Thanks

After a certain age, a blog that starts including obituaries risks becoming only obituaries. Yet, retaining some memory of those we meet along the way is one of the few things that makes us who we are.

Roger (1937-2026) Link to heading

When a “big shot” like Bonnet passes away, you get plenty of institutional statements on his greatness. Sadly, just a few weeks after the fact, everyone moves on.

I was not yet in the planetary science business when Bonnet enabled the work that I and many others eventually did through his leadership of exploration missions.

I also had the luck of working for a couple of years at the institute in Bern where he was executive director at the time. As I’ve said before, I rarely saw anyone lead with such elegance.

Johannes (1926-2020) Link to heading

Met at the same time and place as Bonnet, Geiss was - among many other things - a sort of walking, encyclopedic time machine.

He didn’t just literally make space and planetary science happen in Europe over the last half-century; he was also incredibly insightful across many branches of science, and very funny, too. He always had stories to share in impromptu sessions. We used to call these chats “units”, usually held over a coffee that grew cold while he shed a realistic, humorous light on otherwise very serious topics, such as the NASA Apollo experiments. It has been more than a lustro since Johannes left us, right at the beginning of the pandemic.

Andrea (1965-2018) Link to heading

Andrea was a contract professor of crystalline geology (specifically the structural geology of deep, ductile, metamorphic levels) during my senior undergraduate years.

He had a dog named Raja who had been gifted to him, if I recall correctly, by shepherds in Switzerland while he was mapping for his PhD in the mid-1990s. Andrea taught in Chieti for a short time, and the field excursions he led always included Raja, who shared the bus, the mountain hut, and plenty of time - and rainwater on her coat - on and around the outcrops with us. Andrea was a kind, humble person who left far too early.

Jack (1949-2003) Link to heading

The last one listed here is one of the first I met in my higher education journey, when i (re)discovered that Geology was what I really wanted to study.

Giovanni Jack Pallini was highly popular. Most of his fellow faculty probably could not grasp why. I believe they still cannot. To put it simply, he:

• Was a working class academic
• Did not have big, powerful sponsors
• Landed on a professorship reasonably late in his career, just a few years before tragically passing away, on the flanks of the very mountain he spent so much of his time, with multiple generations of students.

Those students respected him not because of the progressive rock eaxmples (Genesis, PFM on some sort of boombox in class) used to explain evolutionary concepts, or because of the field excursions where he’d convince a restaurant to open at midnight for an extra meal, or beacuse he was the first exposing freshers to fieldwork.

They (we) respected him because he was not one of those entitled academics (that I guess he despised, anyway), and because he was remarkably frank, even when discussing professional prospects.

There are many more I could add to this list (with a broader gender distribution; thankfully, those not mentioned are still alive and well). I intentionally included only those who have passed. I never actually told most of these individuals “thank you”. I’m doing it now with the benefit of hindsight - appreciating their efforts to transmit knowledge, their mentoring, their ethics, and their humor.