A web page of Eric Twelker's interests

I am a geologist, attorney, and web business owner.  This web site is serves as a place to put papers, presentations and other miscellaneous material related to various projects. Some of it is linked and some of it isn't.  It is pretty much all geology of one sort or another.

My geological background is in mining exploration and I approach the science from that perspective. That said, when I push the origin of ore deposits to an understanding based on first principles, almost every aspect of geology is included. My Greens Creek Mine work has lead me to suggest some changes in volcanic evolution and metamorphic geology. My consideration of the origin of gold deposits in the Seward Peninsula has lead me to a new way of looking at mantle-crust interaction. (It's not completely new as it has been suggested in other contexts.) The Hawaii Hot Spot page is a simple corollary that came out of the work that is still underway.

Having practiced law for about 20 years, I have come back to geology as an outsider. And I have to say that my ideas have often received a frosty welcome. That has led me to another interesting topic. Outsiders are responsible for many revolutionary developments in science. For example, Albert Einstein, who was working as a patent clerk at the time, revolutionized modern physics. John Dalton, who was primarily a teacher but also an amateur scientist, invented atomic chemistry. And Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist, wrote the first comprehensive argument supporting the idea of continental drift. Wegener's case is interesting to me because his ideas were "discredited" by the geological establishment and more or less suppressed for 40 years. Of course, today they are accepted. How many more cases are like this? A lot I suspect.

Why would this be so? Leo Tolstoy put it this way:

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."

This is my first attempt at raising interest in one of my ideas.

(Under construction--I have an Abstract up)

(under construction. . . )