Quick Search:    advanced search

GSW Home   GeoRef Home   My GSW Alerts   Contact GSW   About GSW   Journals List   Help

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Arima, M. Articles by Sobolev, N. V.

Preface

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Vladimir S. Sobolev in 1976

This issue of the European Journal of Mineralogy is dedicated to the memory of Vladimir S. Sobolev, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, and his critical role in the discovery of the Siberian diamond deposits. Vladimir Sobolev was an eminent petrologist and mineralogist and is a Past President of the International Mineralogical Association.

Sobolev was born 1908 in Lugansk, Ukraine. He graduated from the Leningrad Mining Institute in 1930, and during the 1930’s taught at the Mining Institute in Leningrad, where he carried out a detailed petrological study of the flood basalts (traps) and associated volcanics of the Siberian Platform (Sobolev, 1936). In this book he pointed out for the first time that the geological map of the Siberian Platform is very similar to that of South Africa.

During his petrologic work on the Siberian Platform, Vladimir Sobolev identified augitite, limburgite and olivine melilitite, which are very similar to the rocks associated with the kimberlites of South Africa. These results, along with the overall geological and tectonic resemblance of the Siberian Platform to South Africa, led Sobolev to suggest — first in a paper to the International Geological Congress in Moscow in 1937, and then later on in an unpublished report (Sobolev, 1941) —that the northern part of the Siberian Platform might be an area with kimberlite intrusions. In the above report he wrote: "Every expedition working in the northern part of the Siberian Platform should devote serious attention to . . . [Full Text of this Article]