From Black Mud to Earth System Science: a Scientific Autobiography

This autobiography covers the past 55 years of my research in geochemistry. I try to show how chemical principles can be applied to a wide variety of geological problems, ranging from iron sulfide mineralogy, to carbonate chemistry in the oceans, to silicate mineral surface chemistry during weathering, to biogeochemical changes during early diagenesis, to plants and weathering, to models for the evolution of atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide. This may seem excessively broad but my approach to science has been and will be eclectic for which I do not apologize. My guiding principle is “How can chemical measurement or chemical theory solve a given problem?”