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Professor Richard Stanton was interviewed in 2008 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Stanton's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers’ notes. The extract covers some of his early work looking volcanic island arcs. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Richard Stanton was born in 1926. His secondary studies were done in England and Sydney. He studied geology and mathematics at the New England University College of the University of Sydney at Armidale, which later became the University of New England (UNE).
After a short while as a demonstrator at the University of Sydney, Stanton worked for a time as an exploration geologist with Broken Hill South Ltd. He returned to the University of Sydney in 1950. In 1952 he was awarded an MSc and in 1956 a PhD in geology. His was one of the earliest PhDs in geology from the university and his research was on the regional pattern of mineralisation as illustrated in the Bathurst–Burraga area of New South Wales. During his studies, he was involved in the first systematic geological mapping of the Solomon Islands.
Stanton took up a National Research Council of Canada two year post-doctorate fellowship at Queen's University, Ontario. On coming back to Australia, he returned to Armidale and joined the Department of Geology at UNE. He remained at the UNE until 1986. During his time there he took sabbaticals to Harvard (1966–67) and Oxford (1978–1980).
His research has for the most part been concerned with the ways in which metallic ore deposits have been formed and the geological setting in which they now occur on the various continents. This field of study is referred to as 'economic geology'. Stanton's work involves the application of already established geological principles to, as well as the development of new geological principles for, the discovery of new ore deposits.
Over his career, Stanton has received many honours. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1996 and received the Australia Centenary Medal in 2001. He was awarded the Clarke Medal from the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1998.
Stanton was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1975 and was awarded the Academy's Haddon Forrester King Medal in 1998. He is also a Fellow of the Geological Society of Australia.
Your PhD candidature was, I understand, interrupted by field work in the Solomon Islands, in late 1950 and early 1951. Indeed, you carried out the first systematic geological mapping ever done in that part of the world, and subsequently you were responsible for the mapping of the first of the Solomon Islands to be completely surveyed in this way! I believe that your going there was rather unexpected but highly influential in your subsequent career, and that the story of your being sent there is quite amusing. Perhaps you could tell us something about this episode.
Well, I caught the plane on the 8th of December 1950. Most of the journey was in an unlined freighter DC3, not very comfortable, very cold when one got up in the air, and it took about four days to get from Sydney through New Guinea and New Britain, eventually to the Solomon Islands.
I had been there, I suppose, just four or five days when I began, I thought, to realise that I was in a modern analogue of the geological situation that I'd found in the Bathurst area of New South Wales. As I said a little while ago, it had occurred to me that the ore deposits there seemed to occur in sedimentary rocks that had accumulated on the seaward side of small coral reefs that had formed around volcanic islands.
Well, as I looked at the Solomons festoon I realised that, although there were a number of larger islands, there were many small islands that consisted of one or two volcanoes surrounded by fringing reefs. Most of the volcanoes were dormant, but some of them were still in a stage of degassing: they were giving off hot springs, little fumaroles, and so on.
When most people think of volcanic activity, they think in terms of really catastrophic eruption – the emission of large quantities of lava and volcanic dust and so on – and what most people don't realise is that a very major component of what is emitted is actually gas. Of course, we realise that many of these eruptions are explosive, and this is due to the gas content of the molten lava.
The composition of the gases is generally complex, and in many cases the gases contain volatile compounds of metals such as copper, zinc and lead, and many other elements.
We are reasonably familiar with the idea of this sort of degassing happening on the surface round volcanoes, but we must remember that with marine volcanoes the main bulk of the volcano is covered by the sea, and so a great deal of this gaseous emission occurs actually on the sea floor round the volcanoes.
The gases of course rise, are emitted onto the sea floor; the gases themselves are generally hot and concentrated, acid – or at least the solutions that derive from them are – and they immediately encounter the cold alkaline waters of the sea. And they precipitate the mineral matter that they contain (including metals) as a sort of apron round the degassing orifice.
Three things, I suppose, immediately occurred to me, looking about. The first was that perhaps the area I had been interested in in New South Wales – between Bathurst and Burraga, and perhaps extending southwards towards Canberra and northwards towards Mudgee, say – perhaps that in fact had been an old island arc, the scene of marine volcanic activity, a volcanic island festoon, about 360 million years ago, because that was the age of the rocks concerned.
The second thing that occurred to me was that perhaps the ore bodies that I'd observed in that area had been formed in the way I have just suggested, around individual volcanic islands.
And the third thing that occurred to me (which was perhaps more important, certainly quite as important as the others) was that the area in New South Wales, say extending down to Canberra and north to Mudgee, was the same order of size as the Solomon Islands – that is, the same order of size of the average volcanic island festoon. Now, if ore bodies had formed in this way round the individual islands, we would have a number of ore bodies along the length of the festoon. Perhaps, therefore, the metallogenetic regions that Dr WR Browne had talked about in that lecture that I'd been to in 1949 were in fact old volcanic island arcs, volcanic island festoons, that had now become parts of continents.
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
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