Richard F. Flint

Richard Foster Flint (born March 1, 1902 in Chicago , † June 6, 1976 in New Haven (Connecticut) ) was an American geologist ( Quaternary geology).

Flint's parents were professors at the University of Chicago (his father was Natt William Flint). He graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree and received his PhD in geology in 1925. His teachers included Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin and Rollin D. Salisbury . Then he was at Yale University , where he received a full professorship in 1945. In 1957 he became Henry Barnard Davis Professor . 1951 to 1957 he was director of graduate studies and then seven years chairman of the geology faculty. In 1970 he retired.

He was one of the leading Quaternary geologists and specialists for the Ice Age in the USA and particularly researched glaciations in the northeastern USA. He began mapping the glacial geology in Connecticut in the 1930s. Flint was known both for field geological research and for his syntheses on Quaternary geology specifically in a monograph that appeared in 1947. He was an opponent of the in the 1920s developed by J Harlen Bretz (and now generally accepted) hypothesis of catastrophic floods in Washington state at the end of the last ice age due to runoff from ice reservoirs ( Missoula floods ). The controversy dragged on for several decades. Flint also looked at marine terraces on the east coast and the Ice Age glaciation of Labrador and Newfoundland. He studied recent glaciers, for example as a geologist on the Boyd Arctic Expedition in Greenland. After the war, he investigated ice age deposits in eastern South Dakota for the US Geological Survey and was a pioneer in the use of the radiocarbon method to obtain reliable bases for ice age stratigraphy and chronology. He was also one of the driving forces behind the establishment of a geochronology laboratory at Yale. In the late 1950s, he studied the glacial deposits in Searles Lake , which provided a chronology of the flood episodes in the western Great Basin at the end of the Ice Age.

He was instrumental in the creation of the Glacial Map of the United States East of the Rocky Mountains . In the late 1950s, he began to expand his research beyond North America. He undertook a critical inventory of glacial stratigraphy and chronology in East and South Africa, and from 1963 he intensified his research in the Andes.

In 1960 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1966 he received the Albrecht Penck Medal and in 1972 the Prestwich Medal . He received honorary doctorates from Wroclaw and Dublin (Trinity College). The Flint Glacier in Antarctica is named in his honor.

Fonts

• with CR Longwell, JE Sanders: Physical Geology, Wiley 1969
• Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch (2nd edition as Glacial and Pleistocene Geology), Wiley 1947, 1957
• Glacial and Quaternary geology, Wiley 1971

Web links

• Obituary by Stephen C. Porter, Geological Society of America, pdf