Frank Stillwell

Frank Stillwell (around 1912)

Frank Leslie Stillwell (born June 27, 1888 in Hawthorn , Victoria , Australia , † February 8, 1963 on the Isle of Wight , United Kingdom ) was an Australian geologist and polar explorer .

Life

Frank Leslie Stillwell was born on June 27, 1888 in Hawthorn, a suburb of Melbourne , the seventh of eight children of Alfred Stillwell and Mary Eliza Stillwell (née Townsend). He was the youngest son in the family. His father and grandfather, John Stillwell, were printers.

From 1893 to 1900 he attended Auburn State School and then Hawthorn College. From 1907 he studied at the University of Melbourne where he received his Bachelor of Science ( B.Sc. ) in 1911 .

Australasian Antarctic Expedition

Sleigh troop with Frank Stillwell, Alfred Hodgeman and John Close .

From December 1911 Stillwell took part as a geologist in the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-1914) of the Australian polar explorer Douglas Mawson and spent 15 months in the Antarctic. He was assigned to the team at base camp in Commonwealth Bay . From there he led two expeditions equipped with sledges, which were commissioned to explore the topography and geology of the coastal section east of the base camp ( Georg-V-Land ). The sledge troops moved along the coast up to 97 km from the base camp.

On March 19, 1913, he returned to Australia and continued his studies at the University of Melbourne. In the same year he received his M.Sc. and from 1914 he taught mineralogy at the University of Adelaide . At the same time he worked on his dissertation on "The metamorphic rocks of Adelie Land," which was published in reports on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, and he with the 1916 at Melbourne University doctorate .

World War I - civil service

In the same year 1916 Stillwell volunteered with the Australian Imperial Force for use in the First World War . His announcement was withdrawn, however, so that he could support the newly established government body of the Advisory Council of Science and Industry, now the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).

After the war, Stillwell worked as a geologist in the Broken Hill and Bendigo deposits from 1919 to 1921 . A longer stay abroad took him to various mining areas in Europe, North America and South Africa in 1922/23. Stillwell took this opportunity to familiarize himself with the then still new method of ore microscopy . Back in Australia, he applied the new investigation method to the ores of the Broken Hill deposit and was able to identify dyskrasite , in the form of finely distributed inclusions in the galena of the deposit, as an economically important silver ore.

Success earned him a research fellowship from the University of Melbourne under Ernest Willington Skeats , and in 1927 he became a petrologist at CSIRO. In 1927 and 1928 he was mainly involved in mapping work in the Kalgoorlie gold fields . From 1929 until his retirement in June 1953 he headed the "Department of Minerography" of the CSIRO, which is attached to the Department of Geology at the University of Melbourne, where he also taught at the same time. After his retirement he remained active as an advisor to the Broken Hill Geological Committee.

Stillwell published 68 specialist publications in the course of his scientific career, the last of them in 1959. He died after a brief illness on February 8, 1963 at the age of 75.

Diaries 1911–1913

The diaries that Stillwell had kept while participating in the Australasian Antarctic Expedition were published in 2012 by the Australian Academy of Science under the title "Still no Mawson: Frank Stillwell's Antarctic Diaries 1911-13". In his diaries Stillwell describes not only his own activities within the scope of the expedition, but also gives insights into daily camp life and his view of the dramatic events around the Mawson, Ninnis and Mertz away team .

Stillwellite (Ce)

Awards

• 1948: Institute Medal of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy
• 1951: Clarke Medal from the Royal Society of New South Wales
• 1954: Officer of the Order of the British Empire

Dedication names

• Stillwell Hills : A group of hills in Kempland in the southwest of William Scoresby Bay was named after Stillwell by the Australian Antarctic Names and Medals Committee .
• Stillwell Island : The largest island in the Way Archipelago , named by Mawson after Stillwell.
• Stillwell Lake : A lake in the Stillwell Hills in Kempland.
• Stillwellite- (Ce) : A mineral from the group of borosilicates , was first described in 1955.

literature

• John Stewart: Antarctica - An Encyclopedia . Vol. 2, McFarland & Co., Jefferson and London, 2011, ISBN 978-0-7864-3590-6 , p. 1508 (English).
• Bernadette Hince (Ed.): Still no Mawson: Frank Stillwell's Antarctic Diaries 1911-13. Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 2012, ISBN 978-0-85847-330-0 , viii + 240 pp. (English).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} ES Hills: Frank Leslie Stillwell 1888–1963. In: Records of the Australian Academy of Science , Volume 1, Number 1, 1966, pp. 58-66, ( transcript ).
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} AA Wilcock: Stillwell, Frank Leslie (1888–1963). In: Australian Dictionary of Biography , Volume 12, 1990, text15165 ( online )
3. ^ ^{A b c} T. Sharpe: Still no Mawson: Frank Stillwell's Antarctic Diaries 1911-13. In: Polar Record , Volume 49, Number 1, 2013, e3, ( review ).
4. ^ Stillwell Hills. In: Geographic Names Information System. United States Geological Survey, accessed February 24, 2020 .  
5. ↑ Stillwell Lake. In: Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica. Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), accessed February 24, 2020 .  
6. ^ J. McAndrew & TR Scott: Stillwellite, a New Rare-Earth Mineral from Queensland. In: Nature , Volume 176, 1955, pp. 509-510, ( abstract ).
7. ^ Stillwellite- (Ce). In: mindat.org. Hudson Institute of Mineralogy, accessed February 23, 2020 .  

Web links

• Website about Stillwell