This issue of Petrology was planned to honor Aca demician Vyacheslav Ivanovich Kovalenko, a promi nent Russian geologist, petrologist, and geochemist,.
ISSN 08695911, Petrology, 2011, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 325–326. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2011. Original Russian Text © Editorial Board, 2011, published in Petrologiya, 2011, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 339–340.
In Memoriam Vyacheslav Ivanovich Kovalenko DOI: 10.1134/S0869591111040059
This issue of Petrology was planned to honor Aca demician Vyacheslav Ivanovich Kovalenko, a promi nent Russian geologist, petrologist, and geochemist, on the occasion of his 75th birthday. But alas, he had not reached this age and passed away on December 19, 2010 after a serious illness. This issue became, there fore, memorial. Vyacheslav Ivanovich Kovalenko had dedicated his life to the science and was a researcher of encyclopedic knowledge and broad scientific background. His research interests were very wide: from the investigation of melt microinclusions in the minerals of igneous rocks to the analysis of the composition and structure of man tle plumes, from the problems of regional geology to global geodynamic reconstructions, and from the mod eling of magmatic differentiation to the reconstruction of the mechanisms of the formation and growth of con tinental crust in geologic history. In all cases, he deeply scrutinized the essence of problems and proposed new approaches and methods for their solution. It is of no
surprise that he obtained results of the highest level in a number of geological disciplines. Kovalenko started his scientific career at the Insti tute of Geochemistry of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (Irkutsk) in 1976 after graduating from the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute (MGRI). He was deeply inter ested in the problems of the geochemistry and petrology of orebearing magmatic rocks, and this interest had persisted up to his last days. During his work in Irkutsk, he conducted geological and petrological investigations in Tuva and Mongolia and demonstrated the magmatic origin of Li–F raremetal granites, which were consid ered then as postmagmatic “apogranites”. He discov ered a number of raremetal deposits and occurrences in Mongolia, a new igneous rock (ongonite), and the new minerals armstrongite and mongolite. Since 1977, Kovalenko had lived in Moscow. This period was connected with his work at the Institute of Geology of Ore Deposits, Petrography, Mineralogy, and
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IN MEMORIAM VYACHESLAV IVANOVICH KOVALENKO
Geochemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (IGEM). In the 1980s, he conducted a series of notable investigations and prepared and published a number of textbooks. Of special significance among them is the sixvolume encyclopedic set Igneous Rocks. Kovalenko was one of its main authors and also contrib uted as an editor of several volumes. An important result of this work was the establishing of the main tendency in the global evolution of magmatism manifested in its cyclic and irreversible nature and an increase in the compositional diversity of igneous rocks, an increase in their alkalinity, and a decrease in the spatial and tempo ral ranges of magmatic occurrences. In 1990, Kovalenko was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He had a keen interest in deep geodynamics, which emerged then as a new paradigm in geosciences. In these years, he and his colleagues developed a model for the formation and transformation of the continental crust of North Asia owing to the collision and subsequent interaction of the continental litho spheric plate with the North Asian superplume. This model provided an explanation for the specific fea tures of intraplate magmatism in Siberia and its south ern folded framing, which had persisted almost unin terruptedly for approximately 500 million years. This activity produced a series of intraplate magmatic domains of different ages above mantle hotspots in various parts of this region. The geodynamic investiga tions were intimately connected with pioneering stud ies on the nature of crustforming processes in Central Asia on the basis of the Nd isotopic systematics of the Phanerozoic fold belts of the region. These studies demonstrated the high rates of crust formation during the past billion years of Earth history. This provided a basis for the new model formation of the continental crust from oceanic one. In 2000, Kovalenko was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in geochemistry, miner alogy, and petrology. He entered the 21th century with new ideas and new directions for research in the geochemistry and petrology of magmatism, problems of magmatism–mineralization relationships, estima tion the reasons for the concentration of ore compo nents in magmatic melts, distribution of orebearing igneous rocks in geologic structures and geodynamic environments, isotopic aspects of crustforming pro cesses, fingerprinting magma compositions on the basis of melt inclusions in minerals, balance of vola tiles between the mantle and the outer shells of the Earth, global changes in the environment and climate, and catastrophic processes, including their prediction. In all these directions, he obtained novel results of the highest scientific quality.
During the investigation of global characteristics of volcanism and its influence on climate and the envi ronment, Kovalenko firmly established the formation of the nascent supercontinent of Northern Pangea and showed that the modern continental magmatism is confined mainly to a volcanic megabelt, the position of which is controlled by the convergent boundary of the supercontinent formed along the framing of its North America–Eurasia continental nucleus. During the last years, he carried out comprehensive generalizations on the estimation of the composition of mantle magmas and mantle reservoirs of the Earth’s continental and oceanic segments. A conspicuous fea ture of this study is that it relied on direct evidence from melt inclusions trapped in the minerals of igne ous rocks. The compositions of mantle magmas were estimated for the most common geodynamic environ ments: spreading ridges, subduction zones, and domains affected by mantle plumes in oceanic and continental lithospheric plates. The investigations of Kovalenko were highly acknowledged by the World’s and Russian geological communities. For his scientific achievements, Kova lenko was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Fede ration and V.A. Obruchev and A.E. Fersman prizes. Kovalenko had lived a brilliant and active life, whose essence was the search for truth. His talented, benevo lent, and principled personality attracted many researchers, especially young ones. He was the founder of the scientific school “Composition and Sources of OreForming Magmas and Fluids,” which included researchers from various parts of Russia. One character istic feature of this school is a multidisciplinary approach to the investigation of the nature of oreform ing magmas, including all the new achievements in geo sciences, from the investigation of mineralforming media by means of melt inclusions and isotope geochemical signatures to the search for fundamental relationships in the localization of raremetal magma tism and paleogeodynamic reconstructions. The papers in this issue are the tribute to his scientific merits, and his memory will ever be cherished by us.
I. A. Andreeva, V. S. Antipin, O. A. Bogatikov, M. V. Bo risov, N. S. Bortnikov, N. V. Vladykin, V. L. Vinograd, A. V. Girnis, V. A. Glebovitskii, L. V. Danyushevsky, N. L. Dobretsov, V. S. Kamenetsky, L. T. Kogarenko, A. M. Kozlovskyi, S. P. Korikovsky, A. B. Kotov, M. G. Kopylova, M. I. Kuz’min, N. N. Laverov, F. A. Let nikov, B. A. Litvinovsky, A. A. Marakushev, M. A. Naza rov, V. B. Naumov, A. V. Nikiforov, I. S. Puchtel, Yu. M. Pushcharovsky, S. V. Ruzhentsev, I. D. Ryab chikov, V. S. Samoilov, A. V. Samsonov, A. G. Simakin, A. V. Sobolev, A. I. Khanchuk, N. P. Yushkin, and V. V. Yarmolyuk PETROLOGY
Vol. 19
No. 4
2011
