Hans Keidel

Hans Keidel (born October 9, 1877 in Groß Stöckheim ; † August 28, 1954 ) was a German-Argentinian geologist.

Keidel studied at the Bergakademie in Berlin with a subsequent practical year in coal and iron ore mining and then natural sciences in Berlin. In 1902/03 he took part in Gottfried Merzbacher's expedition to the Tian Shan Mountains and received his doctorate from Gustav Steinmann in Freiburg in 1904 (geological investigations in southern Tian Shan, including a description of an Upper Carboniferous brachiopod fauna from the Kugurtus valley). From 1905 to 1906 he was assistant to Ernst Wilhelm Benecke in Strasbourg and then went to Argentina to head the geological section in the Ministry of Agriculture (Division de Minas) founded by Enrique Hermitte . In the early years he was in scientific contact with Eduard Suess in Vienna about the local tectonics in Argentina and published 1906 and 1907 in the meeting reports of the Vienna Academy of Sciences on the Argentine Andes. Due to intrigue, he gave up this position in 1922 and became professor of physical geography, geology and paleontology at the University of Buenos Aires and was also a professor at the Institute of La Plata Museum. In 1942 he retired and lived in Cordoba.

He conducted research in the Sierra de la Ventana in Buenos Aires, where he found traces of glaciation in the Carboniferous and Permian, as well as in the pre-Cordillera in the province of San Juan. Other geologically explored areas were the pre-Cordilleras in the provinces of Mendoza, Salta and Jujuy with predominantly paleozoic layers. He also found traces of icing in the Ordovician of Northern Argentina. With Walther Schiller he described the tin-tungsten deposits in Mazan (Rioja province). Keidel's identification of conspicuous geological structures in the Neuquén Province contributed to the discovery of the Plaza Huincul oil field (1920). Keidel also initiated the geological mapping of Argentina on a 1: 200,000 scale.

In 1924 he received the Nachtigal Medal from the Society for Geography in Berlin. In 1925 he became an honorary member of the Geographical Society in Munich and in 1926 a member of the Academia Nacional de Ciencias in Córdoba. From 1924 to 1929 he was deputy chairman of the Geological Association.

literature

• Obituary by Heinrich Gerth , Geologische Rundschau, 45, 1957, 930 (with list of publications)