Richard Dixon Oldham

Richard Dixon Oldham ( born July 31, 1858 in Dublin, † July 15, 1936 ) was a British geologist and member of the Royal Society. He made the first unambiguous identification of the separate arrivals of P- waves, S- waves and surface waves on seismograms and suspected the existence of a liquid core of the earth.

Life

He attended the Rugby School in the English county of Warwickshire and later the Royal School of Mines, State School of Mining Engineering in London.

In 1879 he went to the Geological Survey of India. He wrote more than 40 publications on topics such as hot springs, the geology of the Son Valley and the structure of the Himalayas and the Ganges plain. His most famous work was about seismology. His report on the Assam earthquake of 1897 went far beyond previous reports of earthquakes. It contained a description of the Chedrang fault with a displacement of up to 35 meters. His most important contribution to seismology was the first unambiguous identification of the separate arrivals of P- waves, S- waves and surface waves on seismograms. Since these observations consistent with the theory of elastic waves, they showed that you could see the earth as elastic body.

In 1903, Oldham resigned from the Geological Survey of India, due to illness, and returned to the United Kingdom. In 1906, he analyzed the seismic arrival times of the various recorded earthquakes. He concluded from the differences in transit time, that the earth had a core, and estimated its radius to 0.55 times the radius of Earth.

In 1908 he was awarded the Lyell Medal, in 1911 he became a member of the Royal Society, and was from 1920 to 1922 president of the Geological Society of London, he died on July 15, 1936

In 1893 he edited the new Manual of the geology of India by HD Medlicott and WT Blanford.

Works

  • RD Oldham: Report of the great earthquake of 12th June, 1897, 29 K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899..
  • RD Oldham: On the Propagation of Earthquake Motion to Great Distances. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. 194, 1900, pp. 135-174. Bibcode: 1900RSPTA.194 .. 135o. doi: 10.1098/rsta.1900.0015.
  • R. D. Oldham: The Constitution of the Interior of the Earth, as Revealed by Earthquakes. 62, No. 1-4, 1906, pp. 456-475, doi: 10.1144/GSL.JGS.1906.062.01-04.21 ( online in the Google Book Search ).
1897 Assam earthquake Metamorphism Henry Benedict Medlicott Digital Object Identifier Integrated Authority File
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