Frank Fitch Grout

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Frank Fitch Grout (born January 24, 1880 in Rockford (Illinois) , † August 1, 1958 in Minneapolis ) was an American petrographer , geologist and mineralogist .

Life

Grout attended the Throop Polytechnic Institute (forerunner of Caltech ) and studied at the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1904. He then switched to geology with a master's degree in 1908 and went to Yale University , where he received his doctorate in 1917 has been. He then briefly served on the Geological Surveys of West Virginia and Illinois and an instructor at the University of Oklahoma. From 1907 he was at the University of Minnesota, where he became a professor in 1919. He spent most of the summers in the service of the Geological Survey of Minnesota, to which the director of the survey and his supervisor in the geology department of the University of Minnesota William H. Emmons brought him. Emmons let him train geology students on excursions in the summer and Grout himself preferred to do field studies in the wilderness, preferably by canoe. In 1948 he retired. His reputation as a teacher then brought him invitations to teach at various universities (Florida State, Columbia, Arizona, Caltech). His ashes were scattered on Lake Saganaka.

He is known primarily as a petrograph. He was particularly interested in the Precambrian gabbro complex of Duluth in northern Minnesota and neighboring Ontario ( Duluth complex ), on which he coined the term lopolith . Here a controversy arose with Norman L. Bowen about the role of differentiation processes in magmas. The Duluth complex consisted of two layers, a thicker lower layer essentially made of gabbro and an upper red layer that looked more like granite (called a granophyr). There was no big transition between them, as would have been expected from Bowen's theory of differentiation / crystallization. Grout also saw evidence of convection in the magma.

He had broad interests and also examined clays, coal, iron ore deposits, published on mineralogy, chemical rock analysis and Precambrian stratigraphy.

The mineral groutite is named after him.

literature

  • Davis A. Young: Mind Over Magma: The Story of Igneous Petrology, Princeton University Press 2003, 295f
  • George M. Schwartz, obituary in The American Mineralogist, Volume 44, 1959, 373–376, PDF (240 kB, English)

Fonts

  • Petrography and Petrology, McGraw Hill 1932

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Webmineral
personal data
SURNAME Grout, Frank Fitch
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American petrographer, geologist, and mineralogist
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Rockford, Illinois
DATE OF DEATH August 1, 1958
Place of death Minneapolis