Pascal Richet

The 2006 Robert Wilhelm Bunsen Medal is awarded to Pascal Richet for his seminal achievements in advancing our fundamental understanding of geomaterials, and in providing badly-needed conceptual frameworks for the thermodynamic and transport of matter within the Earth.

It is a pleasure to nominate Pascal Richet for the VGPM Award. Pascal Richet has been a pioneer of mineral and melt physics for a quarter century. His early work on the thermodynamic and transport properties of silicate melts led to remarkable insights and provided a thermodynamic basis for the calculation of transport properties that is still being analysed and tested to this day. His groundbreaking studies of the phenomenon of pre-melting in crystals has contributed substantially to the understanding of elastic modulus variations in sub melting temperature solid phases. Finally, his calorimetric studies of silicates have significantly advanced our picture of melt energetics.

Pascal Richet has been unselfish in research. He initiated the very successful Silicate Melt Workshop Series. (There have been seven workshops.) He has been the intellectual magnet for these meetings together with Yan Bottinga. The special volumes resulting from those meetings have become the best cited volumes of the journal in which they have appeared,-Chemical Geology).

Pascal Richet himself has published well over 100 papers in his field and he is extremely well cited. ISI-Thompson (the citation index people) have included him in their elite club of “most highly cited researchers”. Without Pascal Richet, our present picture of silicate melts would be much more primitive than it is, full of many of the myths and uncertainties which he has almost single-handedly banished from the literature. Pascal Richet would be a highly honourable recipient of the VGPM award.