Stephen Erwin Moorbath (9 May 1929–16 October 2016) was a German-born British geochronologist. He set up (1956–58) and then directed the Geological Age and Isotope Research Group at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

, before retiring.

Research

Moorbath and his collaborators demonstrated the great gap between Scourian (2,600 million years old) and Laxfordian (1,600 million years old)

gneiss Gneiss (pronounced ) is a common and widely distributed type of metamorphic rock. It is formed by high-temperature and high-pressure metamorphic processes acting on formations composed of igneous or sedimentary rocks. This rock is formed under p ...

es in northwest

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

. He established the basic mineral age pattern of the Scottish and Irish

Caledonides The Caledonian orogeny was a mountain-building cycle recorded in the northern parts of the British Isles, the Scandinavian Caledonides, Svalbard, eastern Greenland and parts of north-central Europe. The Caledonian orogeny encompasses events tha ...

(420–450 million years old) and interpreted it as a cooling- uplift interval. He also pioneered lead isotope studies of ancient gneisses, showing that much of the Lewisian existed over 2,900 million years ago. Stephen dated the oldest rocks yet known on the Earth (more than 3,800 million years old) from west

Greenland Greenland is an autonomous territory in the Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark. It is by far the largest geographically of three constituent parts of the kingdom; the other two are metropolitan Denmark and the Faroe Islands. Citizens of Greenlan ...

, and applied the rubidium–strontium method to date

Torridonian The Torridonian is the informal name given to a sequence of Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic sedimentary rocks that outcrop in a strip along the northwestern coast of Scotland and some parts of the Inner Hebrides from the Isle of Mull in the sou ...

sediments. In addition, he elucidated the complex history of British and Scandinavian lead ores, and showed that the

Tertiary Tertiary (from Latin, meaning 'third' or 'of the third degree/order..') may refer to: * Tertiary period, an obsolete geologic period spanning from 66 to 2.6 million years ago * Tertiary (chemistry), a term describing bonding patterns in organic ch ...

acid An acid is a molecule or ion capable of either donating a proton (i.e. Hydron, hydrogen cation, H+), known as a Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory, Brønsted–Lowry acid, or forming a covalent bond with an electron pair, known as a Lewis ...

magma Magma () is the molten or semi-molten natural material from which all igneous rocks are formed. Magma (sometimes colloquially but incorrectly referred to as ''lava'') is found beneath the surface of the Earth, and evidence of magmatism has also ...

s of

Skye The Isle of Skye, or simply Skye, is the largest and northernmost of the major islands in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. The island's peninsulas radiate from a mountainous hub dominated by the Cuillin, the rocky slopes of which provide some o ...

are re-melted Lewisian gneisses (more than 3,000 million years old) whereas those of Iceland are of mantle origin.

Awards and honours

Moorbath was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1977. One or more of the preceding sentences may incorporate text from the royalsociety.org website where "all text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." In 1978 he was awarded the

Murchison Medal The Murchison Medal is an academic award established by Roderick Murchison, who died in 1871. First awarded in 1873, it is normally given to people who have made a significant contribution to geology by means of a substantial body of research an ...

by the

Geological Society of London The Geological Society of London, known commonly as the Geological Society, is a learned society based in the United Kingdom. It is the oldest national geological society in the world and the largest in Europe, with more than 12,000 Fellows. Fe ...

and in 1979 he was awarded the Steno Medal by the Danish Geological Society for his work on isotopes and dating the

Precambrian The Precambrian ( ; or pre-Cambrian, sometimes abbreviated pC, or Cryptozoic) is the earliest part of Earth's history, set before the current Phanerozoic Eon. The Precambrian is so named because it preceded the Cambrian, the first period of t ...

of Western

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Moorbath, Stephen 20th-century British geologists British geochemists Fellows of the Royal Society German emigrants to England Alumni of Lincoln College, Oxford 1929 births 2016 deaths Scientists from Magdeburg Fellows of Linacre College, Oxford Murchison Medal winners Oral History of British Science