This issue of the Newsletter will be slightly different in format from those previously edited by me. Hopefully the changes will be to the liking of the Division membership. I welcome all your input and items for inclusion in our Newsletter. Thanks.
Jane P. Davidson, HOGD secretary/treasurer, newsletter editor. jdhexen@unr.edu

Financial statement as of 6/2009

If you wish to see the actual excel spreadsheets, etc. which the officers have seen, please email me and I will email that to you.

Income/expenses for the period of twelve months prior to and through 6/30/2009
This information comes to us from M. Kerns GSA bookkeeper
 

    
GSA Annual Meeting October, 18-21 HoGD Business Luncheon Awards:
  
Student Award: Michael Bramnik (citationist, Steve Rowland)
Gerry and Sue T. Friedman Distinguished Service Award: Deborah Day (citationist Michele Aldrich)
Mary C. Rabbitt Award: Davis Young (citationist, Sally Newcomb)
  
Congratulations also to Gary D. Rosenberg for being named a Fellow of GSA.
  
Davis Young’s remarks on his reception of the Mary C. Rabbitt Award follow:

                         RABBITT ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
  
My profoundest gratitude to the History of Geology Division for bestowing this honor on me. To have my name on a list with previous Rabbitt award honorees, such as Rudwick, Oldroyd, Marvin, Albritton, Bork, and Torrens, leads me to believe that I accidentally awoke in a parallel universe this morning.
  
At the age of twelve, I was introduced to a modest collection of apophyllite, prehnite, and zeolite specimens from the lava flows of northern New Jersey at a friend’s home. The beauty of the crystals produced in me the determination to spend my life working with minerals. My newfound passion was further stimulated by collecting staurolite, almandine, and kyanite crystals from nearby outcrops of Wissahickon Schist in Philadelphia. In college and graduate school my interests matured to include petrology and geochemistry, which I learned from Dick Holland, Arthur Buddington, Dick Jahns, Peter Wyllie, Don Eckelmann, and Dick Yund. My doctoral dissertation focused on the granulite facies orthogneisses and paragneisses in the New Jersey Highlands. In 1968 my teaching career began at New York University and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where I taught hard rock geology.
  
Concurrent with my enthusiasm for geology was another passion. My father was a professor of Old Testament. One of his professional interests was the Genesis creation story. I became ever more curious about the relationship of geology and the biblical creation account. Realizing in graduate school that young-Earth creationism was spreading throughout the Christian community, I set out to explain the fallacies of young-Earth creationism and flood geology to church and college audiences in articles, books, and talks. I spent the final 26 years of my 36-year teaching career in Grand Rapids at Calvin College, a Christian liberal arts college operated by the Christian Reformed Church. Calvin takes it for granted that its faculty members will integrate history, philosophy, and theology into their specific disciplines. That was the ideal environment for me.
  
In writing on the relationship between Christianity and geology, the important role of religion in the historical development of our science was driven home to me. I also learned that young-Earth creationists often made inaccurate comments about the history of geology. My writing increasingly incorporated historical aspects of the relation between Christianity and geology. Because of my uncompromising stance against a 6000-year-old Earth and against flood geology, my books became controversial in some Christian circles. During the late 1980s, I and two other colleagues at Calvin College became the targets of vocal constituents within our denomination. Calvin strongly defended the three of us, but that didn’t make me any more popular with the advocates of young-Earth creationism.
  
In 1995, I published The Biblical Flood, a book on the history of ecclesiastical interpretation of the flood story. There was plenty of history of geology in that book. Around that time, I needed a breather from the controversy that often swirled about my writing. Increasingly intrigued by the history of geology, and aware that the only history of igneous petrology, by then woefully out-of-date and a scant 85 pages, was originally written in Russian by Loewinson-Lessing in 1936 and translated into English in 1954, I decided, just for fun and no doubt naively, to write a history of igneous petrology. Along the way, I received much encouragement and insight from numerous petrologists and geochemists. Hatten Yoder, Julian Goldsmith, Peter Wyllie, Tony Morse, Alexander McBirney, and many others were enormously helpful. Given the critical role of N. L. Bowen (of reaction series fame) in the development of experimental petrology, I planned to devote an entire chapter to his achievements. That chapter quickly evolved into a separate book, N. L. Bowen and Crystallization-Differentiation: the Evolution of a Theory. In 2003, the more extensive history, Mind over Magma, my magma opus, as my colleagues at Calvin liked to call it, was published. The appreciative response was incredibly gratifying. No controversy, no one overly annoyed with me. Just thanks expressed for undertaking and accomplishing the task. Writing that book, however, made me conscious that so much work remains for historians of igneous petrology. We need critical biographies of igneous petrologists as well as investigations of the history of ideas about specific rock types, classification schemes, magmatic emplacement, the generation of magmas, and solar system petrology.
  
