John Imbrie

John Imbrie ( born July 4, 1925 in Penn Yan, New York) is an American geologist and paleoclimatologist. He is considered a founder of paleoceanography and is known for having found evidence for astronomical causes of the formation of the ice ages.

Imbrie grew up in upstate New York and studied at Coe College in Cedar Rapids and at Princeton University (Bachelor 1948). He made his 1949 master's degree in geology at Yale University and received his doctorate there in 1951. After that, he was a professor at Columbia University, where he studied radioactive dating techniques at the Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and from 1952 Assistant. He was finally Professor and Head of the Geological Faculty at Columbia University since 1967 and a professor at Brown University, most recently as Henry L. Doherty Professor of Oceanography.

In 1981 he was MacArthur Fellow. In 1986, he received the Maurice Ewing Medal of the American Geophysical Union and the 1991 William Twenhofel Medal of the Society for Sedimentary Geology. In 1994 he received the Wilbur Cross Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1978 ), the American Geological Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Meteorological Society. In 1990 he received the Leopold von Buch- badge.

During his participation (from the late 1960s ) years at the CLIMAP project he found in ocean sediments confirmation of the Milankovitch theory of glacial origin. He developed computer methods to determine the water temperature from the finds of foraminifera and other fossils in the sediments. In 2003 he was awarded the Milutin Milankovitch Medal from the European Geophysical Society ( EGS).

Writings

• Katherine Palmer Imbrie Ice ages, solving the mystery, Enslow Publishing 1979, Harvard University Press, 1986 ( written with his daughter )