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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

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List of the most influential people in Earth Sciences,

#3051

Beno Gutenberg

1889 - 1960 (71 years)

Beno Gutenberg was a German-American seismologist who made several important contributions to the science. He was a colleague and mentor of Charles Francis Richter at the California Institute of Technology and Richter's collaborator in developing the Richter magnitude scale for measuring an earthquake's magnitude.

#3052

George Gaylord Simpson

George Gaylord Simpson

1902 - 1984 (82 years)

George Gaylord Simpson was an American paleontologist. Simpson was perhaps the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century, and a major participant in the modern synthesis, contributing Tempo and Mode in Evolution , The Meaning of Evolution and The Major Features of Evolution . He was an expert on extinct mammals and their intercontinental migrations. Simpson was extraordinarily knowledgeable about Mesozoic fossil mammals and fossil mammals of North and South America. He anticipated such concepts as punctuated equilibrium and dispelled the myth that the evolution of the horse was a linear process culminating in the modern Equus caballus.

#3053

Isaiah Bowman

1878 - 1950 (72 years)

Isaiah Bowman, AB, Ph. D. , was an American geographer and President of the Johns Hopkins University, 1935–1948, controversial for his antisemitism and inaction in Jewish resettlement during WWII. Biography Bowman was born in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. His family was Mennonite, and, at the age of eight weeks, Bowman's father moved his family to a log cabin in Brown City, Michigan, sixty miles north of Detroit. In 1900, Isaiah became an American citizen and began intensive study to prepare himself for admittance to Harvard. Studying first at Michigan State Normal College in Ypsilanti , Bowman c...

#3054

Arthur Francis Buddington

1890 - 1980 (90 years)

Arthur Francis "Bud" Buddington was an American geologist. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, he grew up there and in West Mystic, Connecticut. He was educated at Brown University and Princeton University.

#3055

Hugo Benioff

1899 - 1968 (69 years)

Victor Hugo Benioff was an American seismologist and a professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is best remembered for his work in charting the location of deep earthquakes in the Pacific Ocean.

#3056

Glenn Thomas Trewartha

1896 - 1984 (88 years)

Glenn Thomas Trewartha was an American geographer of Cornish American descent. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with a Ph.D. in 1924. He taught at the University of Wisconsin.

#3057

James Gilluly

1896 - 1980 (84 years)

James Gilluly was an American geologist. Regarding the Cupriferous Porphyry Genesis, Gilluly integrated detailed observations of the Ajo porphyry between 1936 and 1936 with experimental data . Gilluly concluded that after the Ajo quartz monzonite intruded and crystallized, it was fractured by magmatic bypass solutions . Gilluly frequency experimental restrictions to estimate a paleo depth between 1000 and 3000 , consistent with solidus temperatures of 900 °C for granite, containing 4% by weight of water. He realized that the source magmatic content was water, sulfur and halogens, and that the binders can form complexes with metals to produce an aqueous fluid with larger volumes.

#3058

Thomas Lyttleton Lyon

1869 - 1938 (69 years)

Thomas Lyttleton Lyon was an American soil scientist who wrote on the nitrogen cycle. He was secretary of the American Society of Agronomy from 1907 to 1909. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Chemical Society. His Principle of Soil Management went through 10 editions.

#3059

Ernst Antevs

1888 - 1974 (86 years)

Ernst Valdemar Antevs was a Swedish-American geologist and educator who made significant contributions to Quaternary geology, particularly geomorphology and geochronology. Ernst Valdemar Antevs was born on a farm in the Vartofta-Åsaka parish of Skaraborg, , Sweden. He attended Stockholm University where in 1917, he was awarded his Ph.D. in geology. He was employed as a docent at the University of Stockholm from 1917 to 1935. He was also a research associate for the American Geographical Society , the Carnegie Institution of Washington , Geological Survey of Canada , and Harvard University .

#3060

Hisakatsu Yabe

1878 - 1969 (91 years)

Hisakatsu Yabe was a Japanese paleontologist and geologist. He is from Tokyo and is a graduate of the University of Tokyo. He was an emeritus professor at Tohoku University. Yabe contributed to the development of geology in Japan. In 1918, He advocated Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line.

