Vale Keith Scott

Keith Scott, foundation ARGA member, collapsed at the CSIRO North Ryde offices on Tuesday 23 April 2013 and passed away very quickly afterwards. Keith was an ardent supporter of regolith geoscience, a member of CRC LEME for 13 years, a CRC LEME Honorary Fellow, and and an expert exploration geochemist.

Keith was a research geoscientist with CSIRO Exploration and Mining for 34 years (until mid 2004), working mainly in the area of regolith geochemistry throughout Australia, but particularly in the Mount Isa Inlier, Yilgarn Craton, Drummond Basin and the Lachlan Fold Belt of NSW and Victoria.

Keith was part of CRC LEME 1 and 2 since 1995. He served as the Deputy Program Leader for the Tasman Fold Belt Program in CRC LEME 1 and Acting Leader for Program 2: Mineral Exploration in areas of deep cover in CRC LEME 2 until February 2004.

Keith was very supportive of CRC LEME Education and Training activities, and participated in Exploration Geochemistry MSc Short Courses at CODES for CRC LEME and then in CRC LEME-sponsored MSc courses for the Minerals Council of Australia. Within CRC LEME, he sought to break down barriers between researchers from different institutions and at different locations. He also encouraged students at the CRC LEME-core universities by providing an industry perspective on their studies. This was recognised by his appointment as Visiting Fellow at the Department of Earth and Marine Sciences ANU (now Research School of Earth Sciences) in 2004, as well as becoming an Honorary Fellow at CSIRO.

During his career, Keith championed the concept of integration of mineralogy and geochemistry to better understand how geochemistry could be used more effectively during exploration using regolith materials. He developed techniques to enable resistate minerals, especially rutile, to be used as an indicator of mineralization in weathered material.

From 2001, until its publication in 2005, he was part of the editorial team which compiled the regolith case histories (as well as contributing 13 articles himself) which resulted in the very popular CRC LEME Thematic Volume "Regolith Expressions of Australian Ore Systems". From 2004 to early 2006, Keith was editor of CRC LEME Minerals Brief - a quarterly electronic newsletter providing a succinct scientific report on progress in CRC LEME mineral exploration projects.

In 2006 he was commissioned to edit a reference book outlining advances in Regolith Science made by CRC LEME. This latter endeavour (in which he was joined by co-editor Colin Pain) challenged all his persuasive skills resulting in publication in 2008.

More recently, Keith was part of the editorial team at Geoscience Australia charged with producing the excellent, weighty "Geology of Australia" book which was produced for the Brisbane International Geological Congress in 2012.

Keith was a wonderful mentor to many students and staff at the ANU, University of Adelaide and Curtin University. Keith produced many seminal journal papers and reports on combining regolith geochemistry, regolith mineralogy and the applied use of geophysics to mineral exploration problems.

Our heartfelt condolences go to Keith's family.

He will be fondly remembered and sadly missed.