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10/7/2009

Earth scientist meets gold standard
Cin-Ty Lee earns high honors from Geological Society of America

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Cin-Ty Lee spends a good bit of his time searching the planet for iron and zinc, so it's ironic when gold finds him.

The Rice scientist and associate professor has been named one of three gold medalists for 2009 by the Geological Society of America (GSA) in honor of his achievements in the geological sciences.

	CIN-TY LEE

Lee will receive the organization's Young Scientist Award, consisting of the gold Donath Medal and a cash prize of $20,000, "for outstanding original research marking a major advance in the Earth sciences," according to the GSA announcement. The honor will be presented at its annual meeting Oct. 17 in Portland, Ore.

Roberta Rudnick of the University of Maryland, who nominated Lee for the honor and was his mentor at Harvard University, noted his large and diverse impact on Earth sciences. "He has made important contributions to the study of the continents and to understanding why Archean cratons (the oldest, most stable parts of continents) are so strong.

"He has investigated topics as diverse as the oxidation state of the Earth's mantle through time, trace element partitioning between mantle minerals and the chemical influence of weathering on the continents," she wrote. "Recently, he published what is sure to be a seminal paper on how basalt chemistry can be used to infer the pressures and temperatures of their mantle sources.

“He is one of the brightest of the new generation of multidisciplinary geoscientists whose work embraces geophysics and geochemistry but is fundamentally pinned in geology,” wrote Rudnick.

"When you write a lot of papers, it's hard to know which ones people get excited about," said Lee, who is busy with classes while finishing several papers bound to challenge established thought on the Earth's crust and what lies beneath. "The ones I get most excited about may not be the ones other people do.

"But I think whatever I'm doing at the moment is the neatest thing," he said.

Lee's investigation of the Earth's continents, how they formed and evolve, continues to take him in some interesting directions. Most recently, he's been interested in how oxidation within the planet's mantle affects mineral deposits. "The oxygen content dictates the type of gases that come out of volcanoes, which affects the atmosphere' s composition -- though it's not something we humans have to worry about on a million-year timescale.

"But it's also important in understanding how the Earth generates ore metals, like zinc and copper deposits. As we get into electronics, hybrid vehicles, solar energy and moving over to alternative fuels or energy, you need more of these metals.

"Knowing the oxygen content of the mantle helps us understand the processes by which metals are transported throughout the mantle and how they get concentrated into an ore body that we can sample, or mine out."

Another upcoming work focuses on the formation of a mysterious, likely iron-rich layer that sits above the Earth's core and has long mystified scientists.

Lee knows such basic research doesn't often find its way into the public eye, but that doesn't keep him from following his instincts. "The way I look at it, anything we come to understand about the real, fundamental physics of the Earth's chemistry is always a step forward to application, eventually," he said.

Lee said he will use the monetary prize to seed new research efforts by his students.