General
The technical meeting will be held at the Geoscience Center at the University of Göttingen, September 10 and 11, 2024. The meeting begins on Sunday September 8th with a pre-excursion to the Harz Mountains. The registration desk opens on Monday, September 9th late afternoon (18:00h) and an icebreaker party will be organized that evening. The same day a pre-conference guided tour to the labs of the Institute for Glass and Raw Material Technology (IGR) Göttingen is planned. Oral and poster presentations including a discussion forum are scheduled for September 10-11th. On September 12th there will be a 1-day post-conference excursion to SCHOTT AG in Grünenplan (Holzminden) and quartz sand deposits in Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. For the pre- and post-conference excursions, separate registrations are required.
Topics
A short history of quartz research meetings
The present symposium is the fourth event of its kind. The series of quartz meetings started in 2008 with the symposium on “Frontiers in quartz research: The genesis, crystal chemistry and economic importance of igneous, metamorphic and hydrothermal SiO2-polymorphs” held during the 33rd International Geological Congress in Oslo, Norway. In 2011 the conference series continued with the colloquium “Mineralogy and analytics of high-purity SiO2 raw materials” organized by the TU Bergakademie Freiberg in Germany. In 2021, the University of Oslo in Tønsberg, Norway, organized QUARTZ-2021 with emphasis on pegmatite quartz and the exploration of quartz for metallic silicon production.
The present QUARTZ-2024 meeting wants to continue the tradition of this “quartz community” forum for presentation and discussion of the latest results from a broad spectrum of ongoing research on quartz. This time we emphasize the importance and the economical as well as ecological sustainability of quartz as a resource material for the glass production, because of its particular economic importance in Germany. A panel discussion at the planned symposium will focus on that theme and will combine geoscientific as well as material scientific aspects.