What is Geoalchemy?

Question

I am reading this paper, and the authors have an interesting affiliation:

geoalchemy

Center for Geoalchemy, MIT? A quick Google Scholar search shows that it was a thing in the late 1970s to 1980s. Seems like they were researching geochemical petrology. Any ideas for the source/reason for this name?

+1 I believe questions like this are vital, as they are an integral part of the development of ideas in Earth Sciences. — , Dec 24 '14 at 11:15
Great name; it reminds me of the Center for Rock Abuse, a prolific rock physics lab, at Colorado School of Mines. I suspect it's just some geochemist's shining wit, and maybe a wink at geochemistry's early history. But I'd love to know the full story if anyone knows it. — Matt Hall, Dec 26 '14 at 19:36
I agree with @kwinkunks: a bit of sly humour, probably intended as a nod to the sizable gaps in our current understanding -- cf. Hess' essay in geopoetry and jocular references to palaeomagnetists as palaeomagicians. (As a pure speculation, I wouldn't be surprised if the Center for Geoalchemy's disappearance in the 1980s was due to a higher-up stumbling across the name and deciding it was "unprofessional".) — Pont, Jan 09 '15 at 11:29

score 9 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:41

This is no trivial search and as I was not able to source any information from the MIT website - this is a part answer.

Any Internet search for the term Geoalchemy brings up the a support library for SQLAlchemy, that adds support for spatial databases. (Stack Overflow has a tags for geoalchemy and geoalchemy2)- none of which is really related to why the department was named so, interestingly, the program has a MIT licence.

Some examples of the usage of the term extend to recent times:

In 2013, the Ottawa Geotechnical Group had a lecture tour presentation that hints at a definition:

Geo-Alchemy: Turning Sand into Sandstone and other Microbiological and Bio-Inspired Ground Improvement Technologies.

The abstract for the article Evolution of Knowledge and Ideas in Petroleum Geochemistry - From "GeoAlchemy" to Petroleum Systems Analysis and Beyond (Creaney and Isakson, 2001) indicate that petroleum geochemistry was developed out of earlier disciplines that were geological and chemistry based.
Earlier, in a 1984 article Windows to the Earth (Comrie), has on page 35 a subheading 'Geoalchemy', in it the author focuses on the isotopic geochemistry of volcanics.
Much earlier, in the time of Isaac Newton, the article Newton's Alchemy and early Geochemistry describes how he and other naturalists of the day saw the crystalisation of saltpeter (potassium nitrate) as a model for mineral growth and ore genesis.

It seems from these examples, past and present, that the term 'geoalchemy' stems from the terms geology and alchemy and was (and in some cases, still is) used as a fancy way of saying 'geochemistry'.

MIT license is one of the most common open source licenses, it's not that interesting :P — naught101, Jan 08 '15 at 06:23

What is Geoalchemy?

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