Armin Alexander Öpik

Armin Öpik

Armin Alexander Öpik (born June 24, 1898 in Lontova near Kunda , Estonia Governorate , † January 15, 1983 in Canberra ) was an Estonian - Australian paleontologist .

Life

Öpik was the son of the harbor master of Kunda. After graduating from the Nicolai High School in Reval in 1917, he studied geology and mineralogy at the University of Dorpat (Tartu), among others with Henrik Bekker, with a master’s degree in 1926 and a doctorate in 1928.

In 1929 he became a private lecturer and in 1930 professor of geology and palaeontology and director of the Geological Institute and Museum, which he remained until the Soviet occupation in 1944. Öpik was also a member of the Geological Committee from 1932 to 1941, which advised the government. He began his field studies of the Cambrian and Ordovician of Estonia in 1922 with first publications in 1925. From 1926 to 1928 he made study trips to Scandinavia, Germany and Czechoslovakia (where he studied formations of the Precambrian ) and in 1937 took part in the Danish Greenland expedition by Lauge Koch part. He published in particular on brachiopods and trilobites (in a monograph 1937) from Estonia, but also many other areas of geology, paleontology and geophysics. A three-volume monograph on the geology of Estonia completed by him remained unpublished.

Öpik left the country with his family before the Soviet occupation in 1944 and lived as a displaced person in Germany under difficult conditions until 1948 . His brother Ernst organized the Baltic University in Pinneberg , where Armin Alexander Öpik taught geology. In 1948 he was able to emigrate to Australia, where he became a geologist in the Bureau of Mineral Resources in Melbourne and from 1949 in Canberra. In 1955 he became an Australian citizen. In Canberra, where the new capital was built, he was mainly occupied with paleontological tasks in the context of oil exploration, but he also published studies, for example on the Cambrian and Ordovician in northern Australia and described numerous new species of trilobites.

In 1962 he received the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal . In 1962 he became a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences. He was an honorary member of the Geological Society of London (1938), a corresponding member of the Paleontological Society (1928) and the Finnish Geological Society and an honorary member of the Geological Society of Australia (1965).

His brother Ernst Julius Öpik was an astronomer in Northern Ireland and at the University of Maryland, College Park .

He was married to Barbara Potaschko (1897–1977), whom he still knew from Russia, and had a son and three daughters with her.

Web links

• Australian Academy of Science - Biographical Memoirs of Deceased Fellows: Armin Alexander Öpik 1898–1983