Robert S. Dietz

Robert S. Dietz (1961)

Robert Sinclair Dietz (* 14. September 1914 in Westfield (New Jersey) ; † 19th May 1995 in Tempe (Arizona) ) was a US -American geophysicist and oceanographer who made significant contributions to the theory of plate tectonics made.

Life

Dietz studied geology and chemistry from 1933 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , where he received his doctorate in geology in 1941, with the dissertation predominantly at the Scripps Institute in San Diego. During World War II he was a pilot in the US Army Air Corps and had many missions in South America. After the war he was at the US Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego, where he participated in many marine expeditions, including the last voyage of Admiral Richard E. Byrd . He headed the Sea Floor Studies Section there. In the early 1950s, his group was among the first in the United States to acquire the newly invented regulators by Émile Gagnan and Jacques Cousteau . With that they started a company that dived for the oil industry. Dietz was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Tokyo and from 1954 to 1958 at the Office of Naval Research in London. From 1963 he was with the US Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington DC (later part of NOAA and in Miami). After he retired there he was visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1974/75, at Washington State University in Pullman in 1975/76 and at Washington University in Saint Louis in 1976/77. He was then Professor of Geology at Arizona State University , where he was retired in 1985.

Dietz, Harry Hammond Hess and H. William Menard pioneered the exploration of ocean floor spreading on mid-ocean ridges around 1960 and 1961. While employed at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography , he observed the nature of the Hawaiian Emperor chain , which emerged from the The Hawaii-Midway Islands chain stood out, speculating in 1953 that something would have to carry those ancient volcanic mountains northward like a conveyor belt.

He dealt with the geomorphology of continental shelves and their submarine canyons and mapped the estuary of the submarine canyon of Monterey.

He later became interested in meteorite impacts and was the first to recognize the Sudbury Basin as a result of an impact. In addition, he discovered other impact craters and spoke out in favor of impact structures in the Nördlinger Ries and Steinheimer basins.

During the Prague uprising he was in Prague and photographed the insurgents' battles with Russians, some of which appeared in Life magazine. He wrote a book with Jacques Piccard about his record-breaking dive in the Mariana Trench. During the Cold War, he visited oceanographic laboratories in the Soviet Union.

In 1988 he received the Penrose Medal from the Geological Society of America and he received the Walter H. Bucher Medal . He received the Humboldt Research Award and the gold medal from the US Department of Commerce. The Dietz Bluff , a cliff in the Antarctic, is named after him.

Fonts

• Earth, Sea, and Sky: Life and Times of a Journeyman Geologist. In: Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science 22 (1994), pp. 1-32.
• In Defense of Drift. In: The Sciences , Vol. 23, Nov-Dec. 1983, p. 26.
• Sudbury Structure as an Astrobleme. University of Chicago, 1964.
• With John C. Holden (Illustrator): Creation / Evolution Satiricon: Creationism Bashed. Bookmaker, Winthrop, WA 1987.
• Continent and Ocean Basin Evolution by Spreading of the Sea Floor. In: Nature , Vol. 190, 1961, pp. 854-857.

literature

• Alexander E. Gates: Earth Scientists from A to Z, Facts on File, 2003