Armin Öpik

Armin Alexander Öpik (* June 24, 1898 in Lontova in Kunda, Estonia governorate; † January 15, 1983 in Canberra ) was an Estonian- Australian paleontologist.

Öpik was the son of the harbor master of Kunda. After graduating from the Nicolai Gymnasium in Reval 1917 he studied geology and mineralogy at the University of Dorpat (Tartu ), among others, Henrik Bekker, with a Master 's degree in 1926 and his doctorate 1928.

In 1929 he was a lecturer and in 1930 professor of geology and paleontology and Director of the Geological Institute and Museum, which he remained until the Soviet occupation in 1944. Öpik between 1932 and 1941, Member of the Geological Committee, which advised the government. He began his field studies of the Cambrian and Ordovician of Estonia in 1922 with first releases in 1925. From 1926 to 1928 he pursued study trips to Scandinavia, Germany and Czechoslovakia (where he studied formations of the Precambrian ) and adopted in 1937 at the Danish expedition to Greenland by Lauge Koch in part. He has published in particular brachiopods and trilobites ( in a monograph 1937) of Estonia, but also many other areas of geology, paleontology, and geophysics. A completed three-volume monograph by him on Estonia's geology remained unpublished.

Öpik left the country with his family before the Soviet occupation in 1944 and lived until 1948 as a refugee ( displaced person ) under difficult conditions in Germany. His brother Ernst organized the Baltic University in Pinneberg, in the Armin Alexander Öpik taught geology. In 1948, he was able to emigrate to Australia, where he was a geologist in the Bureau of Mineral Resources in Melbourne and from 1949 in Canberra. In 1955 he became an Australian citizen. In Canberra, where the new capital was built, he was mainly occupied with paleontological tasks in oil exploration, but He also published studies, for example, the Cambrian and Ordovician in northern Australia and described numerous new Trilobitenarten.

In 1962, he received the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal. In 1962 he became a member of the Australian Academy of Science. He was an honorary member of the Geological Society of London ( 1938), corresponding member of the Paleontological Society (1928) and the Finnish Geological Society and Honorary Member of the Geological Society of Australia ( 1965).

His brother Ernst Julius Öpik was an astronomer in Northern Ireland and at the University of Maryland, College Park.

He was married to Barbara Potaschko (1897-1977), whom he had known in Russia, and had given me a son and three daughters.