Andrew Cowper Lawson
Andrew Cowper Lawson (born July 25, 1861 in Anstruther , Scotland , † June 16, 1952 in Berkeley , California ) was a professor of geology at the University of California, Berkeley . He was the first to identify the San Andreas Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1895 . He got the name from him, and he was the first to reveal its full length after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake , although he never fully understood its nature. He also examined and named the Franciscan complex, a more than 1,000 kilometers long, heavily flaked rock sequence from a former accretion wedge that builds up the American west coast from Oregon in the north to southern California. He was the editor and co-author of the 1908 report on the San Francisco earthquake known as the "Carnegie" or "Lawson Report".
Lawson moved to Hamilton , Ontario with his parents when he was six . In 1883 he made the BA in natural sciences at the University of Toronto , the MA he received there in 1885. During his studies he worked for the Geological Survey of Canada . The Ph.D. he made in 1888 at Johns Hopkins University .
In 1890 he left the Geological Survey of Canada to work as a consulting geologist in Vancouver . In October of that year, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Mineralogy and Geology at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1892 he was given a full professorship, which he held until 1928. In 1915 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1924 to the National Academy of Sciences . In 1926 he was President of the Geological Society of America . As Professor Emeritus , Lawson was a consulting geologist on the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s.
His house in the area of La Loma Park in the Berkeley Hills in Berkeley, California, now called "Lawson House" or "Fault-Line Villa", was specially designed for him by the architect Bernard Maybeck as an earthquake-proof structure . Today the house is an officially marked sight.
In 1938 Lawson was awarded the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America . The mineral lawsonite is named after him.
literature
- Andrew C. Lawson (Ed.): The California Earthquake of April 18, 1906: Report of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission. 2 volumes. In: Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication. No. 87, Volume 1, 1908 ( publicationsonline.carnegiescience.edu PDF).
Web links
- The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. United States Geological Survey. The 1906 earthquake
- Andrew Cowper Lawson (1861-1952). ( Memento from November 10, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
- Mary K. Miller: Science from the Ashes. Exploratorium, The museum of Science, Art and Human Perception, San Francisco. Lawson's role in earthquake research after the 1906 earthquake
- Great Scots: Scots Who Made A Difference: Lawson, Andrew Cowper (1861–1952). Britannia.com (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ John Dvorak: Andrew Lawson. Discoverer of the San Andreas Fault. In: The World & I Online . May 2006. Lawson's Discovery of the San Andreas Fault
- ^ Gerhard H. Eisbacher: North America . In: Geology of the Earth . 1st edition. tape 2 . Ferdinand Enke Verlag, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-432-96901-5 .
- ↑ Lauri Puchall: Architexture: Fault-Line Villa. In: The Monthly San Francisco, April 2006. The Lawson House (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lawson, Andrew Cowper |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Scottish-American geologist, discoverer of the San Andreas Fault |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 25, 1861 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Anstruther , Scotland |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 16, 1952 |
| Place of death | Berkeley , California |