Norman L. Bowen

Norman Levi Bowen ( born June 21, 1887 in Kingston, Ontario, † September 11, 1956 in Washington, DC) was a Canadian geologist.

Bowens research in the field of geochemistry and geochronology made ​​him a founder of modern petrology. His book The Evolution of the Igneous Rocks from 1928 set the benchmark for the following generations of researchers and has been used as a reference for long. He worked from 1912 to 1937, founded on 1905 Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and examined, among other things, the laws of the deposition of minerals during cooling from magmatic melts. He was one of the leading experts on experimental petrology in the U.S. and made the Geophysical Laboratory one of the key research centers in this field.

Bowen was in 1946 a member of the Leopoldina in 1951 foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei. In 1941 he received the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America, and in 1950 the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London. According to him, the Norman L. Bowen Award is named, a prize of the American Geophysical Union.

Works

• The Evolution of the Igneous Rocks, Princeton University Press, 1928, reprint Dover, 1956 ( emerged from lectures at Princeton )