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Geoscience’s John Valley honored for distinction in the field

​Valley receives the Arthur L. Day Medal from the Geological Society of America

by Aaron R. Conklin October 24, 2019
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2019 has been a very good year for John Valley.

Valley retired from teaching in July after spending nearly four decades as a professor in the Department of Geoscience at UW. In April, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

And earlier this month, Valley received the Arthur L. Day Medal from the Geological Society of America (GSA) at the association’s annual meeting, held this year in Phoenix. The medal, one of the GSA’s highest honors, recognizes “outstanding distinction in contributing to geologic knowledge through the application of physics and chemistry to the solution of geologic problems.”

Valley has spent much of the past two decades developing new techniques to explore and quantify isotope compositions from ultra-small samples. This led to his groundbreaking theory that there were oceans on Earth much earlier than previously thought—which opens the possibility that life may have existed 800 million years earlier than the oldest known micro-fossils—and a major shift in thinking and a change in geology textbooks.     

“It is a wonderful example of how technological advances in chemistry and physics, harnessed by an imaginative and unconventional thinker like John, propel revolutions in our science,” wrote Brad Singer, Valley’s departmental colleague, in his nomination narrative.   

Valley has impacted the field in other important ways as well. He mentored over 80 graduate students and post-docs, effectively training the next generation of earth scientists. And he established the Wisconsin Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (WiscSIMS) Laboratory, which, since 2005, has been used by nearly 400 researchers from many disciplines to analyze stable isotopes.

While Valley, shown here in the WiscSIMS Laboratory, has retired from teaching, his research activity is ramping up. Photo by Jeff Miller.

While Valley is now retired from teaching, his research work is ramping up. Valley is the Madison PI in a three-institution consortium that recently landed a $14 million grant through the European Research Council to use geochemical techniques that Valley helped pioneer to discover more about early conditions on Earth. The team, which includes colleagues in Grenoble, France and Potsdam, Germany, plans to heat zircon crystals at high temperatures in order to homogenize melt inclusions, tiny drops of the original parent-magma from which the zircons formed. It’s not known if the parent rocks were granite or basalt, and that difference is huge for geologists.

“Granites are the building blocks of continents, and no one knows when the first granites formed,” Valley explains.  

Receiving the Day Medal at the GSA meeting in Phoenix this year is the completion of a circle for Valley. His first professional talk, delivered as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, was given at a GSA annual meeting.

“Joining the pantheon of Day medalists is a daunting prospect and causes me to reflect how lucky I have been,” Valley says. “My parents instilled an early sense of wonder for the natural world and encouraged me to find my passion. It could have been any passion, but I started collecting rocks when I was four years old and haven’t stopped.”