DATE2022.11.04 #Awards & Prizes

Emeritus Professor Minoru Kojima received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Rosette.

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

Professor Emeritus Professor Minoru Kojima

Professor Emeritus Minoru Kojima was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in the autumn conferment of the Order of Merit issued on November 3, 2022.

Dr. Kojima has made pioneering and innovative contributions to the elucidation of central issues in geophysics, such as the formation and evolution of the Earth, through rare gas isotope analysis, taking advantage of the chemically inert nature of rare gases. He has made a milestone achievement in the field of atmospheric and oceanic origin/evolution by clarifying that the majority of the present atmosphere is due to large-scale degassing that occurred immediately after the birth of the Earth, and that the remainder was continuously degassed through volcanic activities.

Dr. Kojima not only pioneered noble gas geochemistry, which uses the properties of noble gases, which are not affected by chemical processes, as tracers of physical processes, but also published the book "Noble Gas Geochemistry" (with Professor Frank Podusek), which is the bible of this field. The first edition of the book was published in 1983, and a revised second edition was published in 2002. It has also been translated into Chinese and Russian, and is now the textbook that most of the wide generation of researchers in leadership positions in this field read and studied in their youth. In this way, Dr. Kojima has worked to advance cutting-edge research and, at the same time, to broaden the scope of the field in order to build a solid foundation for the field.

We congratulate Dr. Kojima on receiving this award in recognition of his many years of distinguished service to education and research.

Cabinet Office Website
https://www8.cao.go.jp/shokun/hatsurei/r04aki/meibo_jokun/zuiho-chujusho.pdf#page=5

(Responsibility: Professor Shogo Tachibana, UTokyo Organization for Planetary and Space Science)