On New Year's Day 2017, Professor Hazel Prichard passed away after a long and spirited battle against cancer. As many know, Hazel's overarching research passion was the platinum-group elements. She devoted herself to these fascinating metals for nearly 40 years and made numerous fundamental contributions to our understanding of them over her distinguished career. She collected and studied platinum-group minerals from every continent, except Antarctica, and never tired of interpreting their textures and elucidating the many and varied processes by which they formed. Over the course of her career Hazel was awarded two fellowships and a major award by the UK's most prestigious research organisation, the Royal Society; an individual University Research Fellowship held first at the Open University and then at Cardiff, then later a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship and finally the Brian Mercer Award for Industrial Research to support her work on recycling platinum from road dust. She was UK Representative and Project Secretary for three major IGCP Projects on magmatic ore deposits and edited the landmark ‘Geo-Platinum 87’ conference volume in 1988 that did so much to expand platinum-group element (PGE) research beyond the narrow confines of layered intrusions and turn it into the broad field of research that we recognize today. Hazel supervised or co-supervised 14 PhD students, including three at the Open University and a further 11 at Cardiff on topics ranging from PGE in ophiolites and layered intrusions to gossan formation and Au mineralization in Turkey. She leaves behind an enormous legacy of research, including much of it that she was sadly unable to complete herself, among her many friends and collaborators.

Hazel was an only child and experienced the advantages, and disadvantages, that this brings. She knew she wanted to be a geologist from the age of about five, when her parents took her to the Isle of Wight and she was fascinated by the different coloured sands in the cliffs at Alum Bay. Her father, Gordon, who had really wanted a boy, later took her to residential field study centres around the country. What she discovered on these trips increased her enthusiasm for geology and especially for igneous rocks.

Hazel was dyslexic, and did not learn to read properly until she was 10. Failing the 11+ exam meant she went to Wombwell Hall, a technical school for girls in Gravesend where – despite her earlier learning difficulties – she quickly rose to the top of the class. Knowing of her growing passion for rocks, her father secured a position for her to study ‘O’ and then ‘A’ level geology at the local boys’ school. Many of her peers at the technical school still wonder how ‘square’ old Hazel managed to get into the boys’ school for three lessons a week! After school, Hazel studied for a BSc degree at the University of Hull. In Hazel's words, Hull was an idyllic place for her to study her chosen subjects because at that time Hull had a number of renowned geomorphologists, and this resulted in a highly specialized degree course which turned out to be perfect for Hazel's later work in exploration. Hazel was the only person ever to do the hard-rock component of the geology course combined with geomorphology and the consequent chaos Hazel caused to the time-table resulted in this combination of courses never being offered again.

In 1976, Hazel graduated with first class honours in Geology and Physical Geography. She was accepted to read for a PhD at the University of East Anglia, but after a year, moved with her supervisor Professor Joe Cann to Newcastle. Her PhD thesis focussed on the formation and composition of ocean floor rocks. After her PhD, Hazel took up an EU-funded post-doctoral research post at the Open University, under the supervision of Professor Ian Gass. This research post was the beginning of Hazel's lifelong involvement with, and attachment to, Shetland. Hazel's work there revealed concentrations of platinum never before measured in ophiolites. At the time, her results were greeted with scepticism, but she persevered and her discoveries are now recognized as fundamental petrological aspects of the geology of Shetland.

In 1996, Hazel transferred her Royal Society fellowship to Cardiff. Here, her post involved lecturing to students, something that academics at the Open University can largely avoid. Initially she was unsure about teaching, but to her surprise she came to enjoy it. She took it extremely seriously and was passionate about passing on her knowledge. After completing her Industrial Fellowship in 2004, Hazel was appointed Director of the BSc degree in Exploration and Resource Geology and it is fair to say that this was more than just a job to her. It was one of her passions and she poured not just time and effort, but a good part of her soul, into making the degree relevant and exciting for the students who studied it. Nothing gave her more pride than seeing each cohort of Exploration students graduate every summer and even up to the end of her last year she was still offering advice and writing references to help these students, her students, on the path to success. Through unstinting hard work, dogged determination and pure unwillingness to take no for an answer she built and developed the company placement component of the Exploration degree scheme into the success that it became. Dozens of ex-Cardiff Exploration alumni got their first start and their first experience of the minerals industry through the placements that Hazel set up. These were often hard won and would not have taken place without Hazel's tenacity, warmth and charm.

