Hugo Benioff

Victor Hugo Benioff (* 1899, † 1968) was an American geophysicist and seismologist.

Hugo Benioff graduated in 1921 from Pomona College. First, he pursued a career of an astronomer and worked for a time at Mount Wilson Observatory. However, the nocturnal working told him to little and then moved his art for Seismology. Since the early 1930s, by the way Benioff also worked on the design of electronic musical instruments such as cello, piano and violin. However, he became famous about science.

So he came in 1924 Seismological Laboratory in Pasadena and received his doctorate in 1935 at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech ), in which the seismological laboratory was built a year later. At that time worked more significant seismologist at Caltech, such as Beno Gutenberg and Charles Francis Richter. Benioff proved to be inventive designer of earthquakes measuring instruments ( seismometers ). One of his first device is named after him Benioff seismometer. It was created in 1932. Likewise, he designed instruments to measure stress in the solid earth. Hugo Benioff became a professor at Caltech during his further career.

One of his best known works was the mapping of deep earthquakes in the Pacific Ocean, which he published in 1954. He made a connection between the depth of the hypocenters of earthquakes and their removal of deep-sea trenches and realized that the coherent pattern always deeper earthquakes represents the position of the subducting oceanic plate in the mantle. This seismically active region of subduction has since been referred to in seismology after him and the Japanese seismologists Kiyoo Wadati - Benioff zone Wadati as.

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Links / sources

• Plate Tectonics with illustrations from Benioffs work (English )
• Photo of Mr Benioff
• Benioff and musical instruments

• Americans
• Born in 1899
• Died in 1968
• Man