January 6, 1997

• Derek offered to research what vaccinations/pills are required to visit Oman
• Mark will be organizing a bibliography for the class
• Andrew is researching how to establish a listserv/newsgroup/whatever for the class
• Martin is having Laura's geologic map of Oman laminated for use in class.
• EVERYBODY!  Remember the following guidelines/requirements

 
1.   In preparing your discussion/lecture you and your lecture partner should cover the subject from both the RIDGE and the OPHIOLITE perspective!  I also suggest giving emphasis to the results from ophiolites when possible.

 
2. Each student should suggest at least 2 papers to be read by others before their  presentation.  One could be more of a review paper, the other could be more in depth and detailed. (Remember to make 15 copies of the papers that you assign and put them in the foyer outside of my office.)

 
3. Your reading assignments, and lecture notes MUST be posted on our home page.  As well, if there are a couple of key graphics that you can have on your page . . . well then I will give you one quarter of a rial.  Hint:  1 complete rial can usually buy you a modest beverage.

 
4. I highly recommend buying the book by Adolphe Nicolas, and to encourage you the reading assignment is chapters 1-4 for this week; easy reading, good background material

 January 8, 1997

• A few comments about meetings and readings.  To be prepared for what we are going to see in Oman we MUST cover a considerable amount of material BEFORE arriving.  Hence the significant amount of reading, which again MUST be done before the class wherein we talk about that reading.
• Preparing a summary lecture on some of these topics will be very difficult for the speakers, so to help them out as much as possible, please come prepared.  They are there to guide and summarize, often times in a field that is not particularly their specialty.
• Thanks to Bill and Rob for going first and getting together material on short order!
• Rob will finish his talk at the beginning of the next class.  Of the two papers, the one by Ceuleneer et al. is structural in nature, and much of the results can be quickly understood from the figures and skimming the text.  The second paper, by Kelemen et al., is a very well presented paper that gets to the heart of the problems related to melt transport in the mantle.  The evidence supporting the views presented therein is petrologic and gechemical in nature.  Hence from my view it takes more time to read and understand than the first paper.  Nevertheless it is a gem of a paper and very good reading (hint, hint).

Assignment (due at the beginning of the next class):

Each student (faculty too if you want!) must bring a succint question to class, written out on a piece of paper.  Four questions will be drawn randomly for discussion at the beginning of class.  The remaining ones will be posted on our web page for out-of-class discussion and consideration.