Emeritus Professor Mike Rhodes Honored with Geological Society of America Distinguished Geological Career Award
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J. Michael “Mike” Rhodes, emeritus professor at the College of Natural Sciences’ Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences, was recently bestowed a Distinguished Geological Career Award by the Geological Society of America (GSA).
During his long career at UMass, Rhodes made numerous foundational contributions to geology. During the nomination for the GSA Distinguished Geological Career Award, glowing accolades were given: “J. Michael Rhodes has a distinguished record of making fundamental advances to our understanding of the diverse processes controlling the geochemistry of Earth and Moon rocks. His innovative and groundbreaking interpretations of his high-quality XRF data on rocks from diverse environments (billion-year-old continental granites in Australia to still-hot basalts from Hawaii) have set a gold standard for current and future generations of earth scientists. His pioneering ideas, such as the importance of magma mixing, and geochemical and petrologic research that constrained the origin and growth of mantle plume generated Hawaiian volcanoes, are especially noteworthy.”
At Goldschmidt2018, the 2018 installment of the annual, international Goldschmidt conference on geochemistry, Rhodes's 80th birthday was celebrated. During the celebrations, his colleagues praised his impact on the field: “Mike Rhodes has had a long and distinguished career that started with mapping and analyzing granite in Australia, moved to the USA with the NASA program to work on Lunar rocks, and culminated with influential studies of MORB [Mid-Ocean Ridge basalt] and, particularly, Hawaiian volcanoes. Many of the seminal papers that have advanced our understanding of the geochemistry of these iconic volcanoes were built upon the foundations laid by J. M. Rhodes.”
Click here to watch Professor Rhodes discuss Hawaiian volcanoes as part of a 1995 episode of PBS’s NOVA.