The Interdisciplinary Earth: A Volume in Honor of Don L. Anderson

Don's colleagues first knew something was up when they began to receive emails asking them to help him finish up manuscripts in preparation. Attached is the start of a paper on the low-velocity zone and dynamic melting, and some associated literature and background. I think the subject is worthy of extending but I will not be able to finish it. From then, over the roughly 250 days left to him, Don produced two papers, six book chapters, films, archives, an American Geophysical Union Special Session, and a tsunami of emails, drafts, slide presentations, ideas, and advice. He launched into a frenzy of activity to finish what he had started. In the last eight months of his life, he threw out enough ideas to occupy a whole career. I have about 15 unfinished manuscripts that I am trying to farm out to former students to finish up! The job is overwhelming me and I will probably be only able to complete two or three of these. Only "two or three," Don, with "weeks or months" to live? What about the others? Up to the plate he frog-marched his extended family of former graduate students and anyone else he could get his email on. From then, scientific progress was extraordinary. One has to wonder how science would advance if we could work at this intensity all the time. The six book chapters appear in the present volume. Assignments included "Mirages under Yellowstone," "Hindsight Heresy," "Maxwell's and Morgan's Demons," "Sit Down before Fact," "Paradigms and Paradoxes," and "Ambient Mantle." Not all the titles were retained. Some bundles of notes still await the light of day. Every so often, we got insights into how he worked. I have always had the bad habit of not submitting a paper until I have written the two ...