Arthur Holmes

Arthur Holmes ( born January 14, 1890 in Gateshead, England; † September 20, 1965 in London, England ) was an English geologist.

Life

As one of the first geoscientist, he suggested that the beginning of the 20th century discovered radioactivity as a tool for geochronology - the temporal classification of geological epochs - apply. His 1911 achieved with the simplest method data (about 600 million years to the Cambrian ) are close to the currently accepted value of 590 million years. Caused a sensation in his book The Age of the Earth (1913 ), where he attributed Archean gneisses a time still unimaginable age of 1.5 billion years.

Around 1930, he suggested a mechanism to explain the developed by Alfred Wegener Continental Drift: Convective heat flows within the earth produce enough force to move the tectonic plates. Since Holmes were no experimental methods to test this hypothesis available, he called his proposal " speculation"; he can be counted among the Pulsationshypothesen geophysics. Today, his insight is considered very similar to the processes as they are described in the theory of plate tectonics.

The textbook author Laszlo Egyed assigns Holmes ' convection model, however, rather the expansion theory of the earth: the supercontinent Pangaea aufströmende under the magma had torn it and constructed the mountain roots in the outflow; after cessation of flow, the alpidischen Mountains have lifted both sides of the Pacific.

Holmes was, until his death in 1965 professor of geology at the Universities of Durham and Edinburgh. His textbook Principles of Physical Geology is still regarded as a standard work. In 1956 he received the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London.

The Arthur Holmes Medal of the European Geosciences Union, the Arthur Holmes Isotope Geology Laboratory at the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Durham are named after him.

Publications

  • The association of lead with uranium in rock -minerals, and its application to the measurement of geological time. Proceedings of the Royal Society, Ser. A, Vol 85, pp. 248-256 (1911).
  • The Age of the Earth. Harper & Brothers (1913).
  • Principles of Physical Geology, 3rd edition, London 1945
  • Petrographic methods and calculations, London 1921

Biographies

  • Cherry Lewis: The Dating Game: One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth. (2000)
László Egyed List of Penrose Medal winners Integrated Authority File
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