Oral histories in meteoritics and planetary science: V. Brian Mason

Abstract

Abstract— In this interview, Brian Mason describes the sudden awakening of his interest in meteorites during his student days at Canterbury College in New Zealand when he read a paper on the cosmic abundances of the elements by Victor M. Goldschmidt. Subsequently, he won a scholarship for graduate study abroad and wrote to Goldschmidt asking if he could do a thesis with him in Norway. Shortly after he began his research in Oslo, he fled the city, ahead of the German invasion of Norway, and completed his doctorate in Stockholm with a thesis on the iron‐manganese minerals of the Långban Mine. After the war he taught for 3 years at Canterbury College where he gave courses on mineralogy and geology (into which he inserted lectures on geochemistry) and led students in extensive field studies. In 1947, Mason accepted a professorship of mineralogy at Indiana University. While there, he wrote the landmark book, Principles of Geochemistry, which appeared in 1952. The following year he moved to New York City where he served as the Curator of Minerals at the American Museum of Natural History and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. He became fascinated with the museum's meteorite collection and discussed meteorites in his lectures, which inspired some of his outstanding students to enter the field. During a sabbatical year he spent as a Fulbright Professor in Japan, he gave an advanced level seminar on meteorites and based his book, Meteorites, on his lecture notes. Mason developed a rapid method of optically classifying chondritic meteorites that he applied to major collections in many countries, thus enabling curators to replace uninformative labels such as “stone” or “chondrite” with species names, and to recognize which of their meteorites were rare types demanding serious study. In 1965 he moved to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. where he remained for the rest of his career. Early in 1968, he collected specimens from the spectacular fall of the Allende meteorite in Mexico, which proved to be a carbonaceous chondrite containing rare types of inclusions enriched in calcium and aluminum. His analyses showed how these inclusions could be divided into groups on the basis of their differing rare earth element patterns. Mason's studies of Allende continued while he investigated lunar samples returned by the Apollo missions and coauthored a book on them. Beginning in the latter 1970s, he applied his rapid classification of stony meteorites to the large numbers of specimens collected each year by U.S. teams on the Antarctic ice sheet. In 1992 he capped his career with a biography of Victor M. Goldschmidt. In recognition of his many fundamental contributions, The Meteoritical Society honored Brian Mason with its Leonard Medal at its meeting in 1972 at the University of Chicago.