John Graham Ramsay

John Graham Ramsay ( born 1931 in London ) is a British structural geologist. Growing up in suburban London in the 1930s, he attended the Imperial College London, where he became a full professor in 1966. The following year he published his first book, Folding and Fracturing of Rocks, which made him known in the circle of structural geologists. During his academic career he has received numerous scientific awards.

Life

John Graham Ramsay won his Bachelor of Arts in Geology at Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London and graduated in 1952 under John Sutton with distinction. His dissertation dealt with the rock deformation in the area of ​​Loch Monar in the Scottish Highlands, which could be seen from the strongly deformed and folded several times rocks of the Moine Supergroup, and the relationships between the folded basement and its overlying strata; Ramsay received his Ph.D. in 1954.

After his military service as a musician in the Corps of Royal Engineers of Great Britain, he was appointed in 1957 as a lecturer at the geological faculty of Imperial College. Many of its basic early scientific works were created during this period at Imperial Colleg. Later he became a full professor at Imperial College before moving in 1973 as Head of the Institute and Professor at the University of Leeds. In 1976 he was appointed Professor of Geology at the ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, and is now Professor Emeritus at both departments. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Rennes, France and the University of Cardiff in Wales.

After the withdrawal from active teaching in Zurich he devoted himself increasingly to the instruments he had played during his military service, the cello and the tenor drum. He still composes and teaches cello and chamber music in Issirac, France.

Work

John Ramsay is the author and co-author of four books and numerous structural geological essays. It represents long been the view that the outcrop or thin section actually visible structures of the rock form the key to understanding the tectonic processes, and concludes that deformation models must be measured against the observed ratios to actually be important. In all his works, the theoretical part is followed by experimental simulations, which are then compared with photographs of course incurred examples.

Ramsay has conducted extensive railing work in Barberton greenstone belt in South Africa and Zimbabwe as well as in the East African grave breach in Sudan. In addition to his contributions to the structural geology of the Alps before and during his time in Zurich he worked preferably with the Caledonian mountain belt of the Scottish Highlands.

Even after his retirement, he continued his geological structure work and has performed in recent years as Honorary Research Adviser studies in the area of the Moine Thrust in the north-west Highlands of Scotland for the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Honors

His work in the service of progress of structural geology have been recognized with numerous honors, including the Bigsby Medal ( 1973) and the Wollaston Medal ( 1986), both awards from the Geological Society of London, the Prestwich Medal of the Société géologique de France (1989 ), the Sir Arthur Holmes medal of the European Union of Geosciences (1984 ), the CT Clough medal of the Geological Society of Scotland (1962) and the medal of the University of Liège ( 1988). He was appointed to the honorary list of the Queen in the Order of Commander of the British Empire in 1992. He is since 1973 a Fellow of the Royal Society, and an honorary member of the Geological Society of America, Société géologique de France, the Indian National Science Academy, the American Geophysical Union, the National Academy of Sciences and the British Geological Society of London.

Writings

• Folding and Fracturing of Rocks. McGraw -Hill, 1967, ISBN 978-0070511705.
• The Techniques of Modern Structural Geology, Volume 1: Strain Analysis. Academic Press, 1984, ISBN 978-0125769211.
• Martin I. Huber: The Techniques of Modern Structural Geology. Volume 2: Folds and Fractures. Academic Press, 1987, ISBN 0-12-576902-4.
• Richard Lisle: The Techniques of Modern Structural Geology. Volume 3: Applications of continuum mechanics in structural geology. Academic Press, 2000, ISBN 0-12-576923-7.