2011 Kuno Awardee

Fortunately for me, Katie Kelley, fresh out of Macalester College, was wooed by the romance of sitting on a immobile ship for two months drilling two holes in the seafloor in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and on the basis of that, was compelled to come to the University of Kansas to do PhD work. From this experience Katie took a leadership role in studying the world's oldest oceanic crust, became an expert in laser ablation ICP-MS, wrote a definitive paper on the chemical fractionations during seafloor alteration, ultimately illuminating for the first time, the fractionation in the U-Th-Pb system. This work has garnered over 150 citations, and established Katie early on as a player in the study of geochemical fluxes from the ridge to the slab and past the arc.

But this is not what she is best known for. Instead, most of her time at Boston University, where she finished her degree, and at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (DTM), where she did a post-doc, Katie worked on measuring the water contents of Marianas arc magmas. She's one of the few people to have measured the same melt inclusions by both FTIR, learning from the masters at Caltech Sally Newman and Ed Stolper, and also by ion microprobe, with another master, Erik Hauri. While her data were lovely, they came slowly. I think this frustration is what led her to start simply thinking about the wet melting problem, how the mantle actually melts when you add water to it. And she found simple relationships in these quantities. A hallmark of Katie's work is that it seems so simple and obvious. Haven't we always known that if you add a lot of water to the mantle that it melts a lot? And that magmas are drier away from the trench? And yet from her new observations, Katie has developed one of the few testable quantitative models for how to unravel the effects of temperature, pressure and water content on the mantle melting beneath arcs.

But this is not even her greatest work. No, in my opinion, that has come recently, in a dynamic partnership with Liz Cottrell. Together, Katie and Liz have so improved the precision and accuracy of micro-XANES in measuring the ferric to total iron ratio in silicate glasses, that it now competes with the former gold standard, wet chemistry, as pioneered by Ian Carmichael, another hero of our evening. Of course it is common knowledge that arc magmas are wet, and that they are more oxidized than MORB, but Katie and Liz were the first to measure H2O and Fe3+/FeT together in the same glass and melt inclusions, from a range of settings, where they found a breathtaking relationship between the two quantities.

Someone once told me you could always ask a question at the end of petrology talk: What about water?? What about fO2?? Usually the speaker mumbles something unsatisfying, and in fact, these demons have haunted petrologists since Bowen. Well Katie has some of the answers. She has contributed deeply and broadly to our understanding of arc magmas, and put her head down and measured the tough things -- water and oxidation state - and has found relationships among them.

I think if you corner Katie tonight, and ask her the secret to her success, she may confess. But I will give it up and tell you the secret here. Competitive Poetry Reading. Katie was a competitive poetry reader in high school. I'm not exactly sure what competitive poetry reading entails - I can only guess - but I can tell you it is a great skill to have if it results in a poised women, who always gives lucid talks, and who writes beautifully. And even though science is first, expression is second, and Katie is remarkably accomplished in both.

Terry Plank, Columbia University

Response

Thank you so much, Terry, for your kind words, and thanks to the AGU and the VGP section for this tremendous honor, the Kuno Award. Like any of us, my body of scientific work has grown from great collaborations, and I stand here on the shoulders of many generous and brilliant mentors and colleagues, with whom I share this terrific recognition.

I grew up in southern Minnesota, in a landscape shaped by glaciers and Ordovician sedimentary rocks. Much of my early interest in geology was fostered by my father, Phil Kelley, a cartographer and lifelong member of the AGU. I attended Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, where Karl Wirth and John Craddock led many great field trips to the Duluth Complex and rift-related volcanics in northern MN, and from then on, I was hooked on volcanoes. I did an undergraduate honors thesis with Karl, doing two-pyroxene geothermometry on mantle xenoliths. At Karl’s urging, I applied for a Fulbright scholarship to spend a year in the Philippines, where I traveled the country sampling basaltic volcanoes under the guidance of Jun Yumul at the University of the Philippines and Toti Corpuz at PHIVOLCS.

When I arrived at the University of Kansas to begin my PhD with Terry Plank, Terry herself was winning young scientist medals, and she was so vibrant and enthusiastic, I knew she would lead me to great scientific experiences. I always learn something from Terry whenever we talk, and I relish the opportunities we still have to collaborate.

Sailing on ODP Leg 185 connected me with many great scientists, John Ludden, Hubert Staudigel, Marty Fisk, and Roger Larson, who mentored me in diverse ways and helped to shape my scientific world view. Our move to Boston University marked the beginning of countless productive interactions with Ed Stolper, Tim Grove and Steve Parman that led to new perspectives on, and models of, hydrous melting beneath arcs and back-arc basins.

As a post-doc at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, I learned innovative new ion probe methods for measuring volatiles in glasses from Erik Hauri and had the greatest arguments with Paul Silver, Mark Behn, and Brian Savage (my supportive and loving husband).

And now, my colleagues at the Graduate School of Oceanography at URI, Chris Kincaid, Rob Pockalny, Art Spivack, and Steve Carey, enrich my daily life with new scientific perspectives.

Along the way, many others have offered both assistance and arguments that have helped to make my science, and our science as a whole, richer. Marc Hirschmann, Kaj Hoernle, Mark Reagan, Jon Blundy, Tim Elliott, Jim Gill, Richard Arculus, Doug Wiens, Charlie Langmuir, Maureen Feineman, Alison Shaw, and Jenn Wade have all played a great part in this.

Six years ago, Liz Cottrell and I had a lucky conversation at Carnegie’s lunch club, during the few short weeks when we overlapped as post-docs. That conversation quickly became a proposal that opened up a new frontier in geochemistry for us, accessing the key petrological variable of oxygen fugacity at previously inaccessible spatial scales. Our work together has helped me grow as a scientist in ways I never thought possible. The only way this moment could be sweeter is if Liz were standing here with me, as part of this award truly belongs to her as well.

Thank you all, so very much, but thanks most especially to Terry and Liz. You make me a better scientist, and I look forward to a lifetime of new scientific frontiers with you both.