Topics in igneous petrology / Темы магматической петрологии

“Topics in Igneous Petrology: A Tribute to Professor Mihir K. Bose”, as the title appropriately suggests, is a Festschrift, ably edited by Professors Jyotisankar Ray, Gautam Sen and Dr. Biswajit Ghosh. It includes 18 scientific papers by 53 authors from around the globe. This Festschrift is indeed a welcome tribute, a true “festival of writing”, celebrating the life and works of the honoree, the admirable Professor Bose, by his students, colleagues and acquaintances. Unfortunately, Professor Bose passed away on October 1, 2009 before seeing these papers in print. The papers cover a broad range of topics and focus on igneous petrology that is bound to attract attentions of many igneous petrologist-geochemist, and certainly Professor Bose would have found himself drawn to many of these papers with utmost interest.

Professor Bose was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India on September 1, 1933 and attended the University of Calcutta for all his academic training, receiving B.Sc., and M.Sc. degrees in Geology. He joined the Department of Geology in Presidency College, Calcutta in 1956 as a Lecturer and taught there throughout his professional career. While teaching, he also enrolled in a doctoral program under the supervision of Professor S. Ray to do research on the alkalic igneous rocks of Koraput in Orissa for which he was awarded a D.Phil. degree in 1965, also from Calcutta University. In the same year he published a paper in the journal Nature on the differentiation of alkali basaltic magma, thus earning the attention of the international petrological community, including that of Professor T.F.W. Barth of the University of Oslo in Norway, who invited Dr. Bose to Oslo in 1967 as a post doctoral fellow.

Professor Bose carried out intensive petrological, mineralogical and structural research of a number of plutonic magmatic complexes along the Eastern Ghats Belt in India. Over the course of his distinguished career, starting with the 1965 paper in Nature, he was mostly known in India and abroad as a petrologist of alkalic igneous rocks, contributing many papers on the various nepheline syenite complexes along the Eastern Ghats and also those associated with the Deccan Volcanic Province. Nepheline syenite became widely known among the undergraduate students in Geology in Presidency College, and emerged as the roche du jour in geological circles. Professor Bose’s fascination for alkalic magmatic rocks led him to investigate them within the vast tholeiitic lavas of the Deccan Traps. This inquiry resulted in a seminal paper in 1980 on alkaline magmatism in the Deccan volcanic province, published in the Journal of the Geological Society of India <...>