William H. Twenhofel

William Henry Twenhofel (born April 16, 1875 in Covington , Kentucky , † January 4, 1957 in Atlanta , Georgia ) was an American geologist and paleontologist who was a pioneer of sedimentology in the United States.

Twenhofel grew up as the son of German immigrants on a farm in northern Kentucky near Covington. He received training as a mathematics teacher and taught for eight years in schools from 1896 to 1904, each winter, while in summer he worked for the railroad, among other things. From 1902 to 1904 he studied in the summer at the National Normal School in Lebanon in Ohio with a bachelor's degree and then taught at East Texas Normal College in Commerce in Texas. There he turned to geology and paleontology when he had to replace a geology teacher. However, he had been a fossil collector since his youth, particularly in the area of ​​Cincinnati, which is rich in fossils from the Ordovician . From 1907 he continued his studies at Yale University . In 1912 he received his doctorate in paleontology from Charles Schuchert at Yale with a thesis on marine fossils on the Ordovician-Silurian border from Canada ( Anticosti ). As a sedimentologist, Joseph Barrell (1869-1919) was his teacher at Yale. In 1910 he became an assistant professor at the University of Kansas and in 1918 he became a state geologist in Kansas.

From 1916 he was at the University of Wisconsin , where he was a professor until his retirement in 1945.

He was one of the founders of sedimentology in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s, which was given a strong boost by the petroleum industry. His first publication was about black slate formation in 1915, the result of an expedition to the Baltic States . At the beginning of the First World War he was interned for field studies in the Silurian Mountains of Gotland and temporarily in Sweden. He wrote a monograph and in 1939 a textbook on sedimentology.

In the 1930s and 1940s he worked on lake sediments to aid limnology research at his university, and during World War II he studied black sands on the Oregon coast for chrome extraction.

From 1919 to 1949 he was on the committee of the National Research Council (NRC) for sedimentation, which he chaired from 1923 to 1931. From 1931 to 1934 he headed the Geology and Geophysics Department of the NRC (during this time he was involved in the creation of a committee for stratigraphy) and from 1934 to 1937 he was the committee of the NRC for paleoecology.

The Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM), which he helped found in 1926 , awards the William H. Twenhofel Medal in his honor . In 1935 he was president of the SEPM. In 1947 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leuven. He was an honorary member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists . In 1930 he was President of the Paleontological Society and Vice President of the Geological Society of America .

Fonts

• with Stanley A. Tyler: Methods of study of sediments , McGraw Hill 1941
• Principles of sedimentation , McGraw Hill, 1939, 2nd edition 1950
• A treatise of sedimentation , Baltimore, Williams and Wilkins, 1926
• with Robert R. Shrock Principles of invertebrate paleontology , McGraw Hill 2nd edition 1953 (first Invertebrate Paleontology 1935)
• Geology of Anticosti Island , Ottawa 1927
• Origin of the black sands of the coast of southwest Oregon , Portland 1943
• Soil, the most valuable mineral resource, its origin, destruction and preservation , Portland 1944
• Geology and paleontology of the Mingan islands, Quebec , New York 1938

literature

• Alexander E. Gates: A to Z of Earth Scientists (Notable Scientists) . Facts on File, Inc., New York 2003, p. 269–270 ( online [accessed September 2, 2013]).

Web links

• Robert H. Dott William H. Twenhofel - Patriarch of Sedimentary Geology , pdf