Thomas FW Barth

Thomas Fredrik Weiby Barth (born May 18, 1899 on the island of Bolsøy , Norway , † March 7, 1971 in Oslo ) was a Norwegian mineralogist, petrologist and geochemist.

Life

Barth initially studied mining engineering in Trondheim , but then turned to geology, which he studied from 1919 in Oslo at the Geological Museum in Oslo's Tøyen district with Waldemar Christofer Brøgger (1851-1940) and Victor Moritz Goldschmidt . There he was assistant to the Finnish mineralogist Pentti Eskola , who researched there for a year. In 1927 he received his doctorate from Goldschmidt (on nepheline-containing syenite - pegmatite in northern Norway), during which time he taught at an agricultural school for two years. From 1927 he was a lecturer at the TU Berlin and the University of Leipzig and in 1929/30 with a Rockefeller scholarship at Harvard University . Then he was until 1936 at the geophysics laboratory of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC under its then director Arthur L. Day (1869-1960).

In 1937 he became professor and director of the Mineralogical Institute at the University of Oslo. In 1939 he was back at the Carnegie Institution, but returned to Norway, where he was also during the occupation, during which he was briefly imprisoned. After the Second World War he taught at the University of Chicago until 1949 and then returned to Oslo as a professor.

Among other things, he dealt with feldspars and the possibilities of drawing conclusions about the geological history of the rock containing them from their properties (for example, from the sodium content with simultaneously occurring alkali feldspars and plagioclases on the crystallization temperature). Other research topics included the hot springs and geysers in Iceland, the formation of pegmatites, the geochemical cycle of sodium, differentiation and crystallization processes in basalts, metasomatosis , plutons in the Oslo region and the Precambrian in southern Norway. In a 1932 work with Posnjak, he used the example of spinels to show that elements from different chemical groups can occupy the same crystallographic position in a mineral.

Barth had been a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences since 1936 . In 1967 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . 1957 to 1960 he was President of the Commission for Geochemistry of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, 1960/61 President of the Geochemical Society and 1964 to 1968 President of the International Union of Geological Sciences . In 1962 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1969 he received the Norwegian Order of Saint Olav .

literature

Johannes Dons: Tom FW Barth , Norsk Geolog. Tidskrift, Volume 51, 1971, pp. 219-230

Fonts

with Carl Wilhelm Correns , Pentti Eskola The Origin of Rocks , Springer Verlag 1939 (in it the section igneous rocks )
Theoretical Petrology. A textbook on the origin and the evolution of rocks , Wiley 1952
Iceland , Oslo 1941
Feldspars , Wiley, Interscience 1969
Geochemical distribution laws of the elements , with V. Goldschmidt, G. Lunde u. a., Videnskabselskabet Skrifter, Math.-Naturw. Class, 1925/26 (several parts)
The pegmatite dikes of the Caledonian intrusive rocks in the Seiland area , Videnskabselskabet Skrifter, Mat.-Naturw. 1st class, 1927

source

Obituary by F. Dickson, K. Krauskopf, American Mineralogist, Volume 58, 1973, p. 360, pdf

Individual evidence

^ History of X-ray Crystallography at the Geophysics Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution
^ Barth, Posnjak The Spinel Structure: an example of variate atom equipoints , J. Washington Acad. Sci., Vol. 21, 1931, pp. 255-258
↑ Member entry by Tom (Thomas) Barth at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on October 19, 2015.
↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 32.

personal data
SURNAME	Barth, Thomas FW
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Barth, Thomas Fredrik Weiby (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Norwegian mineralogist and geologist
DATE OF BIRTH	May 18, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bolsøy , Norway
DATE OF DEATH	March 7, 1971
Place of death	Oslo

[1] History of X-ray Crystallography at the Geophysics Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution

[2] Barth, Posnjak The Spinel Structure: an example of variate atom equipoints , J. Washington Acad. Sci., Vol. 21, 1931, pp. 255-258

[3] Member entry by Tom (Thomas) Barth at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on October 19, 2015.

[4] Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 32.