#3061

Kirtley F. Mather

Kirtley F. Mather

1888 - 1978 (90 years)

Kirtley Fletcher Mather was an American geologist and faculty member at Harvard University. An expert on petroleum geology and mineralogy, Mather was a prominent scholar, advocate for academic freedom, social activist, and critic of McCarthyism. He is known for his efforts to harmonize the dialogue between science and religion, his role in the Scopes "Monkey Trial", his faith-based liberal activism, support for adult education programs and advocacy for civil liberties.

#3062

Louis J. Battan

1923 - 1986 (63 years)

Louis Joseph Battan was an American atmospheric scientist who received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1953, where he was hired to work in the field of the physics of clouds and precipitation. In 1958 he was appointed professor of meteorology and associate director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He was a pioneer in cloud physics and radar meteorology.

#3063

Irene Barnes Taeuber

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

Irene Barnes Taeuber was an American demographer who worked for the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, where she edited the journal Population Index from 1936 to 1954. Her scholarly work is credited with helping to establish the science of demography.

#3064

Ray S. Bassler

1878 - 1961 (83 years)

Ray Smith Bassler was an American geologist and paleontologist. Biography Bassler was born in 1878, in Philadelphia. When he was in high school he used to sell fossils for Edward Oscar Ulrich. He got his bachelor's degree in 1902 from the University of Cincinnati, and received master's degree in 1903 and Ph.D. in 1905 from George Washington University. Starting from 1904 to 1948 he was an assistant professor there. From 1905 to 1931 he was working with Ferdinand Canu of France on Tertiary Polyzoa of the Atlantic and Gulf coastss. Starting from 1910 to 1922 he was working as a curator for the...

#3065

Charles Bungay Fawcett

1883 - 1952 (69 years)

Charles Bungay Fawcett was a British geographer, regarded as "one of the founders of modern British academic geography" and an early promoter of the idea of regional planning. He was born into a farming family in Staindrop, County Durham, and went to school in nearby Gainford. He studied science at University College, Nottingham and worked briefly as a schoolteacher before joining the staff under A. J Herbertson at the then-new School of Geography at Oxford University. He was later a lecturer at University College, Southampton, and Leeds University. In 1928, he was appointed Professor of Geog...

#3066

Charles L. Christ

1916 - 1980 (64 years)

Charles Louis Christ was an American scientist, geochemist and mineralogist. Education He received his Bachelor's, Master's and Doctoral degrees from the Johns Hopkins University, completing his Ph.D. in 1940.

#3067

Merle Tuve

1901 - 1982 (81 years)

Merle Anthony Tuve was an American geophysicist who was the Chairman of the Office of Scientific Research and Development's Section T, which was created in August 1940. He was founding director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the main laboratory of Section T during the war from 1942 onward. He was a pioneer in the use of pulsed radio waves whose discoveries opened the way to the development of radar and nuclear energy.

#3068

Gabrielle Donnay

1920 - 1987 (67 years)

Gabrielle Donnay, née Hamburger , was a German-born American crystallographer and historian of science. Life Gabrielle Donnay was born in Landeshut, Germany on 21 March 1920 and emigrated to the United States in 1937. She received her B.A. from UCLA with highest honors in chemistry in 1941 and was awarded her Ph.D in 1949 from MIT. She then went to work for Carnegie Institution of Washington where she met and married Jose Donnay that same year. When he retired from Johns Hopkins in 1970, she was hired as a faculty member by McGill University in Canada.

#3069

Charles Fleming

1916 - 1987 (71 years)

Sir Charles Alexander Fleming was a New Zealand geologist, ornithologist, molluscan palaeontologist and environmentalist. He spent the last twenty years of his life studying the evolution and systematics of New Zealand cicadas.

#3070

Louis B. Slichter

1896 - 1978 (82 years)

Louis Byrne Slichter was an American physicist and geophysicist who directed the Institute of Geophysics at UCLA. Slichter was notable for, among other things, earth tides research, submarine detection, development of three-component short-period seismographs, studies of the earth temperature distribution, and the invention of a number of important geophysical devices. Slichter Foreland peninsula in Antarctica is named after him. The Institute of Geophysics building in UCLA where he used to work as a director of the Institute has been named Slichter Hall. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the chair of the Academy's Geophysics Section.

