James Dwight Dana

James Dwight Dana

James Dwight Dana (born February 12, 1813 in Utica , New York , † April 14, 1895 in New Haven , Connecticut ) was an American geologist , mineralogist and zoologist . He carried out important research on orogeny , volcanism and the origin and structure of the continents and oceans . He was one of the leading exponents of the contraction theory and coined the term syncline .

Life

Early on, Dana showed an interest in the science nurtured by his teacher at Utica high school . In 1830 he joined Yale College to study with Benjamin Silliman . After receiving his doctorate in 1833, he was a mathematics teacher for sea cadets and sailed the Mediterranean.

From 1836 to 1837 he was Silliman's assistant at Yale's chemistry laboratory, and for the next four years he participated in the United States Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean as a mineralogist and geologist, under the direction of Charles Wilkes . After his return to North America in 1842, the work on his research reports took a good part of the following thirteen years.

In 1844 Dana moved back to New Haven, married Silliman's daughter, and in 1856, after his resignation, was appointed Silliman's professor of natural history and geology at Yale. He held this position until 1892. In 1846 he became co-editor and in his later years editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Science and Arts (founded in 1818 by Benjamin Silliman), to which he himself contributed regularly with articles on geology and mineralogy. In the early 1950s he maintained an intensive correspondence with researchers such as Asa Gray , Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin .

In 1854 he was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

In 1859 he suffered a physical breakdown due to constant overwork, from which he was no longer to fully recover.

In 1888 he founded the Geological Society of America with James Hall and Alexander Winchell , and was its chairman in 1890 .

Services

At the age of 23 he published a system of minerals, which is still being published in new editions to this day. The systematics of minerals according to Dana , which is still used today in the English-speaking world, goes back to the fourth edition, published in 1854 .

As early as 1846, Dana had attributed the sinking of the ocean basins to the decrease in volume of the earth's body due to cooling. On the other hand, he thought the ocean basins were very old. In contrast to the catastrophists like Léonce Élie de Beaumont , he considered the ongoing contraction process to be very slow and undramatic. In his opinion, deep crevices had already formed at the edges of the primordial ocean basins, which today still allow the rise of volcanic magmas and the elevation of mountain ranges . With this he especially tried to explain the structure of the South American Andes . Around the same time, however, researchers such as JH Steel and the brothers Henry Darwin Rogers (1808–1866) and William Barton Rogers made confusing observations in the Appalachians . There seemed to be layers there that were overturned and laid in waves, like frozen ocean surf. They suspected the effect of a wave-like movement in the molten interior of the earth. The signs of tectonic movement from side pressure, such as B. Folding and foliation of the rocks, but still difficult to explain. Dana now tried to integrate these findings into his theory: While the ocean basins deepened and filled with large amounts of sediment , the masses of molten material underneath were supposed to be pushed laterally under the continental margins by the increasing load and accumulate there. He blamed these lateral evasive movements for the observed folds.

The geologist of the Geological Survey (Geological State Office) of New York, James Hall, had made the observation that in some mountain ranges sediment layers with thicknesses of up to 40,000 feet (about 13,000 meters) were exposed. Since there could never have been such deep oceans, he suspected that the ocean floor only collapsed under the load in a few narrow channels. The observed folds then only occurred in these grooves. Dana took up this idea and coined the term geosyncline for these zones, even if he himself was not the originator of the concept. With this, Hall and Dana contradicted the common notion that mountain formation takes place solely through (catastrophic) vertical movements such as "elevation craters" (according to Leopold von Buch ) or collapse basins. However, Dana complained that Hall could not explain how these "lines of primitive accumulation" should be raised to form mountains. For this purpose, Dana again resorted to Élie de Beaumont's "dried up apple model" of the shrinking earth.

Although Dana always emphasized the steadily advancing change of the earth's shape, as a devout Christian he was long averse to the new theory about the evolution of living things. He only accepted the idea in the last edition of his Manual of Geology .

Honors

In 1845 Dana was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1854 he was elected a corresponding member and in 1886 an external member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . Since 1854 he was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society . From 1861 he was a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg . In 1855 he was elected as a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences , in 1857 as a member of the Leopoldina Academic Academy , in 1858 as a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg and as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1863 he was a founding member of the United States' National Academy of Sciences . In 1868 he was elected to the Royal Physiographical Society in Lund , 1871 to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , 1873 to the Académie des Sciences in Paris and in 1874 to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1874 he was awarded the Wollaston Medal by the Geological Society of London , in 1877 by the Royal Society with the Copley Medal and in 1882 by the Royal Society of New South Wales with the Clarke Medal .

The mineral danalith , a crater on Mars and a rib system (magma bulges) ( Dorsa Dana ) on the moon are named after him. The same applies to the Dana Mountains , a mountain range in the Antarctic.

Fonts

Dana's most famous works were his System of Mineralogy (1837) and Manual of Geology (1862). A bibliographical list of his writings shows 214 titles of books and articles, beginning in 1835 with a contribution on the state of Vesuvius in 1834. His works on corals and sponges , on the geology of the Pacific region and on crabs , which summarize his reports on the Wilkes expedition, appeared from 1846. Other works are the Manual of Mineralogy (1848), which is still published in an expanded form today .

As a late work he published Corals and Coral Islands in 1872 and summarized his thoughts on mountain formation by 1873. In 1887 Dana visited the Hawaiian Islands again and the results of his research were published in 1890 under the title Characteristics of Volcanoes .

His System of Mineralogy was revised again and again by leading US mineralogists until the middle of the 20th century, for example in the 7th edition by Harry Berman , Charles Palache and Clifford Frondel . It was also a compendium of mineral types, which later by the Glossary of Mineral Species of Michael Fleischer and others took over. Fleischer edited the 6th edition in the 1930s with William Ebenezer Ford (1878–1939).

literature

• Article by James Dwight Dana in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911. Public domain.
• David R. Oldroyd: Thinking about the Earth , Harvard Press, 1996 ISBN 0-674-88382-9 ; dt .: The biography of the earth. On the history of science in geology , Frankfurt a. M., 1998.
• Johannes Uray: Chemical theory and mineralogical classification systems from the chemical revolution to the middle of the 19th century . In: Bernhard Hubmann, Elmar Schübl, Johannes Seidl (eds.): The beginnings of geological research in Austria . Contributions to the conference “10 Years Working Group History of Earth Sciences in Austria” from April 24th to 26th, 2009 in Graz. Graz 2010, pp. 107–125.

Web links

Commons : James Dwight Dana  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Member entry by James Dwight Dana (with picture) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on February 3, 2016.
2. ^ Member History: James D. Dana. American Philosophical Society, accessed July 5, 2018 . 
3. ^ Members of the previous academies. James Dwight Dana. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on March 11, 2015 . 
4. ↑ Member entry by James Dana at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on February 3, 2016.
5. ↑ Nordisk familjebok vol. 5, 1906 col. 1238 .
6. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 64.
7. ^ In the 8th edition Dana's new mineralogy: the system of mineralogy of James Dwight Dana and Edward Salisbury Dana , Wiley 1997, edited by Richard V. Gaines