Memorial of Richard Edwin Stoiber, 1911–2001

Richard Stoiber, volcanologist, geochemist, mineralogist, petrologist, and tectonic geophysicist, died peacefully at his home in Norwich, Vermont on 9 Feb 2001 after a long illness, but not long after a 90th birthday party that he shared with old friends and family. A Life Fellow of MSA, he was Frederick Hall Professor of Mineralogy Emeritus at Dartmouth College and the honoree of the mineral stoiberite. Dick Stoiber was known in his later career as a volcanologist, noted for the analysis of gaseous volcanic emissions and the study of mineral deposits. He was known worldwide as the keeper of a volcanoes web site, and to a privileged few thousands of Dartmouth students as an indefatigable and famously original teacher in the classroom and field. Few today may know that he was also a leading innovator in the trace element geochemistry of ore minerals, an accomplished spectrographer, a student of the petrology of ore deposits, a crystallographer and optical mineralogist, an atmospheric scientist, and an acute student of the geometry of subduction related to volcanism. Born in Cleveland and raised in New Jersey, Stoiber attended Dartmouth and graduated with the class of 1932. He returned as an instructor in 1935, having completed his residency for the Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and except for the war years, never left. In 1941 he married Edna Howley, herself a highly original person, who became a devoted supporter of his teaching and his students, and later a gifted painter whose pictures graced their home in Norwich. They raised two children, Christine and Philip, both able scholars in their own right. At MIT, Stoiber studied economic geology, receiving the Ph.D. degree in 1937. The major outgrowth of his thesis was the ground-breaking 1940 paper “Minor elements in sphalerite” published in Economic Geology, in …