Terence Thomas Quirke
Terence Thomas Quirke (born July 23, 1886 in Brighton , † August 19, 1947 ) was an American geologist .
Life
Quirke was the son of an Irish violinist and a pianist who played regularly at the seaside resort of Brighton. After a good education at a private school, he was drawn to the USA, where he worked on a ranch and on river paddle steamers on the Missouri. An uncle who was a mining engineer in New Zealand urged him to continue his education and he studied mining and geology at the University of North Dakota and the University of Chicago , where he received his PhD in 1915. After he had already worked as a student at the Geological Survey of North Dakota, he continued this after graduation in the summer months at the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC). But he continued his academic career full-time, becoming an instructor in 1915 and assistant professor in 1917 at the University of Minnesota and associate professor in 1919 and professor at the University of Illinois in 1925 , where he headed the geology faculty until 1928.
His main area of work was the Precambrian geology of Ontario , Canada , where he mapped for the Geological Survey of Canada. When the GSC was no longer allowed to employ foreign geologists in 1931, it turned to engineering geology as a consulting geologist and to mineralogy and crystallography. He also dealt with meteorites, translated petrographic works from German and collected precious stones. Since he traveled a lot by canoe on his geological excursions, he was able to draw on his own experience in his posthumously published book.
A stage of the Huronian Supergroup, a formation of the older Proterozoic (2.4 to 2.2 billion years old) in Ontario and Quebec, is named after him (Quirke Lake Group). In 1930 he published with WH Collins the thesis that the disappearance of the sediments of the Huronian east of Killarney (Ontario) is the result of igneous melting processes and transformation into gneiss and migmatites .
He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America .
Fonts
- with WH Collins: The disappearance of the Huronian, Canadian Geological Survey Memoirs 160, 1930, 1–129
- Elements of Geology: New York: Henry Holt 1925
- Engineering Geology, Champaign / Illinois 1947
- Canoes the world over, University of Illinois Press 1952
Web links
- Obituary by Carlton A. Chapman, Proc. Geolog. Soc. America 1947 (PDF, 481 kB, English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Including The laws of rock metamorphism by Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Quirke, Terence Thomas |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American geologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 23, 1886 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Brighton |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 19, 1947 |