Arthur Holmes

Arthur Holmes (January 14 1890 – September 20 1965) was a British geologist.

He performed the first uranium-lead radiometric dating specifically designed to measure the age of a rock. His result was 370 Ma for a Devonian rock. The result was published 1911, after he already travelled to Mozambique to prospect for minerals. He contracted malaria so severe that an obituary was telegraphed back to Britain. However, he immediately left for home and recovered.

Later in his career, he took a job with an oil company in Burma, but the company went bankrupt and he had to return to England penniless. To make matters worse, his son had died of dysentery in Burma.

He greatly furthered the newly created discipline of geochronology and published the world renowned book The Age of the Earth in 1913 in which he estimated the Earth's age to be 1600 Ma.

He championed the theory of plate tectonics from its start, even when he was in a small minority. His second famous book Principles of Physical Geology was published in 1944, which concludes with a chapter about plate tectonics.

He won the Wollaston Medal in 1956. The Arthur Holmes Medal of the European Geosciences Union is named after him.

A crater on Mars was named in his honor.

External links

Books

Cherry Lewis, The Dating Game: One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth, ISBN 0521893127