Current Research Activity at age 80 (2024)
I have published 46 papers since “retiring” to emeritus status in 2010, and have shipped more than 1100 rock samples and associated data to curated science collections. The samples are from remote islands in Fiji, eastern Indonesia, and the Marianas, from Holocene eruptions throughout Japan, and from the sea floor of the Izu arc south of Tokyo, Japan, and the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge collected by dredging, diving, and drilling. Most are now at the Smithsonian and the University of Rhode Island, and several hundred more will go to the American Museum of Natural History in NYC.
I no longer maintain labs and or accept graduate students and post-docs, but I have co-supervised eleven of them in other universities and five countries since retirement. For the first time in >50 years, I have no active field projects.
I hope to continue doing science. Five papers are currently underway about diverse topics: mantle flow in subduction zones; the role of lithospheric mantle in the Southern Volcanic Zone in Chile; the use of Ti isotopes to constrain the origin of granite; the use of Mo isotopes to constrain the origin of magma in Japanese volcanoes; and to demonstrate that basalts at mid-ocean ridges can evolve rapidly in mostly closed systems despite nearly universal belief that ridges are open systems.
Of course, I remain interested in the wide variety of phenomena that I have studied throughout my career, but am now mostly a reviewer, consultant, or interested on-looker.