#3071

George Cressey

1896 - 1963 (67 years)

George Babcock Cressey was an American geographer, author, and academic. Born in Tiffin, Ohio, he attended Denison University and then the University of Chicago, where he received a PhD in geology. After receiving his degree, he taught at University of Shanghai and traveled widely in China. Upon his return to the United States in 1929, he completed a pioneering book on the country, China's Geographic Foundations.

#3072

Marshall Kay

1904 - 1975 (71 years)

Marshall Kay was a geologist and professor at Columbia University. He is best known for his studies of the Ordovician of New York, Newfoundland, and Nevada, but his studies were global and he published widely on the stratigraphy of the middle and upper Ordovician. Kay's careful fieldwork provided much geological evidence for the theory of continental drift. He was awarded the Penrose Medal in 1971. Less well known is his work for the Manhattan Project, as a geologist searching for manganese deposits. Marshall's son Robert Kay of Cornell University, daughter Elizabeth Berner of University of Connecticut and son-in-law Robert Berner of Yale University are also geology professors.

#3073

Ruth Harris

Ruth Harris is a scientist at the United States Geological Survey known for her research on large earthquakes, especially on how they begin, end, and cause the ground to shake. In 2019, Harris was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union who cited her "for outstanding contributions to earthquake rupture dynamics, stress transfer, and triggering".

#3074

Sidney William Wooldridge

1900 - 1963 (63 years)

Professor Sidney William Wooldridge CBE, FRS, FGS , geologist, geomorphologist and geographer, was a pioneer in the study of the geomorphology of south-east England and the first professor of geography at King's College London. He collaborated with Dudley Stamp and with David Linton.

#3075

W. B. R. King

1889 - 1963 (74 years)

William Bernard Robinson King was a British geologist. Education King was educated at the University of Cambridge graduating a first-class Honours degree in geology in 1912 Career He joined the British Geological Survey and distinguished himself on field studies in Wales. In 1914 he was commissioned as a second-lieutenant in the Territorial Army and in 1915 was rapidly trained as a hydrologist and sent to France to assist the Chief Engineer of the British Expeditionary Force establish potable water supplies from boreholes. He has been called "the first British military hydrogeologist"

#3076

Doris Reynolds

1899 - 1985 (86 years)

Doris Livesey Reynolds FRSE FGS was a British geologist, best known for her work on metasomatism in rocks and her role in the "Granite Controversy". She was the first woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

#3077

Harold Masursky

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Harold Masursky was an American astrogeologist. After leaving Yale University without defending his dissertation, he started his career in the early 1950s as a field geologist in Wyoming and Colorado working for the United States Geological Survey . In the early 1960s, he moved to the Astrogeology division of the USGS and began working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the mid-1960s, he moved to Flagstaff, Arizona as a founding planetary geologist at the newly constructed USGS Astrogeology Science Center. Throughout his professional career with the USGS, his wo...

#3078

Frederic Brewster Loomis

1873 - 1937 (64 years)

Frederic Brewster Loomis was an American paleontologist. Educated at Amherst College and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, he spent his entire professional career at Amherst. His specialty was vertebrate paleontology. Many fossils he uncovered during his extensive field work are still exhibited at Amherst's Beneski Museum of Natural History. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Geological Society of America, and president of the Paleontological Society.

#3079

Erwin Raisz

1893 - 1968 (75 years)

Erwin Raisz was a Hungarian-born American cartographer, best known for his physiographic maps of landforms. Early life and education Born in Lőcse, Hungary in 1893, Raisz was the son of a civil engineer who introduced him to maps through his work. He received his degree in civil engineering and architecture from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Budapest in 1914.

#3080

William Dickson Lang

1878 - 1966 (88 years)

William Dickson Lang was Keeper of the Department of Geology at the British Museum from 1928 until 1938. Early life Lang was born at Kurnal, India the second son of Edward Tickle Lang and Hebe, the daughter of John Venn Prior. At the age of 1, the family returned to England from the Punjab region of India. Lang's father was a civil servant, who had been working on the Jumna Canal in the Punjab.

#3081

Alan Mara Bateman

1889 - 1971 (82 years)

Alan Mara Bateman was an economic geologist who worked on mining in North America and a professor at Yale University who also served as a long-standing editor of the journal Economic Geology. He also wrote several textbooks on mining including the Formation of Mineral Deposits.

#3082

John Leighly

1895 - 1986 (91 years)

John Leighly was a 20th-century American geographer and professor.

