Richard Dixon Oldham

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Richard Dixon Oldham

Richard Dixon Oldham (born July 31, 1858 in Dublin , † July 15, 1936 ) was a British geologist and a member of the Royal Society . He made the first clear identification of the separate arrivals of P-waves , S-waves and surface waves on seismograms and suspected the existence of a liquid Earth's core .

Life

He was the son of geologist Thomas Oldham , first attended rugby school in the English county of Warwickshire and later the Royal School of Mines , a government training center for mining studies in London .

In 1879 he went to the Geological Survey of India . He wrote over 40 publications on topics such as hot springs , the geology of the Son Valley, and the structure of the Himalayas and the Ganges plain . His best known work was about seismology . His account of the Assam earthquake of 1897 went far beyond reports of previous earthquakes. It described the Chedrang Fault with a dislocation of up to 35 meters. His most important contribution to seismology was the first clear identification of the separate arrivals of P waves, S waves and surface waves on seismograms. Since these observations agreed with the theory of elastic waves, they showed that the earth could be viewed as an elastic body.

In 1903, Oldham resigned from the Geological Survey of India due to illness and returned to the United Kingdom . In 1906 he analyzed the seismic arrival times of the various recorded earthquakes. He concluded from the differences in transit time that the earth had a core and estimated its radius to be 0.55 times the radius of the earth.

In 1908 he was awarded the Lyell Medal , in 1911 he became a member of the Royal Society, and was President of the Geological Society of London from 1920 to 1922 , he died on July 15, 1936

In 1893 he revised the Manual of the geology of India by HD Medlicott and WT Blanford .

Works

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b W. Bragg: Tribute to deceased fellows of the Royal Society . In: Science . 84, No. 2190, 1936, pp. 539-546. bibcode : 1936Sci .... 84..539B . doi : 10.1126 / science.84.2190.539 . PMID 17834950 .
  2. a b Oldham, Richard Dixon  (= Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography), Volume 10. Charles Scribner's Sons , 2008, p. 203.
  3. Institute for Geophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics at the TU Braunschweig ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Oldham, Richard Dixon @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.igep.tu-bs.de
  4. ^ A b C. Davison: Richard Dixon Oldham. 1858-1936 . In: Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society . 2, No. 5, 1936, pp. 111-113. doi : 10.1098 / rsbm.1936.0008 .