Adolph Knopf

Adolph button ( born December 2, 1882 in San Francisco, California, † November 23, 1966 ) was an American geologist and petrologist.

Button was the son of German immigrants, his father was a building contractor with a ranch near San Francisco. He studied geology at the University of California, Berkeley, with Andrew Cowper Lawson. In 1905 he earned his master's degree with a geological mapping in the plutons of the Sierra Nevada in the valley of the Kern River. Then he went to the United States Geological Survey, for the next five years he prospected deposits and then worked in Alaska, Montana, Nevada and California. From 1920 he taught as an associate professor at Yale University, but he worked until 1945 on part-time for the USGS. For example, he created in 1929 a report on the Motherload gold field in California (The Motherload system of California, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper No. 157 ). In 1923, he received a full professorship and 1937 he was Professor Silliman and Sterling Professor in 1938. In 1951 he retired and moved to California in the vicinity of the ranch where he grew up. He was in California visiting professor and after consulting professor at Stanford University and was still active in geological fieldwork.

Button was an expert in petrology and dealt next publications on special deposits in particular with plutons with field studies, for example, about Spanish Peaks in Colorado and the Boulder Batholith of. He also dealt with issues of isostasy ( and Geosynklinal theory ) and the geological age of the Earth, where he soon the high estimates of Arthur Holmes and other supported ( over 2 billion years).

In 1944 he was president of the Geological Society of America and in 1959 he received the Penrose Medal. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1931 ) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He was married twice, his first wife, from 1908 until the death of his wife in 1918. He had three daughters and a son from his first marriage. In 1920 he married again.