Paul Werner guest

Paul Werner Gast (born September 11, 1930 in Chicago , † May 16, 1973 ) was an American geochemist and senior scientist at the Apollo lunar mission .

Guest graduated from Wheaton College, Illinois with a bachelor's degree in 1952, received his master's degree in 1956 and received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1957 . He was then briefly at the University of Minnesota and in 1965 was a geology professor at Columbia University , where he worked at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

In 1969 he became a senior scientist for the Earth Science Program of the Apollo Mission on the Moon. He was one of four senior advisors (in addition to him Gerald J. Wasserburg , James R. Arnold (1923–2012), Bob Walker). He identified the KREEP basalts on the moon. Gast was involved in the advancement of rubidium-strontium and uranium-lead dating methods (and their application to lunar rocks) and investigated the distribution of trace elements such as rare earths in rocks, which also led to a better understanding of the origin of volcanic magmas ( tholeiitic and alkaline Basalt magmas). He developed an equation for this in the 1960s and introduced new distribution factors in 1968 (compared to a method by H. Neumann in 1954).

In 1972 he received the first VM Goldschmidt Award and in 1973 the Space Science Award and the James Furman Kemp Medal. He was a fellow of the Geochemical Society, which named a series of lectures after him.

The Dorsum guest on the moon is named after him.

literature

• Claude J. Allegre, Stanley R. Hart (Eds.): Trace Elements in Igneous Petrology: A Volume in Memory of Paul W. Gast, Elsevier 1978
• Davis A. Young: Mind over Magma. The story of igneous petrology, Princeton University Press 2003, p. 480ff