Robert Alfred Cloyne Godwin-Austen

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RAC Godwin-Austen

Robert Alfred Cloyne Godwin-Austen FRS (born March 17, 1808 , † November 25, 1884 in Shalford House near Guildford ) was an English geologist .

Life

Godwin-Austen was the eldest son of Sir Henry E. Austen. He received his education at Oriel College , Oxford , where he became a member in 1830 before joining Lincoln's Inn . In 1833 he married the only daughter and heiress of General Sir Henry T. Godwin, Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath , and in 1834 acquired royal rights to use the additional name Godwin. As a student of William Buckland in Oxford, he became interested in geology. A short time later he met Henry De la Beche , and assisted him in the creation of a geological map of the area of Newton Abbot in Devon , which was later included in the official map of the Geological Survey . In addition, he published a paper on the geology of the south-east of Devonshire ( On the Geology of the South-East of Devonshire ), which appeared in the Transactions of the Geological Society (Series 2, volume viii).

He then turned his attention to the Chalk rocks of Surrey , the county in which his estates were located, in Chilworth and Shalford near Guildford. Later he dealt with the superficial deposits on the English Channel and the boulders of Selsey . In 1855 he presented his work On the possible Extension of the Coal-Measures beneath the South-Eastern part of England to the Geological Society of London , in which he set out the reasons why coal-bearing layers would have to occur underground in this area. In this paper he also argued that the Old Red Sandstone was not deposited in the sea but on land and discussed the Old Red Sandstone's relationship with the Devonian , Silurian and Carboniferous .

He was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1849 , and in 1862 he was awarded the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London. On that occasion he was referred to by Roderick Murchison as an outstanding physical geographer of the past. Godwin-Austen died at Shalford House near Guildford. His son Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen was also a geologist, on whose expedition one of the names of the K2 goes back in 1856 ( Mount Godwin-Austen ).

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