Expatriate scientist Brian Mason was a pioneer in the science of geochemistry – the composition of the earth – as well as an expert in meteorites and lunar rocks. He died in Washington DC on 3 December 2009 aged 92.
Born in Dunedin in 1917, he graduated with first class masters degrees in geology and chemistry from Canterbury University College, and was awarded a postgraduate scholarship for study overseas. Instead of taking the conventional route to Oxford or Cambridge, he decided to study the new subject of geochemistry at the University of Oslo in Norway.
Arriving in January 1940, he was in Oslo for only a few months before the German invasion. He was lucky to escape to Sweden just ahead of the advancing troops. Although Sweden remained neutral during the war, he was unable to leave, so decided to complete his PhD at the University of Stockholm.
Dr Mason left Sweden in 1944 and returned to New Zealand. In 1946, still in his late twenties, he was offered a position as professor of mineralogy at the University of Indiana. He was to be based in the United States for the rest of his life, and became a US citizen.
At Indiana he taught a graduate course in geochemistry, and developed his lecture notes into a textbook. The first book in its field, his “Principles of Geochemistry” has been through four editions, and been translated into German, Russian, Japanese and Portuguese.
In 1953 he was appointed Curator of Mineralogy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He arrived to find a collection of several thousand meteorites sitting in boxes in the corridor. While cataloguing the collection, he devised a simple method of classifying meteorites that could be used by any mineralogist with a basic microscope, and has since been widely adopted. Once again he developed his lecture notes into a book, and “Meteorites” was a standard text for many years.
His final career move was to the Smithsonian Institution in 1965, where he was appointed Curator of Meteorites. He remained an active researcher there for the next 40 years, although he officially retired in 1984. With increased interest in outer space, the study of meteorites had changed from being an obscure subject to being a matter of widespread interest in deciphering the ago of the solar system. Dr Mason was to play an important role in the study of lunar geology after Apollo 11 brought back the first rocks from the moon in 1969.
Although based overseas for most of his life, Dr Mason maintained close ties with New Zealand, returning regularly and undertaking fieldwork in the Southern Alps and on the West Coast. Some local scientists know him through his New Zealand publications, and have little idea of his career in extra-terrestrial geology.
An admirer of the US system of philanthropy to public institutions, Dr Mason has been a generous donor to his home country, setting up several trust funds for the promotion of science including the Brian Mason Scientific and Technical Trust.
His marriages to Anne Marie Linn and Virgina Powell ended in divorce, and his only child, George, was killed in a climbing accident in 1981. His third wife, Margarita Babb, died in 2009 after 15 years of marriage.
Concerned that the number of meteorites available for study in museums was limited, Dr Mason spent the last three decades encouraging the systematic collection of meteorites. Scientific parties have regularly collected meteorites from Antarctica, and it was arranged that these would be sent to him at the Smithsonian for preliminary identification and analysis.
By his 90th birthday he had examined and described more than 7000 meteorites. It is likely that he has seen more meteorites than anyone else in the world. A highlight came in 1982 when he was able to use his experience with lunar rocks to identify the first meteorite that had come from the moon.
Brian Mason received many awards through his career including the Leonard Medal from the Meteoritical Society in 1972 and the Roebling Medal from the Mineralogical Society of America in 1993. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Canterbury in 2002.
Most fittingly, he is commemorated by the naming of an asteroid, 1292Brianmason, which lies between Mars and Jupiter. Two minerals were named after him: Brianite and Stenhuggarite (from the Swedish word stenhuggar, meaning stone mason).
His life is recorded in the book From Mountains to Meteorites, written by Brian Mason & Simon Nathan, published by the Geological Society of New Zealand in 2001.
