Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia

Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia , often cited as DN Wadia , (born October 25, 1883 in Surat , † June 15, 1969 ) was an Indian geologist.

Life

Wadia comes from a Parish family in Gujarat , originally a shipbuilder - his father was the head of a railway station. He went to college in Baroda , where he made bachelor's degrees in zoology and botany in 1903 and in botany and geology in 1905 and masters' degrees in biology and geology in 1906. From 1907 he was a professor at Prince of Wales College in Jammu , where he taught geology and other subjects and conducted geological field research in the Siwalik Mountains in the foothills of the Himalayas. He also discovered the tusks of a stegodon . From 1921 he was the first Indian at the Geological Survey of India who was not trained in Europe. There he mapped in the Northwest Himalayas in the Kashmir area, for example on Nanga Parbat . In contrast to Eduard Suess, he did not explain the bend of the Himalayas around the Nanga Parbat as the meeting of two different mountain ranges, but as a bend around a central mass (the 500 million year old Purana system and a more recent tectonic system from the Carboniferous to the Eocene). In 1926/27 he was on a study visit to the British Museum in London , where he studied Indian vertebrate fossils, and during this time he also attended geological institutes in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia as well as a course on Alpine geology in Geneva. In 1938 he retired from the Geological Survey and became state mineralogist in Sri Lanka , investigating its geology during this time. In 1945 he became a geological advisor to the Indian government under Nehru and in 1963 he was the first to be awarded the title of National Professor of Geology by the Indian government .

In 1935 he published a soil map of India with Mukherjee and MS Krishnan .

In 1928 he discovered a well-preserved skull of the amphibian Sclerocephalus (Actinodon) from the Carboniferous in Kashmir.

In 1960 he received the Leopold von Buch plaque . In 1958 he received the Padma Bhushan and in 1943 the Lyell Medal . He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1957). He has received numerous other Indian awards and honorary doctorates from various Indian universities. 1946/7 he was President of the Indian National Science Academy (then Indian National Institute of Sciences). In 1942 and 1943 he was president of the Indian Science Congress, whose geology section he chaired several times. In 1938 he was president of the Calcutta Geographical Society and he was the first president of the Indian Society of Soil Sciences in 1949. 1951/52 he was President of the Geological Society of India. In 1955 he became president of the Geographers Association of India, 1965/66 he was president of the Engineering Geological Society of India and from 1965 to 1967 of the Geochemical Society of India. In 1964 he was President of the 22nd International Geological Congress in New Delhi.

He was a corresponding member of the Geological Society of America and an honorary member of the German Geological Society .

In 1919 the first edition of his textbook of the geology of India appeared, which replaced the outdated work of HD Medlicott and WT Blanford Manual of the geology of India (which was edited in 1893 by the head of the Geological Survey of India RD Oldham ).

Fonts

• Geology of India for Students, Macmillan 1919, 6th edition 1966
• Syntaxis of North-Western Himalayas: Its Rocks, Tectonics and Orogeny 1931
• Geology of Nanga Parbat and Gilgit District, 1932
• Cretaceous Volcanic Series in the Great Himalayan Range of Kashmir 1937
• Structure of the Himalayas and of the North Indian Foreland, 1938
• Minerals and Metal Resources of India, United Nations Conference, New York 1949
• Tectonic relations of the Himalayans with the north indian foreland, International Geological Congress, Moscow 1937

Web links

• Biography ( Memento from July 13, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
• Entry for Wadia, Darashaw Nosherwan (1883-1969) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London