Robert A. Berner

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Robert A. Berner (2006)

Robert Arbuckle Berner (born November 25, 1935 in Erie , Pennsylvania , † January 10, 2015 in New Haven , Connecticut ) was an American geoscientist ( geochemistry and especially chemical sedimentology ) and professor emeritus at Yale University .

Life

Robert Berner studied geology up to a master’s degree (1958) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he also met his future wife Betty Kay. The couple married in 1959 and published various specialist articles together in the following decades. In 1962, Berner earned his doctorate in Raymond Siever's group at Harvard University in Cambridge , Massachusetts , based on a study of the formation of iron sulfides in sediments . As a post-doctoral student , he moved to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla , California (1962/63 as a Sverdrup Fellow), and then worked for a short time as a research assistant at the University of Chicago . In 1965 he was appointed to Yale University , where he researched and taught until his retirement in 2006. In 1968 he received a research grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ( Sloan Research Fellowship ).

He also published with his wife Elizabeth Kay Berner (* 1936).

In 1993 he received the Huntsman Medal in Oceanography from the Geological Society of Canada, the VM Goldschmidt Award in 1995 , the Murchison Medal in 1996 and the Arthur L. Day Medal . He was an honorary doctorate from the University of Aix-Marseille (1991).

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1987 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991 .

Act

CO 2 content in the Phanerozoic according to the GEOCARB and COPSE models

Berner was best known for GEOCARB and GEOCARBSULF , two models for the development of the CO 2 concentration in the atmosphere over the past 541 million years.

He dealt with the computer-aided modeling of the carbon and sulfur cycle and the determination of the cycles of carbon, phosphorus and sulfur in sediments with stable isotopes. In his research he was strongly interdisciplinary and included, for example, biological processes (especially the role of the first land plants in the global carbon cycle), oceanography and meteorology. He also studied diagenesis and chemical weathering.

In 1999 he made a curve of the change in the oxygen content of the atmosphere in the Phanerozoic.

literature

Fonts

  • Principles of Chemical Sedimentology, McGraw Hill 1971
  • Early Diagenesis: A Theoretical Approach, Princeton University Press 1980
  • with Elizabeth Kay Berner: The Global Water Cycle, 1987
  • with EK Berner: Global Environment: water, air and geochemical cycles, Prentice Hall 1996, 2nd edition, Princeton University Press 2012
  • Dana L. Royer, Robert A. Berner, Isabel P. Montañez, Neil J. Tabor, David J. Beerling: CO 2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate . In: GSA Today . tape 14 , no. 3 , 2004, p. 4 , doi : 10.1130 / 1052-5173 (2004) 014 <4: CAAPDO> 2.0.CO; 2 ( PDF ).
  • A new look at the long term carbon cycle, GSA Today, Volume 9, Issue 11, 1999, pp. 1-6
  • Modeling atmospheric O2 over phanerozoic time, Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta, Vol. 65, 2001, pp. 685-694.
  • Atmospheric oxygen over phanerozoic time, Proc. Nat. Acad. USA, Vol. 96, 1999, pp. 10955-10957, online
  • Examination of the hypothesis of Permo-Triassic boundary extinction by carbon cycle modeling, Proc. Nat. Acad. USA, Vol. 99, 2002, pp. 4172-4177
  • with David J. Beerling, Robert Dudley, Jennifer Robinson, Richard Wildman, Phanerozoic atmospheric oxygen, Ann. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci., Vol. 31, 2003, pp. 105-134

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In memoriam: Robert Berner, a 'giant of geology'
  2. ↑ Robert Berner CV
  3. ↑ RA Berner, Z. Kothavala: GEOCARB III: A revised model of atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic time . In: American Journal of Science . tape 301 , no. 2 , February 2001, p. 182-204 , doi : 10.2475 / ajs.301.2.182 ( PDF ).
  4. ↑ Robert Berner: GEOCARBSULF: A combined model for Phanerozoic atmospheric O2 and CO2 . In: Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta . tape 70 , no. December 23 , 2006, pp. 5653–5664 , doi : 10.1016 / j.gca.2005.11.032 ( PDF ).
personal data
SURNAME Berner, Robert A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Berner, Robert Arbuckle (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American geoscientist
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Erie , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH January 10, 2015
Place of death New Haven , Connecticut