Ric (in memoriam)
|
|
This is an excerpt set of a post published elsewhere, with the unique aim of raising awareness on the fund to help the family of Riccardo after their loss. Not many are likely to read this blog, so this cannot multiply much. It does record and, for some time, retain, though.
I would describe Riccardo here with very similar words, thus, I re-use:
I would have never - ever - thought I would have to put down such words. And I have seen several colleagues leave, through the years. They were mostly elderly, though.
This is not the case for Riccardo Pozzobon, unfortunately.
Riccardo tragically passed away while conducting fieldwork on a glacier in Alaska in early September 2025.
He was one of the most generous, capable, down-to-earth, well-organized, curious, selfless, and fun-to-work-with planetary scientists I have met in all the decades I have been in this business. I never saw him being rude to anyone, even when it would have been very tempting.
Never trying to show off or brag about the many things he actually could have bragged about
If you ever worked with him, this is no news to you.
The point of my posting here and now is to ask those who knew him to help his family, considering that a very young child has been left without a father, and his partner without him.
You can give a hand to the surviving family via this link:
[…]
And I do keep the link. Who knows, maybe someone more will see it:
https://buonacausa.org/cause/riccardopozzobon
Some time before… Link to heading
The condolences train has not yet passed, but it soon will. The loss for colleagues and friends stays. It is nothing compared to that suffered by his family. I can at least write what I recall since meeting Riccardo the first time.
I think it was 2013 or so. I was in Chieti, the city where I studied and where I had graduated in Geology, for the celebration of the 20th year since the foundation of its Geological Sciences program.
Back then Giovanni Jack Pallini was buried — and missed — already for a decade.
They planned a few talks from alumni and I don’t know why they called me back then, but I was happy to go back somehow, for a couple of days. After the talks there were some refreshments in the foyer of the aula magna of the university, and I recall myself — I was hungry — embarrassingly stuffing myself with salty and sweet pastries, while chatting with grey-haired former instructors of almost two decades before (I had started studying there on the 3rd year of operations, or so).
Riccardo was at that time working on his PhD and he came to talk to me. He was working on interesting topics, we chatted a bit, and I left shortly afterwards. We kept in touch in the months to come. The same year Riccardo came visiting me for some months in Bremen.
I could already see that he was not the typical self-centered academic (this character is emphasised with time, but it is often already visible at early stage…). He was yes, brilliant, but self-ironic, humble, and handling life with abundant humour, when needed even a bit dark.
Few years later some research project, initiated and led by the University of Padova, brought us together again, and that continued further within Europlanet. Then came few other occasions to work together linked originally to his service for ESA astronaut training. We did a few field campaigns together, including one in 2022 on Mt. Etna (see banner image at the top, to the left). A couple of years before we also did some joint lectures in planetary geoscience in a smog-filled Beijing, in late 2019, right before the SARS-Cov2 pandemic was about to rip across the planet.
In that period we ran few projects and activities together, including a periodic Winter School on planetary mapping. Little I knew that the 2025 edition would have been the last one recording him alive.
What is not visible necessarily from all the — well grounded and justified — condolence notes that have been produced in the past weeks by so many people, is the strong sense of responsibility of him, how much he had (and was able to) to sort things out, under pressure, and how much at times Riccardo had to struggle to get things done when boundary conditions were far from perfect and he never ever blamed anyone around. He just tried to solve problems, to help others, despite walking uphill all the time, or at least, most of the time.
The generosity of him was uncommon. So his attitude to service and problem solving. If another individual, equally competent, had passed away instead of him, I would not BS with this. It was truly exceptional, and that made also working with him, even when under stress, and suboptimal conditions, a merrier experience. We often cursed together to relieve some of that stress, and it did somewhat help, in the end.
Figure 1: (every) Evening data processing setup for the 2022 ESA Miracles campaign. Riccardo never hesitated in front of data to get his hands dirty, and help colleagues, fellow project members, and the community at large. You can also verify his committment on the past half decade of videos of the GMAP Winter School.
Solidarity lasts often just a yawn. Memory perhaps two, or three, in many cases (in lucky ones, one generation… unlikely for individuals though). Take this as an attempt to make the latter last a bit (more).
Obituaries are available at: