William Quarrier Kennedy
William Quarrier Kennedy (born November 30, 1903 , † March 13, 1979 ) was a British geologist and petrograph and expert on the geology of the Scottish highlands and Africa . He is often quoted as WQ Kennedy .
Life
William Kennedy studied geology at the University of Glasgow with John Walter Gregory and at the ETH Zurich with Paul Niggli . From 1928 to 1945 he was with the Geological Survey of Scotland . From 1945 to 1967 he was professor of geology at the University of Leeds , where he founded the Institute of African Geology in 1955 , which he headed until his retirement. He was succeeded by Robert Millner Shackleton .
As a result of his studies in Europe, he was one of the first to introduce universal rotary table methods (Universal Stage) for polarization microscopes for viewing thin sections in Great Britain and to introduce methods of structural science from Bruno Sander .
As a petrograph, he dealt with contact metamorphic (pyrometasomatic) deposits , composite lava flows and the original magma of the British (North Atlantic) Tertiary Province (plateau basalts in Northern Ireland, West Scotland, Hebrides to parts of Iceland, Greenland, Norway) and the origin of basaltic magmas. In his investigation of the basalts he introduced the terms tholeiite - (rich in silicates) and olivine basalt - magmas (poor in silicates).
He convincingly demonstrated in 1946 that there had been a large horizontal displacement at the Great Glen Fault in Scotland (totaling 65 miles over time) which was later declared to be a typical displacement at plate boundaries (between Laurentia and the Baltic Shield). He also worked with EJ Richey on the Moine Thrust in the Geological Survey of Scotland .
Kennedy was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1948) and the Royal Society (1949) and received the Bigsby Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1949 and the Lyell Medal in 1967 . Ian Graham Gass is one of his students .
literature
- J. Sutton, Biographical Memoirs Fellows Royal Society, Vol. 26, 1980, pp. 274-303
- TN Clifford, IN Gass (Ed.): African magmatism and tectonics: a volume in the honor of WQ Kennedy, Hafner Publ. 1970
Web links
- Chair of Geology at Leeds: Prof. WQ Kennedy. In: Nature . 155, 1945, p. 665, doi : 10.1038 / 155665a0 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kennedy, William Quarrier |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British geologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 30, 1903 |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 13, 1979 |