Jon Blundy

Jon Blundy
Born
Jonathan David Blundy

(1961-08-07) 7 August 1961 (age 63)
Alma mater
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsPetrology
Institutions
ThesisThe geology of the Southern Adamello Massif, Italy (1989)
Academic advisorsRobert Stephen John Sparks

Jonathan David Blundy FRS (born 7 August 1961) is Royal Society Research Professor at the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford and honorary professor at the University of Bristol.[1][2][3][4][5]

Education

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He is a graduate of University College, Oxford (B.A., 1983) and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, (PhD, 1989) and a former Kennedy Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1985).[6] He was educated at St Paul's School, Brazil, Giggleswick School and Leeds Grammar School,[citation needed] where petrologists Keith Cox and Lawrence Wager also studied.[citation needed]

Career

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Blundy is most noted for advancing the understanding of how magmas are generated in the Earth's crust and mantle and of the processes that occur in volcanoes before they erupt. He undertook his PhD research at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Robert Stephen John Sparks on the granites of Adamello-Presanella in the Italian Alps. In a series of papers with the notable Bernard Wood in the 1990s, Blundy popularized a theory of elastic strain originally developed by Onuma [7] to describe the uptake of trace elements into the crystal lattices of igneous minerals. The theory was based on high temperature and pressure experiments on molten rocks, and is now widely used to predict crystal-melt partition coefficients for use in modelling magmatic processes.

Blundy subsequently collaborated with Katharine Cashman at the University of Oregon on Mount St. Helens volcano in the Cascade Range of northwestern USA. Blundy and Cashman demonstrated the importance of degassing in driving the crystallisation of volatile-bearing magmas, a process that can occur without any attendant cooling. In fact, because of the release of latent heat of fusion, magmas that crystallise by decompression can actually get hotter in the process.[citation needed]

Awards and honours

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Blundy is a recipient of the F.W. Clarke Medal of the Geochemical Society (1997), and Murchison Fund (1998) and the Bigsby Medal of the Geological Society of London (2005). He was a Fulbright Scholar at University of Oregon in 1998, guest professor at Nagoya University in 2007 and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2008. His nomination reads:

Jon Blundy has made fundamental contributions to understanding the generation and movement of magma within the earth. The breadth of his work is impressive, ranging from field studies of the emplacement mechanisms of granites and volcanic rocks, through experimental petrology and thermodynamics applied to igneous systems, to study of the oxidation state of the mantle. His most recent programme has combined a wide range of field, analytical, and laboratory skills to quantifying the pressure-temperature paths followed by magmas as they ascend beneath volcanoes, and has cast important new light on the evolution of magmas immediately before major eruptions.[8]

Blundy was also awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2011.[9]

References

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  1. ^ New Fellow of the Royal Society, Jon Blundy, Professor of Petrology, University of Bristol
  2. ^ Blundy, J. D.; Holland, T. J. B. (1990). "Calcic amphibole equilibria and a new amphibole-plagioclase geothermometer". Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology. 104 (2): 208. Bibcode:1990CoMP..104..208B. doi:10.1007/BF00306444. S2CID 129779696.
  3. ^ Holland, T.; Blundy, J. (1994). "Non-ideal interactions in calcic amphiboles and their bearing on amphibole-plagioclase thermometry". Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology. 116 (4): 433. Bibcode:1994CoMP..116..433H. doi:10.1007/BF00310910. S2CID 128420920.
  4. ^ Scientists move closer to predicting volcano hazard, planetearth.nerc.ac.uk
  5. ^ "Department of Earth Sciences » Jon Blundy". Retrieved 16 December 2020.
  6. ^ Bristol, University of. "People". www.bristol.ac.uk. Retrieved 16 December 2020.
  7. ^ Onuma, Naoki; Higuchi, Hideo; Wakita, Hiroshi; Nagasawa, Hiroshi (1 January 1968). "Trace element partition between two pyroxenes and the host lava". Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 5: 47–51. Bibcode:1968E&PSL...5...47O. doi:10.1016/S0012-821X(68)80010-X. ISSN 0012-821X.
  8. ^ "EC/2008/07: Blundy, Jonathan David". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 19 October 2014.
  9. ^ "Royal Society announces latest round of prestigious Wolfson Research Merit Awards". The Royal Society. 13 September 2011. Retrieved 4 December 2019.
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  • Profile on the website of the School of Earth Sciences