John Verhoogen

John Verhoogen (* as Jean Verhoogen February 1, 1912 in Brussels ; † November 8, 1993 ) was a Belgian - American geologist and geophysicist .

Verhoogen contracted polio at the age of 17 , which also affected him later in life. Nevertheless, he studied mining at the University of Brussels (graduated in 1933) and engineering geology at the University of Liège (graduated in 1934). He then went to the USA, where he studied with Howell Williams at the University of California, Berkeley . In 1937 he received his doctorate in geology from Stanford University . He then went back to the University of Brussels and was in the Congo from the late 1930s and during World War II , where he studied the Nyamuragira volcano and explored raw materials. From 1947 he was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a professor and stayed until his retirement in 1976.

He was an early supporter of plate tectonics (according to his own statements because his professor in Brussels Paul Fourmarier was a vehement opponent of plate tectonics). In the 1950s he was responsible for expanding research in geochronology with isotopes and paleomagnetism at Berkeley. He wrote an influential textbook on petrology. He is known for the development of a theory of thermodynamics of the formation of rocks and the application of thermodynamics to processes in the earth's mantle and crust (convection).

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1970), the National Academy of Sciences , the Royal Astronomical Society (1950) and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America . In 1978 he received the Arthur L. Day Prize and he received the Arthur L. Day Medal in 1958 . He was twice a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Dumont Medal of the Belgian Geological Society. From 1951 to 1954 he was Vice President of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior.

Verhoogen was married to the Austrian Ilse Goldenschmidt and had four children. His doctoral students included Allan V. Cox and Richard Doell , whose palaeomagnetic work, which they began at Verhoogen, was mainly used in the detection of plate tectonics in the mid-1960s.

Fonts

• The Earth. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
• with Francis John Turner Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology. McGraw Hill 1951.
  • New edition with Ian SE Carmichael : Igneous Petrology. 1974.
• Energetics of the Earth. Arthur L. Day Lecture, National Academy of Sciences Press 1980.

Web links

• biography