Special issue of <i>MAPS</i> in honor of Wolf Uwe Reimold on occasion of his 65th birthday

Wolf Uwe Reimold, or just “Uwe,” as he is known to his friends, was born in 1953 in Germany. This also means that in 2018, he turned 65 and thus had to follow the German retirement rules. For everybody who knows Uwe, retirement is not an option, so he moved, once again, continents (more about this below), but at his then workplace, the Natural Science Museum in Berlin, a large celebration was organized in 2018 to celebrate his 65th birthday, and this volume is more or less the result of that celebration. Uwe studied mineralogy with Dieter Stöffler, an early pioneer of our field. Dieter had arrived in Münster after having worked in Tübingen with Wolf von Engelhardt, a yet even earlier pioneer of impact studies. Uwe duly learned mineralogy and had his first encounter with shock metamorphism, and completed his diploma thesis (on the shock metamorphism of dunite) with distinction in 1977. He then continued his doctoral work in Münster as well, again with Dieter Stöffler, where he produced a seminal thesis on the Lappajärvi crater in Finland in 1980. Uwe thus graduated—again with distinction—in 1980. After research appointments at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston from 1980 to 1982, and continued postdoc work in Münster, he moved to South Africa in 1984. Here he started as a Research Fellow at the Bernard Price Institute of Geophysical Research, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, working on the petrography, geochemistry, and geochronology of granitic and mafic rocks from the Vredefort Dome—thus began a lifelong passion for this particular impact structure (see Fig. 1). Uwe likes to confront big targets: Vredefort is the largest and also the oldest impact structure on Earth. For a while Uwe moved around on the Wits University campus, from the Bernard Price Institute to the Schonland Research Centre for Nuclear Sciences, then to the Economic Geology Research Unit, and finally the Department of Geology (which later became the School of Geosciences). Over the years, Uwe worked his way up from research fellow to senior research fellow to senior lecturer and associate professor to “ad hominem” full professor of mineralogy at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2006, he became professor of mineralogy at the Museum of Natural History, Humboldt University, in Berlin, Germany, where he succeeded his now retired former advisor, Dieter Stöffler, who had earlier moved from Münster to Berlin. In a way this closed a very interesting circle. But it would not be Uwe if he were to just sit still. So instead of enjoying retirement as a German pensioner (I am trying to conjure up this image…), he sold his house and moved to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, to take up a position as a “senior professor” at the university there, continuing his research, now focusing on South American impact structures. One wonders which continent is next on his list! From his early work at the University of Münster, Uwe has been on the forefront of research on shock metamorphism and impact cratering. He is one of the foremost experts on these topics in the world today; he is a gifted mineralogist and petrographer with an amazing eye for details, and also an excellent field geologist, who is equally at home with many different geological and even geophysical techniques. His research includes original and groundbreaking research on topics that range from the study of shock metamorphic effects in a variety of minerals and rocks, to the petrography and geochemistry of impact melt bodies (in particular at Scandinavian, Canadian, and African craters), to lunar rocks and meteorites, to the confirmation of numerous impact structures in southern Africa, to the age dating of several impact structures, and, especially, the study of the Vredefort impact structure in South Africa. This latter aspect of his work, which dominated the 20 years he spent in South Africa, also led to his decade-long work on pseudotachylitic breccias and the quest to understand their formation and their importance in impact cratering. During his tenure in South Africa from 1984 to 2005, his crucial research and leadership led to the discovery and/or confirmation of several meteorite impact structures in southern Africa—this includes the Tswaing (Pretoria Saltpan) crater in South Africa, the Roter Kamm crater in Namibia, the Kalkkop crater in South Africa, and the Kgagodi crater in Botswana, as well as critical early research on the Vredefort and Morokweng impact structures in South Africa. He has (co)authored over 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications—a truly amazing and outstanding record, besides mentoring about 30 students for MSc or PhD theses or postdoctoral researchers. In addition, he has been very active in the community, organizing countless symposia, conferences, and field excursions. From the International Workshop on “Cryptoexplosions and Catastrophes in the Geological Record” in July 1987 in Parys (Vredefort, South Africa) to the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Johannesburg, South Africa, in July 1999, the GSA-GSSA Field Forum on “Processes on the Early Earth” in July 2004, and the “Large Meteorite Impacts and Planetary Evolution” (LMI) conference, again at Vredefort, in the summer of 2008; these days (October 2019) he just organized the sixth LMI meeting, now in Brazil. Uwe is also working hard on keeping up the standards of our science by acting as associate editor of the journals Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and the Geological Society of America Bulletin for many years, and still ongoing as associate editor of Meteoritics & Planetary Science (since 2003). He is a fellow of both the Meteoritical Society and the Geological Society of South Africa, was elected a foreign member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2007, and received the Barringer Medal of the Meteoritical Society in 2009. At the celebrations of Uwe's birthday last spring in Berlin, the idea came up to organize a special volume of MAPS to honor Uwe on this occasion, and the result was overwhelming. About 25 manuscripts, by his collaborators, friends, and current and former students and postdocs, made it through the editorial process on time. They represent most of the topics that were and are dear to Uwe's “research heart,” from the Moon to shock metamorphism in terrestrial and extraterrestrial rocks, new and old impact structures, early Archean impact ejecta, and so on. It is also fitting that Uwe co-authors nine of these papers! As the associate editor seeing most of these manuscripts through the review process, I would like to thank all the reviewers and authors for keeping the schedule (well, almost), my co-AE Jeff Plescia for handling the other papers of this issue, and Tim Jull and Agnieszka Baier for support and keeping us on our toes. But I mainly want to thank my good friend Uwe Reimold for many years of close collaboration, scientific inspiration, excursion companionship, and friendship, and I wish him many more productive years.

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