Alfred Ringwood

Alfred Edward Ted Ringwood was an Australian experimental geophysicist and geochemist born April 19, 1930, in Kew, Melbourne, Australia, who died November 12, 1993, and who worked at the Australian National University. He discovered that germanates functioned as a low pressure analogue to high pressure silicates, allowing predictions about mantle mineral phase changes, demonstrated in 1959 that iron olivine transforms to a denser spinel structure, synthesized the spinel form of magnesium iron silicate in 1966, and in 1978 his team invented synroc, a synthetic rock technology for radioactive waste disposal; the mineral ringwoodite, discovered in the Tenham meteorite in 1969, is named for his predicted high pressure polymorph of olivine. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972, received the William Bowie Medal in 1974, the Mueller Medal in 1975, the Wollaston Medal in 1988, the V. M. Goldschmidt Award in 1991, and the Clarke Medal in 1992.