3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3 From: Paul Wallace <pwallace@xxxxxxxxxxx> 3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3 Sadly, I have just learned that Emeritus Professor Alexander R. McBirney (Mac) passed away last night, Sunday April 7, at 9:30 p.m., following a stroke several days earlier. His daughter Christine and her husband Kevin had been caring for Mac and his wife Carmen, herself a stroke victim last summer, at the family home in Eugene, OR for the past several years enabling them to remain in familiar surroundings. By odd coincidence, I had the opportunity to visit with Mac and Carmen twice in the last month or so and together Mac and I knocked off a bottle of wine on each occasion! He reveled in the memories that he shared with me and brightened up very noticeably. Macâ??s arrival at the University of Oregon in 1965 marked a turning point in the Geology departmentâ??s trajectory when he established the Center for Volcanology, together with Emeritus Professor Dan Weill, the late Gordon Goles and others, and put the UO on the global map of volcanology and petrology research powerhouses. Highly visible studies of the lunar samples returned by the Apollo missions soon ensued and were followed by experimental petrologic work on silicate phase relations and magma phyical properties, studies of trace elements in meteorites and terrestrial igneous rocks, and classic field studies of the Skaergaard layered mafic instrusion in east Greenland and the volcanoes of the Galapagos Archipelago. Mac was also the founding editor of the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research and, very appropriately, was awarded the Bowen Award of the American Geophysical Union in 1990. Mac was of another generation and will always represent for me one of the last of the golden age of exploration. He was a graduate of West Point and always (jokingly) prided himself on having been in the last class that had to demonstrate their prowess leading a cavalry charge wielding a sword on horseback! From there he took his young family to Nicaraugua where he tried his hand running a coffee plantation that he and his crew literally hacked out of the jungle. It was in Central America where he happened upon the famous UC-Berkeley volcanologist Howell Williams who convinced him to leave the coffee plantation to others and join him in the Bay Area for his doctoral studies. Upon completing his dissertation, he, Dan Weill and Gordon Goles all found themselves at Scripps Institution of Oceanography literally at the dawn of plate tectonic theory. When the University of Oregon came looking for the first members of the newly conceived Center for Volcanology, all three of them ans wered the call, with Mac serving as the Centerâ??s first director. Mac would have been 94 had he reached his next birthday in August so, while his passing is certainly sad, it is not tragic. Indeed, I canâ??t help but see him in my mindâ??s eye, riding off into the sunset leading one last cavalry charge! ============================================================== Volcano Listserv is a collaborative venture among Arizona State University (ASU), Portland State University (PSU), the Global Volcanism Program (GVP) of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, and the International Association for Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI). ASU - http://www.asu.edu/ PSU - http://pdx.edu/ GVP - http://www.volcano.si.edu/ IAVCEI - http://www.iavcei.org/ To unsubscribe from the volcano list, send the message: signoff volcano to: listserv@xxxxxxx, or write to: volcano-request@xxxxxxx. To contribute to the volcano list, send your message to: volcano@xxxxxxx. Please do not send attachments. ============================================================== ------------------------------
