Sir Edwin Hall Pascoe (17 February 1878 – 7 July 1949) was an English geologist who worked in India with the

Geological Survey of India The Geological Survey of India (GSI) is a scientific agency of India. It was founded in 1851, as a Government of India organization under the Ministry of Mines, one of the oldest of such organisations in the world and the second oldest survey ...

. He proposed the idea that an Indo-Brahm river flowed between the rising Himalayas and Gondwanaland. The idea was that it was north of the current Gangetic plain and was shifted south with the rise of Himalayas and by deposition of soil by the river.

Early life

Born in London to Edwin Pascoe and Mary A. Hall, he went to

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge founded by the Tudor matriarch Lady Margaret Beaufort. In constitutional terms, the college is a charitable corporation established by a charter dated 9 April 1511. Th ...

and joined the Geological Survey of India in 1905.

Career

His early study in India was on the Great Kangra earthquake of 4 April 1905. He surveyed oil fields in Burma,

Assam Assam (; ) is a state in northeastern India, south of the eastern Himalayas along the Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Assam covers an area of . The state is bordered by Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh to the north; Nagaland and Manipur ...

Punjab Punjab (; Punjabi: پنجاب ; ਪੰਜਾਬ ; ; also romanised as ''Panjāb'' or ''Panj-Āb'') is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising ...

, and on the Arabian Coast. He became the director of the GSI in 1921 and retired from it in 1932. He also worked with the

Indian Museum The Indian Museum in Central Kolkata, West Bengal, India, also referred to as the Imperial Museum at Calcutta in colonial-era texts, is the ninth oldest museum in the world, the oldest and largest museum in India as well as in Asia. It has rare ...

and presided over the Indian School of Mines. He was a specialist on the Tertiary formations of India and hypothesized that the northern rivers of India (including the Brahmputra and the Ganges) flowed as one stream (the "Indobrahm" or the Shiwalik river of G.E. Pilgrim) draining west into the

Arabian Sea The Arabian Sea ( ar, اَلْبَحرْ ٱلْعَرَبِيُّ, Al-Bahr al-ˁArabī) is a region of the northern Indian Ocean bounded on the north by Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf of Oman, on the west by the Gulf of Aden, Guardafui Channel ...

. He revised and published the third edition of the ''Manual of the Geology of India'' whose first edition had been by H.B. Medlicott and W.T. Blanford in 1879 with a second edition in 1893 by R.D. Oldham. He was knighted in the

1928 New Year Honours The 1928 New Year Honours were appointments by King George V to various orders and honours to reward and highlight good works by citizens of the United Kingdom and British Empire. They were announced on 30 December 1927. Unusually, only women we ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pascoe, Edwin 1878 births 1949 deaths Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge English geologists Knights Bachelor Academic staff of the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad British people in colonial India Geologists from British India 20th-century Indian geologists