Ian SE Carmichael

Ian Stuart Edward Carmichael (born March 29, 1930 in London - † August 26, 2011 in Berkeley , California ) was a British -American geologist , petrologist and geochemist .

Life

His father, EA Carmichael, was a neurologist at the National Hospital in London. Carmichael grew up in Haywards Heath near London and attended school in Westminster , where he was also an exchange student in the USA and attended courses there at the Colorado School of Mines . He then served two years as a paratrooper in the British Army in Egypt , Palestine and Sudan . He studied geology and mineralogy at the University of Cambridge with a bachelor's degree in 1954 and then prospected copper in Northern Ontario and wintered in the Canadian Arctic while mapping on the Distant Early Warning Line . He received his PhD in geology from the University of London in 1958 under George PL Walker (on the rhyolithic igneous rocks of the extinct Thingmuli volcano in Iceland). From 1958 he was a lecturer at Imperial College London , where he worked with William S. MacKenzie on experimental petrology, in particular the crystallization of feldspars in rhyolite magmas.

In 1963 he spent six months at the University of Chicago , where he first used electron microscopic techniques in chemical analysis (electron microprobe). Since he wanted to continue his research there, which the Imperial College did not approve, he quit there. From 1964 he was at the University of California, Berkeley , where he was Associate Professor in 1965 and Professor of Geology from 1967 (1967/68 as Miller Research Professor). From 1972 to 1976 and from 1980 to 1982 he headed the Faculty of Geology there; from 1976 to 1978 and from 1985 to 2000 he was Associate Dean . From 1986 to 2000 he was also Associate Provost for Research. From 1996 he was director of the Lawrence Hall of Science at Berkeley (the university's public science center) and from 1996 to 1998 acting director of the university's botanical garden.

Carmichael was involved in the establishment of modern quantitative methods in the petrology of igneous rocks in the 1960s (previously this area had been approached rather descriptively in contrast to metamorphic rocks), which he researched theoretically as well as through field studies and experiments. To this end, he initially attended (sometimes together with his students) the regular thermodynamics courses at the university and learned methods of high-temperature thermodynamics from materials scientists. In the 1970s and 1980s he then researched the physico-chemical properties of igneous melts in experiments, using his expertise in wet chemistry from his time in London. He also applied NMR techniques and, with his student Mark Ghiorso (* 1954), developed computer codes for crystalline melts (first version published in 1983), which were then used to develop the thermodynamic theory of the crystal-liquid-gas phase equilibrium of magmas. He also undertook field studies on volcanoes, for example in Africa, Alaska, New Guinea, New Zealand and particularly intensively in Mexico and examined the sediment products of the Long Valley Caldera in California.

He received the Arthur L. Day Medal in 1991, the Bowen Award from the American Geophysical Union in 1986, the Schlumberger Medal from the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain in 1992, and the Murchison Medal in 1995 . He was a Fellow of the Royal Society as well as the Geochemical Society, the Geological Society of America, the Mineralogical Society of America (whose Roebling Medal he received) and the American Geophysical Union. In 1992 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. From 1973 to 1990 he was editor of Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology.

He was a US citizen.

Fonts

• with John Verhoogen , Francis John Turner Igneous Petrology , McGraw Hill 1974

literature

• Alexander E. Gates: Earth Scientists from A to Z, Facts on File, 2003

Web links

• Obituary at the Geochemical Society by Rebecca Lange

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
2. ^ Rebecca Lange: Ian SE Carmichael (1930-2011). (No longer available online.) Geochemical Society , October 2011, archived from the original on May 31, 2016 ; accessed on August 21, 2017 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.