#3083

Robert Wallace Webb

1909 - 1984 (75 years)

Robert Wallace Webb was a professor of geology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and during World War II was Coordinator of Veterans Affairs for the University of California system. After World War II, Santa Barbara State College became a branch of the University of California and he transferred there in 1948 where he was one of the original professors of earth science at the University of California, Santa Barbara .

#3084

Alfred Woodford

1890 - 1990 (100 years)

Alfred Oswald Woodford was an American geologist. He was the founding director of the geology department at Pomona College, where he taught for four decades. He was nicknamed "Woody". Early life and education Woodford was born in Upland, California, on February 27, 1890, to a family of successful citrus farmers. He moved with his family to neighboring Claremont in 1909, and graduated from Pomona College with a degree in chemistry in 1913. He subsequently pursued graduate work in soil chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his doctorate in 1921.

#3085

Winfried Otto Schumann

Winfried Otto Schumann

1888 - 1974 (86 years)

Winfried Otto Schumann was a German physicist and electrical engineer who predicted the Schumann resonances, a series of low-frequency resonances caused by lightning discharges in the atmosphere. Biography Winfried Schumann was born in Tübingen, Germany, the son of a physical chemist. His early years were spent in Kassel and in Berndorf, a town near Vienna. He majored in electrical engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In 1912, he gained a doctorate with a thesis on high-voltage technology under the supervision of Engelbert Arnold. Prior to the First World War, he managed the ...

#3086

Felix Andries Vening Meinesz

Felix Andries Vening Meinesz

1887 - 1966 (79 years)

Felix Andries Vening Meinesz was a Dutch geophysicist and geodesist. He is known for his invention of a precise method for measuring gravity . Thanks to his invention, it became possible to measure gravity at sea, which led him to the discovery of gravity anomalies above the ocean floor. He later attributed these anomalies to continental drift. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society.

#3087

Howard Meyerhoff

1899 - 1982 (83 years)

Howard Augustus Meyerhoff was an American geologist who taught geology at Smith College from 1925 to 1949. He served as administrative secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , as well as editor-in-chief of its journal, Science, from 1949 to 1953. He conducted research on the geology of Puerto Rico, which led to him publishing the book Geology of Porto Rico in 1933.

#3088

James Wordie

1889 - 1962 (73 years)

Sir James Mann Wordie CBE FRS FRSGS LLD was a Scottish polar explorer and geologist. Friends knew him as Jock Wordie. He was President of the Royal Geographical Society from 1951 to 1954. Early life and education Wordie was born at Partick, Glasgow, the son of Jane Catherine and John Wordie, owner of Wordie & Co., a major carrier and carting contractor, with multiple premises throughout Glasgow. He had a sister, Helen. The family lived at 4 Buckingham Terrace in the Hillhead district. The house, which still stands, is a mid-terraced 19th-century three-storey and basement house facing Great W...

#3089

Siemon Muller

1900 - 1970 (70 years)

Siemon William Muller was an American paleontologist and geologist, known for his studies on Triassic paleontology and stratigraphy, and for his work on permafrost. Siemon Muller was born in Blagoveshchensk on May 9, 1900 . Siemon attended the Russian Naval Academy until the Russian Revolution overtook the nation, when he moved to Shanghai to work with an American company. He sailed to the United States in 1921, and enrolled at the University of Oregon, where he studied geology. He graduated in 1927, and married Vera Vilamovsky the next year. Muller earned his master's degree from Stanford Un...

#3090

Erling Dorf

1905 - 1984 (79 years)

Erling Dorf was an American geologist. He was born July 19, 1905, and died in April 1984. He was hired in 1928 as a professor of geology at Princeton University. He retired from Princeton in 1974. He was a renowned paleobotanist working on the floras of the Late Cretaceous and Paleogene. He was married to Ruth Kemmerer Dorf. They had three sons and a daughter: Thomas Alfred Dorf , Norman Kemmerer Dorf , Robert "Bob" Erling Dorf and Molly Dorf Purrington .

#3091

Myra Keen

1905 - 1986 (81 years)

Angeline Myra Keen was an American malacologist and invertebrate paleontologist. She was an expert on the evolution of marine mollusks. With a PhD in psychology. Keen went from being a volunteer, identifying shells at Stanford, and having no formal training in biology or geology, to being one of the world's foremost malacologists. She was called the "First Lady of Malacology".