More recently Joseph P. Iddings, arguably America’s greatest igneous petrologist prior to Bowen, has occupied my attention. I am currently writing a series of articles on the origin of the remarkable quantitative igneous rock classification system devised by Cross, Iddings, Pirsson, and Washington and published in 1902.
  
Martin Rudwick, David Oldroyd, Ronald Numbers, and David Livingstone have served as my role models in writing history of geology and history of science. Carl-Henry Geschwind and John Servos wisely counseled me to tone down my excessive adulation for some of the petrologists about whom I wrote, particularly Bowen. After all, I am a petrologist who took up writing about the history of geology as a hobby. As an internalist, my admiration for the externalists knows no bounds. I possess neither the knowledge nor skill to evaluate in a meaningful way the social factors that influenced the development of scientific theory and practice. I will leave that to others.
  
Since retiring from Calvin College in 2004, I have resumed writing for Christian audiences, because various forms of pseudo-science doggedly persist within large segments of the church. My most recent book, The Bible, Rocks and Time, co-authored with my paleontologist colleague at Calvin College, Ralph Stearley, was specifically targeted at the “geology” of young-Earth creationism. We determined to root it out once and for all, but, of course, that is an unrealistic dream. Still, we have received many responses from individuals indicating that their eyes have been opened. The first five chapters of this book summarize in popular form the development of ideas, mostly geological, about the age of the earth. Although I have returned to addressing science-religion issues, history of geology has irrevocably become an important component of my intellectual life.
  
I am humbled, delighted, and most grateful for the award. My profound thanks to GSA’s History of Geology Division for bestowing this incredible honor on me.
  
Davis A. Young, Professor of Geology Emeritus
Calvin College
  
   
Inhigeo 09 report
   
(Thanks to Sally Newcomb for the following)
The 2009 meeting of Inhigeo was held in Calgary, Canada on August 10-14th, at the University of Calgary, followed by a field trip on Aug. 15-20th. The topic was Fossils and Fuels, and concerned the historical development of significant fossil sites and the petroleum industry. Calgary province is a major center of the oil industry in North America, as well as being near the Burgess Shale, Dinosaur National Park, and the magnificent Royal Tyrell Museum at Drumheller. The meeting was convened by George Pemberton. After an opening reception on Sunday where participants caught up with activities since the last meeting, there were papers on Monday and Tuesday, and Thursday and Friday. On Wednesday the group was treated to a behind the scenes tour of the archives at the Glenbow Museum in downtown Calgary, followed by a building stone walk through town. The conference banquet was held at Heritage Park, a living history village, in Calgary.
    The field trip was fascinating, to say the least. It was led by David Spalding, well known for his history of geology writing, who is most familiar with the geology of the area. We were fortunate to have Darren Tanke of the Royal Tyrell Museum as our guide at Dinosaur Park, and for a behind the scenes tour of the museum. Hard rain and cold wind cut our tour of the park short, but the museum is one of the best to learn about the progression of life and, particularly, dinosaurs. The next day, on our way to the Rockies we stopped at Okotoks Erratic, a very large glacial erratic of ~16,000 tonnes. After a discussion stop at a closed natural gas establishment, we climbed to the beautiful small city of Banff, a longtime stop on the Canadian Pacific railway. The following day we went to the Banff Cave and Basin, a developed hot spring area, then proceeded to the Columbia Icefield where we took a snowcat and walked on the glacier. That night we stayed at Lake Louise, beautiful, despite the retreating glacier. The following day we saw the spiral tunnel where the railway appears and disappears in order to climb a very steep grade. We saw the Burgess Shale site from the distance, and then had a presentation about the Shale, and were able to handle specimens of its novel fossils. After passing through the Rocky Mountain trench, we proceeded to the town and park of Radium Hot Springs, where all members again had the delightful experience of soaking in the “waters.” That evening we saw the Rocky Mountain sheep that frequent the town. Then, back to Calgary by way of the Frank Slide and Face Smashed in Buffalo Jump, in both places of which we had guides and explanations.
    For this entire spectacular field trip we had the great benefit of David Spalding’s mountain by mountain geological and historical knowledge.

Sally Newcomb


The next Inhigeo meeting will be in Madrid and Almadén, Spain, 1-14th of July, 2010. The days for papers are July 5-10th, bracketed by field trips before and afterwards. The topic of the meeting is History of Research in Mineral Resources, Almadén-Iberian Pyritic Belt, and promises to be most interesting. There will be travel by train and bus to several mining districts and to the volcanic region of Clabo de Gata. Planning is nearly complete, with the second circular to be sent in December. Non-Inhigeo members are welcome. The conference web page is www.sedpgym.org/inhigeo2010.htm .

Planning is also well advanced for the 2011 Inhigeo meeting in Japan. It will be the first two weeks of August, and will include papers and field trips to volcanic regions.