Gerhard Bischoff

Gerhard Bischoff (born September 17, 1925 in Wildau , † August 23, 2001 in Hennef ) was a German geologist. He was professor of geology and head of the geological institute at the University of Cologne .

Bischoff graduated from high school in Berlin and after military service he studied geology as a pilot with the Air Force in Hamburg, Greifswald and Berlin from 1943 to 1945. He was a student of Serge von Bubnoff . Bischoff received his doctorate in Berlin in 1949 and habilitated at the Free University of Berlin in 1955 . He worked as a geologist around the world, primarily in prospecting for deposits in South America, North America, Asia and Africa. In 1971, as chief geologist at Petroperu, he made oil discoveries in the upper Amazon. He suspected that the extensive sedimentary deposits that had accumulated from the Amazon, leading from Africa to the area in front of today's Andes in the Cretaceous Period, also had to carry oil. From 1961 he was associate professor at the Free University of Berlin and from 1963 honorary professor at the University of La Paz. He was professor in Cologne and from 1984 to 1986 Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. In Cologne, during the oil crisis of the 1970s, he mainly dealt with energy policy and founded the Cologne Raw Materials Round.

In 1984 he set up a model of plate tectonics with two convection centers in the Pacific and in Africa, drawing on the undercurrent theory of Nazario Pavoni .

Bischoff, who was a pilot himself, also published a book with aerial photographs of his travels around the world.

Fonts

• The grip into the interior of the earth. Practical Geology , Safari Verlag 1961
• The world below. World and regional studies from a bird's eye view , Safari Verlag 1968
• Economic geological literature on South America , Hamburg, Institute for Ibero-American customers 1966
• Editor with Werner Gocht Energy Handbook , Vieweg 1970, 3rd edition 1979
• An extended, global model of plate tectonics , Spectrum of Science March 1987 (reprinted in Peter Giese (Ed.) Geodynamics and Plate Tectonics , Spektrum Akademischer Verlag)
• The tectonic evolution of the earth from Pangea to the present - a plate tectonic model , Geologische Rundschau, Volume 74, 1985, pp. 237-249
• A bipolar plate tectonic model for the cyclical course of geological history , Glückauf Forschungshefte, Volume 2, 1984, pp. 63-71
• Conversation with a zebra. A geologist's life between adventure and science , Verlag Dr. Kovacs, Hamburg 2002 (autobiography)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography after entry in Peter Giese (Ed.) Geodynamics and Plate Tectonics , Spektrum Akademischer Verlag