Rolf Meissner

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Rolf Meissner (born June 15, 1925 in Dortmund ; † June 4, 2014 ) was a German geophysicist .

Meissner graduated from high school in Dortmund in 1943 and then served in the Air Force. After the war he was a musician for three years and from 1948 studied meteorology and geophysics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . After receiving his doctorate in 1955 (with a topic on groundwater) he worked for six years in seismic oil prospecting for Prakla and Shell in Europe and Africa. From 1961 he was again at the University of Frankfurt as an assistant, where he completed his habilitation in 1966 (the subject of the habilitation was the structure of the earth's crust). He taught and researched in Mainz and Frankfurt and wrote a popular science book about the moon that appeared before the Apollo moon landing in 1969. As a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii (1966 to 1970), he worked on seismic records from the moon and was part of the team that identified moonquakes. In 1971 he became a full professor at the University of Kiel and head of the Institute for Geophysics, which he remained until 1995.

From 1985 to 1987 he was President of the European Geophysical Society and during the same period also President of the Alfred Wegener Foundation . In 1992 he became an honorary member of the German Geophysical Society.

In the 1990s he held senior positions in the International Lithosphere Project. He was considered an internationally recognized scientist in the field of the structure of the earth's crust and lithosphere . In particular, he has been promoting the exploration of the earth's crust with seismic depth reflection since the late 1960s and was involved in the implementation of the German Continental Reflection Seismic Program (DEKORP), which explored the seismic depth structure, especially of the variscides in Germany, in a similar project BABEL in 1984 to 1997 Baltic States (Baltic and Bothnian Echoes of the Lithosphere, this time concerning the crust formation in the Proterozoic and the deep structure of the Caledonids) and on the traverse through Tibet in German-American-Chinese cooperation (INDEPTH / GEDEPTH). He pointed out the importance of petrology and rheology to the interpretation of the data and in this context coined terms such as seismic lamellae and crocodile tectonics.

In addition, he dealt with planetology ( e.g. moonquakes ), applied geophysics (groundwater, prospecting for deposits) and the evolution of the earth. He wrote popular science books, an influential monograph on the continental lithosphere (1986), and a popular standard textbook on seismic exploration.

In 1988 he received the Schlumberger Stitching Award, in 1993 the OJ Schmidt Medal in Moscow and in 1998 the Kapitsa Award.

Fonts

  • The moon, Suhrkamp 1969
  • with Lajos Stegena: Practice of seismic field measurement and evaluation, Bornträger, 1977
  • The Continental Crust: A Geophysical Approach, Academic Press, 1986
  • as editor: Continental lithosphere: deep seismic reflections, AGU 1991 (4th International Symposium on Deep Reflection Profiling of the Continental Lithosphere, Bayreuth 1990)
  • A Little Book of Planet Earth, Springer 2002
  • History of the Earth, CH Beck, 1999, 2nd edition 2004

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ DEKORP, GFZ Potsdam
  2. ↑ Described as a seismic bible for generations of students by W. Rabbel in his obituary in Eos, Volume 96, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Meissner, Rolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Dortmund
DATE OF DEATH 4th June 2014