**3. Post 1950s developments**

Over the last four decades of the 20th century, many laboratories in the United States, Japan, Australia and France began to conduct experiments on the physical properties of minerals at high pressures and temperatures. These laboratories focused their research on understanding the role of fundamental properties of minerals and thus provided links to other disciplines of the geosciences such as seismology, tectonophysics, volcanology, geochemistry and petrology. These links are graphically illustrated by **Figure 4**.

### **Figure 4.**

*Williams-Lattimore diagram reflecting the relationship of mineral physics to other disciplines of geosciences (copyright R. C. Liebermann).*
