Wallace S. Pitcher

Granite boulders The Rosses , County Donegal

Wallace Spencer "Wally" Pitcher (born March 3, 1919 in London , † September 4, 2004 on Wirral ) was a British geologist and petrograph , who dealt mainly with granite and was considered the leading expert in Great Britain.

Life

Pitcher studied geology and chemistry at Chelsea College in London, graduating in 1947 from military service in World War II with the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he worked full-time as a chemical analyst. As a demonstrator at Imperial College London under Herbert Harold Read , he soon began studying granites in County Donegal in Ireland, which would occupy him for around 25 years and for which he developed new, rapid petrographic analysis methods for silicates based on colorimetry and flame photometry developed. With many collaborators, he led the petrographic mapping of the granites and surrounding metamorphic rocks in Donegal and beyond to Connemara and Scotland. Originally, the project initiated by Read served to prove his granitization theory (conversion of surrounding rocks into granites by granitic melts) , which deviated from the prevailing doctrine , but it then turned out that the Donegal granites all came from igneous melt. The results of the long-term study were published in 1972.

In 1950 he became a lecturer at Imperial College, in 1951 he received his doctorate (Ph. D.) and in 1955 he became a reader at King's College London . 1962 until his retirement in 1981 he was a professor at the University of Liverpool ( George Herdman Professor ). From 1962 to 1978 he headed the geology faculty. In addition to the granites in Donegal, he also examined, for example, the granite batholith of the Peruvian Andes (with John Cobbing) and then worldwide granites around the Pacific.

1977/78 he was President of the Geological Society of London . He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1993). In 1979 he received the Murchison Medal , in 1963 the Bigsby Medal and in 1956 he received the Lyell Fund. He was a founding member of the Institution of Geologists and received its Aberconway Medal in 1983. In 1964 he received an honorary doctorate in London (D. Sc.), In 1983 in Dublin and in 1993 at the University of Paris-South. In 1982 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Geological Society of America . In 1964 he received the silver medal from the Liverpool Geological Society and in 1986 the medal from the University of Helsinki.

Fonts

• The Geology of Donegal: A Study of Granite Emplacement and Unroofing, Pitcher and Berger, 1972
• The Nature and Origin of Granite, Chapman and Hall, 1993, 2nd edition 1997
• Magmatism at a Plate Edge: The Peruvian Andes, 1985

Web links

• Obituary, Royal Society of Edinburgh (PDF, 21.7 kB, English)