Victor Vacquier

Victor Vacquier, Sr. ( Russian Виктор Вакье ; born October 13, 1907 in Saint Petersburg , Russian Empire ; † January 11, 2009 in La Jolla , California ) was a Russian-American geophysicist and oceanographer who has been a professor at Scripps since 1962 Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego .

Life

Vacquier came from Saint Petersburg in the Russian Empire. Before the Russian Civil War , he fled with his family in 1920 on a horse-drawn sleigh across the ice of the Gulf of Finland, first to Helsinki, then to France and finally to the United States in 1923. He received a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1927 and a master's degree in physics in 1929, but did not receive a doctorate. He initially worked for Gulf Research Laboratories , the research laboratory of the Gulf Oil company in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania. During the Second World War he worked at the Airborne Instruments Laboratory at Columbia University , where he used the fluxgate magnetometer , which he invented at Gulf in 1940, for submarine location (Magnetic Anomaly Detector, MAD). After the war he developed the two gyrocompass devices Mark 19 and Mark 23 at Sperry Gyroscope Inc. , which were later used on many ships of the US Navy. In 1953 he moved to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology , where he developed a method for locating groundwater resources in arid areas using the electrical conductivity of the soil . From 1957 he worked at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography , where he headed the geomagnetism program in the Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL), in which the fluxgate magnetometers already used during the war and pulled by ships were used to measure the magnetic fields imposed on the sea floor by the earth's magnetic field . It turned out that magnetic field anomalies only persisted in the sea floor at a great distance of more than 1000 km. His discovery of these large layers in these magnetic fields , for example fractured at the fracture zone near Cap Mendocino in northern California , advanced the theory of plate tectonics . which was supported by his later measurements of the change in heat distribution on the seabed.

Vacquier has received numerous awards for his research, including the John Price Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1960 , the Albatross Award of the American Miscellaneous Society in 1963 , the John Adam Fleming Medal of the American Geophysical Union in 1973 , and the Reginald Fessenden Medal in 1975. Award from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists , and in 1995 the Alexander Agassiz Medal from the United States National Academy of Sciences for his discovery of the fluxgate magnetometer and study of the seabed magnetic field anomaly, which confirmed ocean floor spread . Vacquier died of pneumonia on January 11, 2009 in La Jolla, California, leaving behind his surviving wife, Mihoko, with whom he had son Victor D. Vacquier.

His son Victor D. Vacquier also works as a professor at the Scripps Institution, where he studies the reproductive biology of marine life.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c d e f g h} Thomas H. Maugh II: Victor Vacquier Sr., 1907–2009: Geophysicist was a master of magnetics. In: Los Angeles Times . January 24, 2009, p. B24 , accessed February 17, 2012 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Renowned Geophysicist and Professor: Victor Vacquier Sr. In: Scripps News. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, January 16, 2009, accessed February 17, 2012 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} SEG Award: Reginald Fessenden. (No longer available online.) Society of Exploration Geophysicists , archived from the original January 8, 2014 ; accessed on February 17, 2012 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Biographies: Victor Vacquier. Society of Exploration Geophysicists , accessed February 17, 2012 .  
    
4. ↑ Wartime Sub Detector Shows Great Shifts On Sea Floor , In: St. Petersburg Times of March 16, 1959.
5. ^ National Academy of Sciences. Alexander Agassiz Medal. Retrieved on January 14, 2016 (English): "For his discovery of the flux-gate magnetometer, and for the marine magnetic anomaly surveys that led to the acceptance of the theory of sea-floor spreading." 
6. ↑ Profile of Victor D. Vacquier at Scripps. VACQUIER, VICTOR, Professor of Marine Biology. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on December 1, 2008 ; accessed on February 17, 2012 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ↑ Vacquier laboratory website. Dr. Victor Vacquier: Professor of Marine Biology. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on June 14, 2010 ; accessed on February 17, 2012 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.