Abstract

Report of the inaugural meeting of the Metamorphic Studies Group held at Burlington House, 5 March 1981. The meeting was organized by Dr M. Brown.

A Metamorphic Studies Group, jointly sponsored by the Geological Society of London and the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain, was formally established at an inaugural meeting on ‘Metamorphic studies: research in progress’ held at Burlington House on 5 March 1981. The meeting was attended by over 150 participants, ranging from professors to research students, who were rewarded with a programme of 18 papers of high quality which covered a wide range within the field of metamorphism.

A programme of topics arranged broadly in order of increasing temperature and pressure conditions was opened by Arny Sveinbjörnsdottir, one of two research students who contributed papers to the meeting. Her paper, o n water-rock interaction in Krafla (fluid derived from meteoric water) and Reykjanes (fluid derived from seawater), Iceland, both of which are high temperature hydrothermal systems, used log activity diagrams to relate alteration mineralogy to fluid composition and concluded that the present mineralogy in both systems appears to be in equilibrium with the fluid composition.

In the next 4 papers, all concerned with low-grade (or low-grade to medium-grade) metamorphism, the important role of the fluid phase in metamorphism was emphasized. Aguirre, Levi & Offler, in their contribution, demonstrated that fluid chemistry and temperature were the main variables which controlled the development of sequences of mineral assemblages characteristic of the zeolite facies, prehnitepumpellyite facies, prehnite-pumpellyite/greenschist facies transition and