#3092

Edgar W. Woolard

1899 - 1978 (79 years)

Edgar William Woolard was an American meteorologist, mathematician and planetary scientist. He was born in El Paso, Texas and received his college education from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. During World War I, Woolard served in the U.S. Army. In 1919, he was employed at the U.S. Weather Bureau as an assistant meteorologist, where he would remain until 1928. He resigned to join the faculty of George Washington University as a mathematics instructor. Woolard was granted his Ph.D. from the university with a thesis titled, On the Geometrical Theory of Halos, published in 1929.

#3093

Fred B. Kniffen

Fred B. Kniffen

1900 - 1993 (93 years)

Fred Bowerman Kniffen was an American geographer and distinguished professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University for over 64 years. Kniffen had a background in anthropology, geography, and geology when he arrived at Louisiana State University in the late 1920s. While there, he made great strides in the Department of Geography and Anthropology that led to the development of new research areas, additional courses, and well trained graduate students. Kniffen stressed the importance of learning and understanding the history of geography, along with blending physical geography and anthropology with cultural geography.

#3094

Guy D. Smith

1907 - 1981 (74 years)

Guy Donald Smith was a distinguished international soil scientist, who was born in Atlantic, Iowa. Biography Guy graduated from the University of Illinois circa 1929, earned his master's degree from the University of Missouri in 1934, and received his PhD in 1940 from the University of Illinois.

#3095

Adolf Pabst

1899 - 1990 (91 years)

Adolf Pabst was an American mineralogist and geologist. Biography Pabst received in 1925 his bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois and in 1928 his Ph.D. in geology and mineralogy at the University of California, Berkeley under George D. Louderbeck with a thesis on mineral inclusionss in the granitic plutons of the Sierra Nevada. For the academic year 1928/29 he won an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowship for postdoctoral study; on this postdoc under Victor Moritz Goldschmidt in Oslo, Pabst married Gudrun Lisabeth Bert. After returning to Berkeley, he became in 1929 an instructor, in 1931 an assistant professor, in 1936 an associate professor, and in 1944 a full professor.

#3096

Johan Gunnar Andersson

Johan Gunnar Andersson

1874 - 1960 (86 years)

Johan Gunnar Andersson was a Swedish archaeologist, paleontologist and geologist, closely associated with the beginnings of Chinese archaeology in the 1920s. Early life and polar research After studies at Uppsala University, and research in the polar regions, Andersson served as Director of Sweden's National Geological Survey.

#3097

Edward Henry Kraus

1875 - 1973 (98 years)

Edward Henry Kraus was a professor of mineralogy at the University of Michigan and also served as Dean of the Summer Session, 1915–1933, Dean of the College of Pharmacy, 1923–1933, and Dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, 1933–1945.

#3098

Martin Gerard Rutten

1910 - 1970 (60 years)

Martin Gerard Rutten was a Dutch geologist, paleontologist, and biologist. He worked as a professor of geology at the universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht. Rutten was born in Jombang, Indonesia to geologist Louis Martin Robert and biologist Johanna Catharina Pekelharing. He joined the Dutch Youth Association for Nature Study and took an early interest in birds and published briefly on birds observed during his later travels. Like his father, who was a geologist in the oil industry, he took an interest in geology and natural history travelling around the world. He studied at the University of...

#3099

Serge von Bubnoff

Serge von Bubnoff

1888 - 1957 (69 years)

Sergius Nikolajewitsch von Bubnoff was a geologist and geotechnical engineer with Germano-Baltic ancestry who made important contributions to the rebuilding of geological research in East Germany after World War II. Starting in 1922, he was a professor at the University of Breslau. In 1929 he became a professor at the University of Greifswald and in 1950, he started his professorship at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. The Bubnoff unit, which is the unit of measure for the speed of geological processes, is named after him.

#3100

James Edwin Hawley

1897 - 1965 (68 years)

James Edwin Hawley was a Canadian geologist and distinguished Professor of Mineralogy at Queen's University. Biography Hawley was raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He earned both a Bachelor’s and a Master's degree from Queen’s University in 1918 and 1920, respectively. After completing his Masters, Hawley spent three years working in petroleum geology in Alberta, Ecuador, Burma and India. In 1926, he earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He stayed there for three years as an Assistant Professor.

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