Mineralogical Magazine; October 2000; v. 64; no. 5;
p. 968-969
© 2000 Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland
Young, D.A. N.L. Bowen and Crystallization-Differentiation: the Evolution of a Theory.
Washington, D.C. Mineralogical Society of America Monograph No. 4, l998, xii + 296 pp. Price $16.00 ($12.00 for MSA members). ISBN: 0939950472
I.S.E. Carmichael
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On the brink of the twenty-first century, petrology is a very different subject than it was in its heyday in the twentieth, and this book tells the story of N.L. Bowen, the great pioneer of experimental petrology, and of the extraordinary impact that he has had on petrological thought. From the start, Bowen sought to explain the features of igneous rocks in terms of liquid–solid equilibria in simple silicate systems, and how the residual liquids changed composition in response to the separation of crystals. This is crystallization-differentiation, which is more popularly known as fractional crystallization. To gain acceptance, this required that contemporary thought be rid of the concept of eutectic crystallization, which Bowen did with evident gusto. From today’s perspective fractional crystallization has been a phenomenally successful concept underlying almost all of igneous petrology, and this book details some of the great petrological controversies that emerged in the period 1913–1958, fostered by the research of Bowen. Two most bitter, sometimes acrimonious, disputes described in this book are iron-enrichment in residual liquids, observed in nature by Fenner (a colleague of Bowen at the Geophysical Laboratory), . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Copyright © 2008 by Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland
