Ronald W. T. Wilkins (born 1935 in Melbourne) is an Australian geochemist and poet.
His scientific research work is largely based on chemical spectroscopy of earth materials. In the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) where he spent most of his career, his research was focussed on the origin of Australian orebodies and the exploration for petroleum accumulations.
As a poet, his work has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies in Australia, USA, China, France, the UK and elsewhere.
Ronald William Thomas Wilkins was born on 23 December 1935 in Moreland, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia, to Welsh and Australian parents. He was educated at local government schools and at Footscray Technical College, where he obtained a diploma in industrial chemistry.
He did not follow this occupation, however. During his school years he had become interested in fossils, and this decided him to accept an appointment as assistant to the curator of palaeontology at what was then the National Museum of Victoria, during which time he finished a BSc degree in geology and chemistry at the University of Melbourne.
After completing an MSc on the sediments of the Bairnsdale area, Victoria, where the provenance of the sediments was obscured by weathering, he further pursued the subject in the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology at Cambridge with PhD studies on the kinetics of mineral-water reactions, and began the spectroscopic studies on minerals that were to be his major research area during the next few years during post-doctoral research at Harvard, and as lecturer in geology at the University of Queensland.
In 1972 he joined the Division of Mineralogy in CSIRO, and subsequently the Division of Petroleum Resources where he eventually achieved the grade of a Chief Research Scientist. He received the DSc degree for his work on the spectroscopy of earth materials from the University of Melbourne in 1996, and a BA degree from Macquarie University in 1997. A frequent visitor to China, he worked on Chinese petroleum and coal-seam gas projects with Xiao Xianming at the Institute of Geochemistry in Guangzhou, and Zhong Ningning at the University of Petroleum, Beijing. He also worked for extended periods in laboratories in France.
He married Paula Car in the Round Church of Cambridge in December 1963 while he was a student at St JohnâÂÂs College. They have three children, including geneticist Marc Wilkins.
Until the 1960s the major tools of mineralogical research were analytical chemistry, optical crystallography, and X-ray diffraction study of atomic long-range order in crystals for identification and elucidation of structure. During this decade a new wave of mineralogical studies began to emerge in which the full range of spectroscopic tools being utilised in the developing field of materials science were also applied to minerals. These applications, which focussed on the short-range order in crystals, encouraged the study of mineral reactions and transformations.
WilkinsâÂÂs contribution to this new wave of mineralogical researches began with identifying the relationships between atomic structure and hydroxyl ion vibrations in micas and talcs. This made it possible to use changes in hydroxyl ion spectra to investigate the mechanisms of dehydroxylation and rehydroxylation, and oxidation and reduction in micas and amphiboles, demonstrating the possibilities of a more dynamical mineralogy.
In other investigations, crystal field spectra were applied to investigate the dichroism of tourmaline. Mçssbauer, infrared and solid state NMR were utilised in studies of amphiboles, uranium minerals and oxonium ions in crystals. While at Harvard Wilkins also took part in a NASA project that probed the possibility of obtaining water in space exploration from nominally anhydrous silicates expected to be found in moon rocks.
In 1972 Wilkins joined the then Division of Mineralogy, CSIRO, where the origin of Australian orebodies was a major focus of research. One important tool of investigation was study of inclusions of fluid that had been trapped in ores and host rocks from their time of formation to reveal temperature and chemistry of the ore-forming fluids. Whereas pristine orebodies of hydrothermal origin are ideal for such studies, many of the major Australian orebodies occur in ancient deformed and metamorphosed terrains in which the original fluids have been modified by re-crystallization and overprinted by successive later generations of fluids, well-illustrated by granite tectonites, often leading to great complexity in their evaluation.
The principles of relative chronology of inclusion fluids were refined by parallel studies on fluorite, halite and quartz in which deformation structures were revealed by proton irradiation and etching of dislocations. The results were applied by Wilkins, Christoph Heinrich and other colleagues to the major orebodies of Broken Hill, Mount Isa and other deposits. Although the early ore-forming fluids trapped in structurally deformed and metamorphosed terrains have almost certainly lost some of their integrity, some chemical features such as halogen ratios in the earliest trapped fluids were probably little affected, and were appropriately applied for probing into the origin of such deposits.
During 1983 Wilkins spent several months at the Centre de Recherches sur la Géologie de lâÂÂUranium in Nancy, France, working with Jean Dubessy and colleagues on fluid inclusion compositions with the laser Raman microprobe MOLE. In 1985 at what was then the Université Scientifique et Médicale de Grenoble, he worked with Jean-Pierre Gratier and colleagues on the healing of fractures in rocks, and the origin of deformation-related fluid inclusions.
The creation of the CSIRO Division of Petroleum Resources opened the possibility of utilising a laser Raman microprobe to obtain chemical information on micron-sized organic particlesâÂÂa powerful new tool in organic petrology. Wilkins and his colleagues, especially John Wilmshurst, Neil Sherwood and Nigel Russell, expanded this research into the Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy of dispersed organic matter in sediments. A major exploration problem was the determination of thermal maturity of organic matter in the developing oilfields of the North West Shelf of Australia, where application of the traditional tool of vitrinite reflectance for this task often produced data that were difficult or impossible to model in thermal maturity programs.
From parallel studies of iso-metamorphic coals, i.e. coals having the same geological history, but of different composition, it was established that the property of alteration of fluorescence simultaneously provided information on chemistry and maturity, enabling corrections to made to errant reflectance data. The technique called FAMM was widely applied commercially in Australian and overseas oilfields. Conclusive proof that the anomalous properties of dispersed vitrinite particles were due to iso-metamorphic variation in hydrogen content was elusive until EMPA analyses of individual vitrinite grains were accomplished.
An alternative approach to obtain robust maturity data was the application of multi-linear regression to the analysis of Raman carbon spectra known to undergo systematic changes with increasing maturity. This new technique (RaMM)âÂÂwhich was developed, tested and appliedâÂÂremoved the necessity to positively distinguish vitrinite particles from others also of woody origin, always a subject of contention between different petrologists. The proposition that oil could be geologically sourced from coal was also studied and reviewed.
WilkinsâÂÂs poetry has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies in Australia, USA, England, France, China ad other countries. His two books of poetry and drawings are Fistful of Dust (2013) and Séjours en France et autres pays (2025), both published by Delphian Books. The writing is distinguished by clarity, attention to detail and wry sense of humour. Major themes are observation of the natural world, the nature of perception, and experiences in France and China during long sojourns.