Eduard Wenk

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eduard Jean Louis Wenk (born November 4, 1907 in Basel ; † October 19, 2001 there ) is a Swiss geologist , petrograph and mineralogist .

Life

Wenk took an early interest in paleontology and botany of the native Swiss Jura. He studied at the University of Basel with Heinrich Preiswerk-Becker (1876–1940), for whom he carried out fieldwork in the Central Alps in 1929 and worked for his doctoral thesis (1934) in the crystalline area of ​​the Silvretta . During a visit to Bruno Sander in Innsbruck he learned the methods of structural science and as a post-doctoral student he was with Helge Backlund in Uppsala, where he also met Jakob Johannes Sederholm , Eugen Wegmann and Pentti Eskola . He then joined Lauge Koch's expedition to Greenland, which was followed by other Greenland expeditions in the 1950s. From 1936 to 1939 he worked for Shell as a petroleum geologist in Borneo . During the occupation of the Netherlands by the Second World War, he went back to Switzerland, where he worked with Paul Niggli at the ETH Zurich. In 1952 he became a full professor in Basel, where he retired in 1975. He was temporarily rector of the university.

In Uppsala he published a classic work on the formation of banded gneiss from metamorphic differentiation. Due to his petroleum-petrographic-structural studies, he recognized the relatively young age of metamorphic crystallization in the Central Alps as early as 1943 and then created the basis for maps of mineral isogrades in the Alps (maps for the occurrence of certain index minerals that characterize metamorphic zones), especially plagioclase . This work also resulted in a book on the relationship between the composition, crystal structure and optics of feldspar.

He had been married to Martha Heussi since 1939, with whom he had two sons, including the mineralogist Hans-Rudolf Wenk .

Works

  • with Conrad Burri, Robert Parker The optical orientation of the plagioclase , Birkhäuser 1967

Honors

In 1970 he received the Abraham Gottlob Werner Medal . In 1978 he received the Gustav Steinmann Medal for fundamental work on the metamorphosis of the Central Alps, which led to the understanding of what is now a classic metamorphosis belt . In 1962 he became an external member of the Geological Society of London .

The mineral wenkit, discovered in 1962, and two snails from his Borneo expedition in the 1930s (Tibia wenki, Barbatai wenki) were named after him.

literature

  • Volker Trommsdorff: In Memoriam Eduard Wenk (November 4, 1907– October 19, 2001) . In: Swiss mineralogical and petrographic communications . tape 82 , no. 1 , 2002, p. 130–136 ( e-periodica.ch [PDF; 4.4 MB ; accessed on April 8, 2018]).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volker Trommsdorff: In Memoriam Eduard Wenk (November 4, 1907– October 19, 2001) . In: Swiss mineralogical and petrographic communications . tape 82 , no. 1 , 2002, p. 133 ( e-periodica.ch [PDF; 4.4 MB ; accessed on April 8, 2018]).
  2. ↑ DGGV - Gustav Steinmann Medal (since 1938) , 1978 Eduard Wenk, Basel ( laudation , PDF 88.3 kB)
  3. ↑ Mindat - Wenkite
personal data
SURNAME Wenk, Eduard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wenk, Eduard Jean Louis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss geologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 4, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 2001
Place of death Basel