Vale Jeremy Richards

It is with great saddness to report the one of our most distinguished graduate students, Jeremy Richards, died suddenly in Toronto last Friday (7th June). Jeremy was born in 1960 in the UK and was awarded a BSc Honours (1st class) degree from the University of Cambridge in 1983 and a MSc degree from the University of Toronto in 1986. He came to RSES in 1986 to work on the Porgera gold deposit in New Guinea under the supervision of Ian Campbell. The gold at Porgera is spatially associated with an alkali igneous complex but available dating at that time suggested that the igneous complex was 7 Myr older that the mineralization, and that the two events were therefore unrelated. Jeremy spent weeks on the difficult task of separating fine-grained sericite and roscoelite from the mineralization, and hornblende and biotite from the intrusion. He showed that the mineralization and associated intrusion were the same age (6.0 Ma) within analytical uncertainty and that the previous study had suffered from undetected excess Ar in the hornblende. Ian McDougall, not prone to lavish praise, described the work as outstanding. He also used radiogenic isotopes to trace the source of the fluids. Jeremy was awarded the 1995 Society of Economic Geologists Lindgren Award in 1995, largely for work carried out during his PhD. Other awards from the Society of Economic Geologists followed: the International Exchange Lectureship in 2002-2003, the Silver Medal in 2015, and the Thayer Lindsley Visiting Lectureship in 2016. He was also awarded the Geological Association of Canada Hutchison Medal in 2007, the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Julian Boldy Memorial Award in 2007, and the Geological Association of Canada Mineral Deposits Division William Harvey Gross Award in 2001 and, most recently, their prestigious Duncan R. Derry Medal in 2019.

Most recently Jeremy visited RSES in February as the Keynote Speaker at our Porphyry Workshop and appeared to be in good health and spirts. He will be sorely missed by his colleagues and friends.