It is fair to say that Hazel left a unique and unforgettable mark on everyone that met her. She could be argumentative, opinionated and stubborn beyond belief at times. As a woman in a male-dominated sector of academia and an even more male-dominated industry, Hazel was a constant champion for gender equality and for women to succeed in Economic Geology. She was a role model for many of Cardiff's female geology students and many have said that they were inspired and given the confidence to transfer on to the Exploration degree because of Hazel. Cardiff University finally honoured Hazel for this remarkable effort with an Enriching Student Life award in 2014. This was richly deserved but perhaps a more long-lasting and fitting tribute (and one that Hazel would almost certainly have valued more), are all the successful ex-Cardiff students working in the minerals industry who owe a part of their career to Hazel and her efforts to help them in more ways than they probably knew at the time.

For many Cardiff students their fondest memories of Hazel came from the many field trips that she helped to run. With her ever present handbag full of everything needed for the day (because anything too large to fit in the handbag was clearly not worth taking), Hazel would be first off the bus in the morning and full of enthusiasm until the last outcrop – even when the students’ enthusiasm (and sadly sometimes that of her colleagues) had long since run dry. She never took herself too seriously and she loved rocks and loved communicating the story contained within them. She was a field leader in the very best sense of the term. Hazel was a tireless champion for the importance of minerals and mining and for an acceptance among both government and the general public that a modern economy requires a secure supply of minerals. She lobbied parliament and published reports on metal scarcity that led eventually to the current research initiative on the Security of Supply of Mineral Deposits programme funded by the NERC. Hazel's legacy lives on in the Natural Environment Resource Council's Security of Supply of Minerals thematic research programme and particularly the Tellurium and Selenium Security of Supply (TeaSe) consortium, of which Cardiff is a part and that she was instrumental in helping set up. But for many, Hazel's greatest contribution to publicizing mineral deposits was teaching Tony Robinson about the origins of Wales’ gold deposits on the Channel 4 TV series “Birth of Britain”. To watch it back again after so many years, it is hard not be enthused by the story that Hazel tells and by the pleasure that she clearly has in telling it.

Not content with finding platinum in rocks, Hazel was instrumental in raising awareness of how, through degradation of catalytic converters, platinum accumulates in the urban environment. She featured in the media throughout the world with headlines such as “The roads are paved with platinum”. Thanks to Hazel we know that the roads are certainly NOT “paved” with platinum, but there is plenty around in road dust. Hazel was not the first person to discover platinum in the urban environment but she is among only a few to have performed any rigorous research into the subject. Hazel's name is also remembered indirectly through a seamount that was surveyed during her first ocean research cruise on the research vessel Discovery. With Hazel in mind, the science team named the seamount ‘Watership Down’, after the Richard Adams novel in which the rabbit Hazel is one of the main characters.

Hazel married David Robert Sharp on 31 July 2015 at Wolfscastle in Pembrokeshire. David is a geologist whom Hazel had known since their undergraduate course in Hull. The marriage venue is close to her field where she could escape, plant trees, think of the wording of her next paper and where she is buried with a view of the sea.

