Earth Materials
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Earth Materials Rodney C. Ewing In 1987, "Earth Materials"* made their formal debut at the Spring Meeting of the Materials Research Society as a Symposium on Silicate melts and glasses organized by Gordon Brown of Stanford University and Ray Jeanloz of the University of California, Berkeley. The Symposium brought together a diverse group of mineralogists, geologists, and materials scientists to discuss a common problem — the structure of glasses and their relationship to Silicate melts, precursors to igneous rocks. This was a much lauded Symposium, and as a councillor to MRS as well as a geologist, I was pleased that the Symposium enjoyed such a warm welcome from colleagues interested in such distant topics as Silicon technology and electronic materials. This was not the first time geologic materials had been the subject of papers at an MRS meeting. The annual Symposium on the Scientific Basis for Nuclear Waste Management has been a common forum for the presentation of research on radiation effects in minerals, corrosion mechanisms in natural glasses, adsorption of radionuclides onto clays, and the hydrologic transport of radionuclides. The Symposium on Materials Issues in Art and Archaeology at the most recent MRS Spring Meeting in Reno included sessions on the hydration and alteration of natural, ancient, and modern glasses. Thus, there has been a growing trend to include earth materials as a subject in MRS symposia. In fact, I have been pleased to see how easy and useful it is to sample all the MRS symposia in a search for new techniques and ideas that might be applied to earth materials. In this vein, I use this editorial to mention some of the significant areas of research in earth *"Earth Materials" is probably too restrictive a phrase, as geoscientists now are commonly involved in studies of lunar rocks, meteorites, cosmic dust, and other planets. Actually, simply said, geoscientists study naturally occurring materials, usually of great age and commonly of mixed phase assemblages with complicated compositions.
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I have been pleased to see how easy and useful it is to sample all the MRS symposia in a search for new techniques and ideas that might be applied to earth materials. materials that go hand-in-hand with central aspects of research in materials science, and at the same time to point to some of the critical differences in research involving "earth materials" as compared to the more familiär "high tech" materials. A valuable summary of "Earth Materials Research" is found in a report (of the same title) by the National Research Council (National Academy Press, 1987) on a Workshop on the physics and chemistry of these materials held in April 1986 in Airlie, Virginia. The purpose of the Workshop was to bring geoscientists together to discuss how the national effort in earth materials research might be organized. The report makes interesting reading, and is here summarized, because it clearly shows the similarities in research between mineralogists/geologists and their colleagues involved in materials sci
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