Carnegie’s Michael Walter and Robert Hazen elected AGU Fellows

Washington, DC— Carnegie scientists Michael Walter and Robert Hazen have been elected 2019 Fellows of the American Geophysical Union.

Fellows are recognized for visionary leadership and scientific excellence that has fundamentally advanced research in the Earth and space sciences. “Their breadth of interests and the scope of their contributions are remarkable and often groundbreaking,” said the organization in its announcement of the new class.  

The Director of Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory, Walter is an experimental petrologist whose research focuses on early Earth’s history, shortly after the planet accreted from the cloud of gas and dust surrounding our young Sun, when its mantle and core first separated into distinct layers. He also investigates the structure and properties of various minerals and other compounds under the extreme pressures and temperatures found deep in Earth’s interior, with a focus on gleaning information about mantle conditions from impurities preserved inside diamonds.

Hazen is a staff scientist at the Geophysical Laboratory with an expertise in mineralogy. He is also the principal investigator of the Deep Carbon Observatory, which is dedicated to probing the chemical and biological roles of carbon in Earth’s interior.  He pioneered the concept of mineral evolution—linking an explosion in mineral diversity to the rise of life on Earth and the resulting oxygen-rich atmosphere—and introduced the idea of mineral ecology—which analyzes the spatial distribution of Earth’s minerals to predict which ones remain undiscovered and to assert our planet’s mineralogical distinctiveness.

The AGU is an international nonprofit scientific association with 60,000 members in 137 countries. Only one out of every thousand members are selected as Fellows each year.