Howell Williams

Howell Williams (born October 12, 1898 in Liverpool , † January 12, 1980 in Berkeley , California ) was an American geologist , petrograph and volcanologist .

Life

Williams, who spoke Welsh by nature, studied at Liverpool University, interrupted by military service in the First World War (1917/18), with a bachelor's degree in geography in 1923 and a master's degree in archeology in 1924 and geology at Imperial College in London, also with a master's degree . At Imperial College, under WW Watts, he wrote his thesis on Snowdon in North Wales and its origins in Ordovician volcanism. He also visited volcanic regions in the Auvergne (Massif Central) and the Eifel, which contributed to his turn to volcanology. From 1926 he was at the University of California, Berkeley , where he began to deal with volcanoes in California, but also visited Hawaii and Tahiti. In 1928 he received a D.Sc. the University of Liverpool, spent two years at Imperial College and returned to Berkeley in 1930, where he received a full professorship in 1937 and headed the Faculty of Geology from 1940 to 1949. After his retirement he did research at the University of Oregon.

He studied in particular the Californian volcanoes (initially the Sutter Buttes in the Sacramento Valley and the Lassen Peak in the Cascade Mountains), but also in Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico), where he was one of the pioneers of geological surveys in many places, in South America, Alaska and in the Pacific (Galapagos Islands, completed 1969, Tahiti). Williams is known for studying caldera formation, for example in Crater Lake . He also wrote a textbook on petrography, which is well-known in the USA, to which, as in his other publications, he also contributed his own drawings. He also had a degree in archeology (and only came to geology after a geologist pointed out the origin of the stones to him as a student during an excavation of Roman relics through the fossil content of the stones) and used petrographic methods in archeology, for example with the Olmec statues in La Venta (Mexico) . In 1950 he examined fossil human footprints in volcanic mud deposits in Nicaragua.

In 1950 he was accepted into the National Academy of Sciences .

His twin brother, David Williams, was also a geologist.

Fonts

• Geology of the Marysville Buttes California , 1929
• Geology of Tahiti, Moorea, and Maiao , Bernice P. Bishop museum. Bulletin 105, 1933
• Calderas and their origin , University of California Press 1941
• Landscapes of Alaska: their geologic evolution , University of California Press Berkeley 1958
• with Frank Turner, William Gilbert: Petrography: An introduction to the study of rocks in thin sections , WH Freeman 1958
• Geologic Reconnaissance of Southeastern Guatemala , University Of California Press 1964
• Crater Lake: The story of its origin , University of California Press 1963
• The history and character of volcanic domes , Johnson Reprint 1966
• The Sutter Buttes of California: A Study of Plio-Pleistocene Volcanism , University of California Press, reissued 1979
• with Alexander R. McBirney: Vulcanology , Freeman 1979

literature

• Alexander R. McBirney, Rock Stars: The Father of Modern Volcanology: Howel Williams (1898–1980), GSA Today, August 2000