One of the greatest American geologists of the nineteenth century—a man who should be ranked with Lyell, Agassiz, and Smith—is Grove Karl Gilbert, born May 6, 1843 in Rochester, NY, and who died May 1, 1918 while preparing for another field season in Utah. His intellectual contributions were theoretical and institutional, ranging from the concept of dynamic equilibrium of landscapes to founding member and Chief Geologist of the United States Geological Survey. He was one of the premier scientific explorers of the American West and it is not coincidental that his lifetime is called the heroic age of American geology.
Born the son of a self-taught portrait painter, Gilbert was the youngest of three children. He received a classical education studying at home and from the University of Rochester where he emphasized Greek and Latin; he took but one geology course. After a failed attempt at teaching school on the Michigan frontier, he landed a job at Cosmos Hall, the famous distributor of...
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Bibliography
Pyne, Stephen, J., 1980. Grove Karl Gilbert, A Great Engine of Research. University of Texas Press.
Chamberlin, T.C., 1918. Grove Karl Gilbert. Journal of Geology, 26 (4): 375–376.
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© 1978 Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc.
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Slingerland, R. (1978). Sedimentologists: Grove Karl Gilbert (1843–1918). In: Sedimentology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31079-7_195
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31079-7_195
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