kareina

Thanks to a chat with my advisor this afternoon, I may have stumbled upon the first use of the term "mylonite" in a geologic publication. If not the very first, certainly an early one! He had commented that part of the reason I need to include some cross-sections of my field area in my thesis is because the last time anyone published such a thing for this area was in the 1960's before anyone knew about mylonites and what they tell us about the deformation of an area.

This got me to wondering about just *when* they learned about mylonites, and rather than ask my advisor, I checked on Scopus for papers published on the topic between 1960 and 1970. There was one, published in Nature in 1967. Alas, UTAS doesn't have a subscription to the on-line version of that journal, so it was necessary to walk all the way down to the library and get the paper copy and make a photocopy of it. Looking at that article, I noticed early on it in a reference to "Lapworth's definition" of mylonite, and saw that the list of references included a 1885 article by Charles Lapworth. So I checked, and sure enough, UTAS happens to have this journal going back that far! (It is so cool to handle the actually journal from that long ago!)

Therefore, for your reading pleasure, I typed up the article, with the relevant definitions in bold print. ( early mylonite definition )

(yes, I am silly enough to spend the time to type it up, both(!) paragraphs from the photocopy!) I found it odd that the paper describes what the author said, rather than simply saying it, but perhaps this is a summary of a presentation he gave somewhere?