Preston Cloud

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Preston Ercelle Cloud, Jr. (born September 26, 1912 in West Upton , Massachusetts , † January 16, 1991 in Santa Barbara , California ) was an American paleontologist , geographer and professor . He earned merit through his work on the geological timescale and the origin of life on earth.

School education

Cloud was born in West Upton, Massachusetts and grew up in Waynesboro , Pennsylvania , where he developed a love for the outdoors. After graduating from high school , Cloud spent three years in the United States Navy (1930-1933), where he was recognized as an excellent boxer .

academic career

Despite the difficulty of finding work during the Great Depression , Preston paid for his freshman semester at George Washington University in Washington, DC by doing odd day jobs and attending night school.

Ray Bassler (1878–1961), a professor and curator of the paleontological department of the National Museum of Natural History , had a great influence on Cloud's career . Bassler noticed Cloud's interest in his work and enabled the student to work at the museum, first as a handyman, then as a taxidermist . Cloud later worked with G. Arthur Cooper , a paleontologist and stratigraph . From Cooper, Cloud learned a lot about fossils , especially about the group of brachiopods , on which he and Cooper published a paper in 1938. Although he had a full-time position at the museum, he received his Bachelor of Science degree that same year . After graduation, a Cooper scholarship allowed him to attend Yale University , although he also had to continue working as a taxidermist. At Yale he obtained his Ph.D. in 1940 with a monograph on brachiopods. , which won the New York Academy of Sciences A. Cressey Morrison Prize in Natural History and was published by the Geological Society of America as Special Paper 38 in 1942.

Before the war, Cloud briefly taught at the Missouri School of Mines in Rolla and at Yale. He spent World War II with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) mapping war-essential resources in the United States. After the war, Cloud worked for a short time from 1946 as an assistant professor of paleontology and curator for the paleontology of invertebrates at Harvard University , but returned to the USGS in 1948 to map the Mariana Islands , among other things .

From 1948 onwards, Cloud researched the development of life and the rapid breakdown of the Metazoa within the first 200 million years of the Phanerozoic . From 1968 onwards, Cloud worked on models of the early Earth and tried to understand the interaction of the biosphere , atmosphere , hydrosphere and lithosphere . He postulated the increase in free oxygen in the primordial atmosphere about two billion years ago.

Between 1949 and 1959, Cloud was the head of the USGS paleontology department in Washington, expanding it from a small group to a large department. During this time he did research in Spain and on the Great Bahama Banks . He realized that systematic exploration of the continental shelf was of great importance for research, and tried to coordinate national research in this sense.

In 1961, Cloud was appointed director of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Minnesota . From 1965 he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), on the position of professor of biogeology . He worked at UCLA's Santa Barbara campus until the late 1970s, where he also represented the USGS. From 1961 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences for more than 30 years, where he held several offices.

Cloud was married three times and had six children. In the last years of his life he suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , to which he finally succumbed in January 1991.

Memberships

Fonts

  • The Biosphere, Scientific American, September 1983 (Dynamic Earth Special)
  • Terebratuloid Brachiopoda of the Silurian and Devonian, Geological Society of America Special Publ. 38, 1942
  • Some Problems and Patterns of Evolution Exemplified by Fossil Invertebrates, Evolution, Volume 2, December 1948, pp. 322-350
  • Our Disappearing Earth Resources, Field Enterprises Educational Corporation, 1969
  • with Aharon Giber: The Oxygen Cycle, Scientific American, September 1970
  • Major Features of Crustal Evolution, Alexander Du Toit Memorial Lectures 14, Geological Society of South Africa, 1976
  • Cosmos, Earth and Man: Short History of the Universe. New Haven, Conn .: Yale University Press, 1978, ISBN 978-0300021462 .
  • Oasis in Space: Earth History from the Beginning, WW Norton, 1989, ISBN 978-0393305838 .

Prices

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 15, 2016
  2. ^ Member History: Preston Cloud. American Philosophical Society, accessed June 22, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Cloud, Preston
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cloud, Preston Ercelle Jr. (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH West Upton , Massachusetts, USA
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 1991
Place of death Santa Barbara, California , USA