Vocation : Science : Geology

James Freeman Gilbert (August 9, 1931 – August 15, 2014) was an American geophysicist, best known for his work with George E. Backus on inverting geophysical data, and also for his role in establishing an international network of long-period seismometers.Gilbert was born in Vincennes, Indiana. A 1949 graduate of Lawrenceburg High School (Kentucky), his undergraduate and graduate degrees were earned from MIT (B.S., 1953, and Ph.D. in geophysics, 1956), and he continued at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow until 1957, when he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles. At UCLA he was an assistant, then associate, professor, but left to take an appointment as
a senior researcher at Texas Instruments. In 1961, he was recruited by Walter Munk to the Institute of Geophysics and
Planetary Physics (IGPP) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, also becoming a professor of geophysics at the University of California, San Diego. He remained at UCSD through the remainder of his career, and became an emeritus professor.In his later years, Gilbert enjoyed extensive world travel with his wife, Sally Gilbert. He died due to complications resulting from a car accident in Southern Oregon on August 15, 2014. He was 83 years old.

Charles Carter Schnetzler (June 3, 1930 – December 15, 2009) was a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Schnetzler is best known for analyzing Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo program and for studying the Earth's environment using the Landsat and the Earth Observing System. Schnetzler was born in Whiting, Indiana and grew up in Neodesha, Kansas. On November 4, 2009, Schnetzler was seriously injured after being hit by a motorist while walking near his home on Little Patuxent Parkway in Columbia, Maryland. He later died in his home on December 15, 2009.

Charles Fay Passel (April 9, 1915 – December 27, 2002) was a polar scientist responsible along with Paul Siple for the development of the wind chill factor parameter.

Pierre-Marie Termier (3 July 1859 – 23 October 1930) was a French geologist.

He was born in Lyon, in Rhône, France, the son of Joseph François Termier and Jeanne Mollard. At the age of 18 he entered the Polytechnic School, then the Paris School of Mines in 1880. After graduation, he became professor at the school of mines at Saint-Etienne. In 1894 he left for Paris, where he would teach for the remainder of his career.
He was elected as a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1909, in the mineralogy section. Two years later he became the director of the French geological cartography service. In 1930 he became vice-president of the Academy.
During his career he performed geological studies of the Alps, as well as Corsica and North Africa. He was a proponent of the nappe concept and of tectonics as a mountain-building force.
The wrinkle ridge Dorsum Termier on the Moon is named after him.

Victor van Straelen (14 June 1889 – 29 February 1964) was a Belgian conservationist, palaeontologist and carcinologist.
Van Straelen was born in Antwerp on 14 June 1889, and worked chiefly as a palaeontologist until his retirement in 1954.He was director of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences from 1925 to 1954. In 1926, he instigated the world's first gorilla sanctuary in what became the Parc National Albert (now Virunga National Park). In 1933, he was appointed head of the Institut des Parcs Nationaux du Congo Belge, and in 1948, he was on the executive committee at the foundation of the organisation which would become the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). He was the first president of the Charles Darwin Foundation from its foundation in 1959 until his death in 1964.He was awarded a silver Darwin-Wallace Medal by the Linnean Society of London in 1958.

Paul Theodor Range (1 May 1879 in Lübeck – 29 August 1952 in Lübeck) was a German geologist and naturalist.
He studied natural sciences at the universities of Würzburg and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate in 1903. From 1906 to 1914 he worked as a government geologist in German South-West Africa, and afterwards performed scientific studies in the Sinai Peninsula. From 1921 he gave lectures in geology at the University of Berlin, becoming an associate professor in 1934. In 1936, he was named president of the Deutschen Geologischen Gesellschaft.Range is commemorated in the scientific name of the Namib sand gecko (Pachydactylus rangei), which was described as a species new to science by herpetologist Lars Gabriel Andersson in 1908.

Nicolas Auguste Pomel (20 September 1821 – 2 August 1898) was a French geologist, paleontologist and botanist. He worked as a mines engineer in Algeria and became a specialist in north African vertebrate fossils. He was Senator of Algeria for Oran from 1876 to 1882.

Ernest Charles Philippe Auguste Munier-Chalmas (7 April 1843 – 9 August 1903) was a French geologist, born at Tournus in Burgundy, who is known for his contributions to the understanding of the Cretaceous, but who also isolated and defined the Priabonian stage of the Late Eocene, in a paper co-written with Albert de Lapparent in 1893.
From 1864 he worked as an assistant in the geology department at the Sorbonne, and subsequently participated in geological missions to Austria-Hungary and the Venetian Alps. From 1882 he taught classes at the École Normale Supérieure, and in 1891 became a professor of geology at the Sorbonne. In addition, from 1892 to 1903, he was director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études.In 1873 he described the bivalve genera Matheronia and Toucasia (family Requieniidae). With paleontologist Charles Schlumberger, he conducted important investigations on sexual dimorphism in Foraminifera.In 1891 he was appointed president of the Société géologique de France. He was elected to the mineralogical section of the French Académie des sciences on 5 May 1903.In 1895, botanist Hermann zu Solms-Laubach published Chalmasia, which is a genus of green algae in the family Polyphysaceae and name in Chalmas's honour.He died in retirement at Aix-les-Bains, Provence.