This special issue of Mineralogical Magazine is dedicated to Hazel's memory. It contains 14 articles that span a range of petrological, mineralogical and geochemical topics related to the base-metal and platinum-group element mineralized environments, reflecting the breadth and depth of Hazel's research interests. Indeed, Hazel is a lead or co-author on several of the papers; these representing projects that she was instrumental in helping to instigate and design. Hazel's beloved Shetland is fittingly represented by three articles. Two of these (Prichard et al., Reference Prichard, Barnes and Godel2018a and O'Driscoll et al., Reference O'Driscoll, Garwood, Day and Wogelius2018) focus on the petrology of the Harold's Grave and Cliff chromitite localities, respectively. The work in Prichard et al. was carried out when Hazel was a CSIRO Distinguished Visiting Scientist Fellow (2012). The locality described in the O'Driscoll et al. article (Cliff) is the classic area where Hazel discovered such anomalously high Pt and Pd enrichments, compared to other ophiolitic chromitites worldwide, and adds additional support to Hazel's original and novel interpretation for a metasomatic origin for these enrichments. Prichard et al. (Reference Prichard, Suárez, Fisher, Knight and Watson2018b) also discuss the Shetland ophiolite, concentrating on the variety of placer platinum-group minerals (PGM) derived from the Cliff, and also the Harold's Grave, localities. Ophiolite-derived PGM are also described by Barkov et al. (Reference Barkov, Tolstykh, Shvedov and Martin2018) and Cabri and Aiglsperger (Reference Cabri and Aiglsperger2018). The former authors report a mineralogical study on alloys and other PGM found in two Russian localities; the Western Sayan province and in Chelyabinsk Oblast (southern Urals). Cabri and Aiglsperger present a review of the mineral ‘hexaferrum’, based on compositionally similar alloys from the Loma Caribe peridotite (Dominican Republic). Layered intrusion-related PGM are represented by three articles. One of these (McCreesh et al., Reference McCreesh, Yudovskaya, Kinnaird and Reinke2018) concerns the ‘Waterberg Project’, currently under exploration by Platinum Group Metals Ltd in the northern limb of the ~2.05 Ga Bushveld Complex (South Africa). The second is a detailed study of placer PGM nuggets derived from the ~193 Ma Freetown Layered Complex, Sierra Leone (Bowles et al., Reference Bowles, Suárez, Prichard and Fisher2018). Thirdly, Augé et al. (Reference Augé, Gloaguen, Chevillard and Bailly2018) describe the mineralogy and geochemistry of PGM from mineralized horizons in the ~200 Ma Conakry Igneous Complex (Guinea).

Away from the more traditional types of PGE-mineralisation, a range of other tectonic/igneous settings are covered. Le Vaillant et al. (Reference Le Vaillant, Barnes, Fiorentini, Barnes, Bath and Miller2018) describe PGE and Au mineralization from Archean greenstone belt deposits, whilst Tolstykh et al. (Reference Tolstykh, Vymazalová, Tuhý and Shapovalova2018) report Au (+Se–Te) enrichment in the Gaching occurrence (Kamchatka, Russia). David Evans has carried out a study of Cr-spinel compositional variation in the so-called ‘chonolith’ intrusions of Kabanga, in northwest Tanzania (Evans, Reference Evans2018). Turning to lower-temperature mineralization processes, a detailed petrological study of a submarine hydrothermal sulfide deposit (Apliki) from Troodos (Cyprus), focusing on the behaviour of Se in particular, is presented by Martin et al. (Reference Martin, McDonald, MacLeod, Prichard and McFall2018). Finally, a comprehensive study of the mineralogy, geochemistry and geochronology of the historic hydrothermal Waterberg Platinum Deposit (not to be confused with the Bushveld-hosted Waterberg Project described in McCreesh et al.) is reported in a two part series by Oberthuer et al. (Reference Oberthür, Melcher, Fusswinkel, van den Kerkhof and Sosa2018) (Part 1) and Van den Kerkhof et al. (Reference Van den Kerkhof, Sosa, Oberthür, Melcher, Fusswinkel, Kronz, Simon and Dunkl2018) (Part 2). The discovery of the Waterberg deposit in 1923 marked the beginning of the South African platinum industry.

Hazel was diagnosed with cancer in October 2014. Despite being given a very bad prognosis she was determined to stay active, and to defeat the disease. Along the way, she faced dark times, but she never felt sorry for herself, and right up until the end of 2016, she was writing and submitting papers, another indication of her passion and determination not to leave work undone. It is hoped that this issue of Mineralogical Magazine serves as some small tribute to her memory, on the one hand by bringing to completion some of the projects that were important to her, and on the other by highlighting the range of her research activity and the respect with which her colleagues in the wider community held her. Hazel may no longer be with us, but she will never be forgotten by (or ‘will always remain in the hearts of’) those who were lucky enough to know her, and her enthusiasm for geology lives on in the students and colleagues that she inspired. A light went out in the UK mineral deposits community on New Year's Day in 2017 and there will never be another one quite like her.