William White, Cornell University, USA
Recipient of the 2022 Urey Award
William White’s research has focused on using radiogenic isotope ratios to understand the sources of volcanism and the large-scale evolution of the Earth’s mantle.
His interest in isotope ratios was first stimulated as an undergraduate student at the University of California Berkeley in a course taught by John Verhoogen. Later, as a graduate student at the Graduate School of Oceanography of the University of Rhode Island, when his dissertation advisor, Jean-Guy Schilling, offered him a chance to work with Stan Hart at Carnegie Institution of Washington doing Sr isotopic analyses of basalts from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Azores, he jumped at it. In trying to make sense of the various dissertation data he had collected back at URI, he read Dick Armstrong’s papers and it occurred to him that partially melting mid-ocean ridge basalt could reproduce the trace element patterns he saw in Azores basalts.
Upon completing his dissertation, he returned to Carnegie to work as a post-doc with Al Hofmann for two years. He then spent a year at USGS Denver working with Mitsunobu Tatsumoto before Al hired him as a staff scientist at the new geochemistry department at the Max Planck Institut in Mainz. There, ideas from his dissertation work matured into papers Al and him wrote on what would become the now standard paradigm of mantle plumes returning subducted oceanic crust to the surface.
He returned to the US five years later, taking a faculty position at Oregon State University before moving to Cornell University where he has remained, interrupted by sabbaticals at ENS Lyon, universities in Rennes and Brest and, once again, Carnegie. He continues to work on unravelling the mysteries of magma generation and volcanism on oceanic island and island arc volcanoes and what they can reveal about how the Earth works. At Cornell, in addition to introductory earth science and oceanography, he taught classes in geochemistry and isotope geochemistry. What began as handout notes for those latter classes matured over the years into textbooks.
Additional information and a list of publications can be found here.