Adrian Scheidegger

Adrian Eugen Scheidegger (born May 2, 1925 in Basel ; † December 10, 2014 in Baden AG ) was a Swiss-Austrian geophysicist and professor at the Vienna University of Technology .

Life

He has international recognition through various textbooks acquired - of which particularly its Principles of Geodynamics be mentioned (1963/1982) - and is considered an expert bedeutendster the gap - tectonics . His research on the morphology of alpine landscapes and the statistics and dynamics of regional rifts provide strong indications as to how the main axes of geological stress and directions of movement lie in the interior of the continental blocks.

Where the local divide directions and changes in direction of the Danube, for example, do not coincide with the “European” directions, they often correspond to older tectonic phases that can be detected long after they have subsided. They also shape some details of today's landscape and are partly related to earlier mountain formations and regional plate tectonics .

At his Institute for Geophysics , newly founded by the TU - of which he was the first director - Scheidegger also began special investigations on landslides in several high alpine valleys in the Eastern Alps . In the 1970s such observations in the Alps prompted him to investigate the geodynamics of Blaiken for the first time .

Scheidegger was an internationally known author of several specialist books and received several honors. In his private life he was an opera lover and enthusiastic mountaineer who knows many of the world's mountains and their tectonics firsthand.

Textbooks

• Theoretical geomorphology , Springer 1970 and 1991
• Principles of geodynamics , Springer, Berlin 1963
• Systematic geomorphology , Springer, 1987
• Morphotectonics . Springer, Berlin et al. 2004, ISBN 3-540-20017-7 (English).

Other (selection)

• Geophysics today. Held on June 22, 1972 (= inaugural lectures at the Technical University in Vienna 35, ZDB -ID 244460-4 ). Publishing house of the Vienna University of Technology, Vienna 1973.
• Tectonic Stresses in the Alpine-Mediterranean Region , Springer (e-Book) 1980
• Holy cows: Chaos theory of human evolution , Lang, Frankfurt / Main 1997

Web links

• "My life, my career", Adrian Scheidegger, 2008
• Literature by and about Adrian Scheidegger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Landscapes and forces of nature, Zurich 1989 ( Memento from February 23, 2001 in the Internet Archive )
• local geodynamics and crevices near Platt ( Diendorf fault , Lower Austria)
• Neotectonics and "island mountains" in the vicinity of Vienna