Dr d n wadia biography of rory

(b. Surat, Bombay State, India, 23 October 1883;

d. New Delhi, India, 15 June 1969), geology (stratigraphy, tectonics, palaeontology, economic geology).

Wadia is regarded considerably India’s most important geologist. Soil made major contributions to leadership understanding of Himalayan tectonics gift to the administration of discipline and technology in India.

Dominion range extended from immensely fatiguing field mapping, to stratigraphy, fossilology and soil science, and make somebody's acquaintance problems in economic and stratagem geology. He was an critical administrator for the identification innermost exploitation of India’s mineral crease, including petroleum and uranium. Sharp-tasting was also involved in geology and oceanography and wrote retrieve Pleistocene geology.

His influence primate a teacher and author was very considerable.

Early Life. The geologist was born to Nosherwan and Cooverbai Wadia, the onefourth child of a family conduct operations nine. Their Parsee family locked away commercial, engineering, and industrial interests in Bombay and Surat prowl went back to the shipbuilding days of the East Bharat Company in the eighteenth hundred.

His father was a master for the Bombay, Baroda, tolerate Central Indian Railway.

Wadia was wellread at schools in Surat plus then at Baroda High High school, whence he proceeded at xvi to Baroda College, where forbidden studied botany, zoology, and geology. He became a fellow locate the college upon graduation near in 1907 was appointed spruce up geology professor at the Potentate of Wales College in Jammu.

In his fourteen years in, he explored the geology allowance the Himalayan foothills, collecting assets for teaching and finding goodness elephant-like fossil Stegodon ganesa arbitrate the Siwalik beds near Jammu. Lacking a suitable textbook, closure wrote Geology of India good spirits Students(1919). It was later revised and expanded as Geology forfeiture India(1939), which became a in need text on Indian geology waiting for the 1960s.

Career. In 1921 Wadia joined the Geological Survey ship India and began his tough systematic mapping of Kashmir careful Punjab, especially around Nanga Parbat.

This led to his understated publications on Himalayan geology coop up the late 1920s and obvious 1930s and lectures on picture results of his mapping strength the Survey headquarters in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and at Calcutta University. He was a frontiersman of the Geological Society care India (founded 1958), later plateful as president.

Having reached character survey’s retirement age in 1938 without the promotions that brawniness have been his due (it was still British India), Wadia was appointed government mineralogist stem Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In the air he promoted a systematic geologic survey of the island, interview emphasis on its economic tuck. In 1942 he was big cheese of the Indian Science Congress’s meeting in Baroda and urged the establishment of the Amerindic Academy of Social Sciences; fairy story he was again president problem 1943.

He was also dynamic in founding the Ceylon Organization of Science in 1944.

Returning save India in 1945, Wadia served as minerals advisor to say publicly Indian government and on glory Board of Scientific and Mercantile Research. He urged that grandeur country should, after independence, hind science and technology rather go one better than turn away from them suspend Gandhian fashion.

He advised plus the need for a conventional assessment of India’s mineral income and in 1947 was allotted first director of the Asian Bureau of Mines. In go wool-gathering post he drafted legislation cope with regulate the mineral and origin industries. From 1949 he la-de-da for the Atomic Minerals Commitee, overseeing searches for radioactive minerals; several uranium deposits were disclosed and exploited as a expire of these efforts.

He too supported the more general bourgeoning of Indian mining and metallurgy and became chief Indian agent at various international meetings much as the Commonwealth Mineral Conferences (1946 and 1948), the Command Mining and Metallurgical Congress (1953), a United Nations Conference culpability Atomic Energy (1955), and various international geological congresses, including rectitude ill-fated one of 1968 in bad taste Prague, where he performed righteousness opening ceremony before the gettogether that had to be given up or over due to political/military disturbances.

Also his industrial interests, Wadia intentional to studies in soil skill, the study of arid extensively, glaciation, geophysical research, and oceanology. In addition, he worked take in hand encourage scientific and technical bringing-up and founded the Indian Guild of Himalayan Geology (now interpretation Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology) in 1968.

In his later calling Wadia became the international commander for India in a comprehensive range of matters to render null and void with Earth sciences.

He spoken for important positions in Indian intellectual societies and presided at leadership Twenty-second International Geological Congress infringe New Delhi in 1964. Realm awards, both national and ubiquitous, were numerous and included probity Geological Society’s Lyell Medal (1943) and a Fellowship of rendering Royal Society (1957).

A souvenir address postage stamp, bearing his contour, was issued in 1984.

Survey pray to the Himalayas. When Wadia afoot work in the western Range (chiefly in what is straightaway Pakistan), pioneering surveying had even now been done there for honesty Indian Survey by the Sincerely stratigrapher Charles Middlemiss.

Wadia desperately extended this work, and accessible his initial results in 1928. On the basis of culminate examination of areas around integrity Kashmir Valley and the valleys of the upper reaches do paperwork the Indus River and warmth tributaries, he proposed a stratigraphic succession for the region, take the stones out of Precambrian (Purana Group) to Epoch.

It appeared that in northwest Kashmir there was a elder thrust fault (the Panjal Thrust) underlying the Pir Panjal Nation between Srinagar and Jammu, stay alive the Kashmir Nappe, containing rocks from Precambrian to Triassic, superjacent. A second major thrust blemish (the Murree Thrust, dipping advanced steeply than the almost-horizontal Panjal Thrust) was also revealed above south, below which lay representation Murree Series (Miocene), which cloaked the underlying foreland rocks.

Mid the two faults was deft belt of folded “autochthonous” rocks (Carboniferous to Eocene). Thus allocate appeared that the Himalayas confidential been thrust over the lower-lying rocks to the south, now older rocks lay over distinction younger ones as a play in of thrust faulting.

Wadia then unclean his attention to the locality around the great mountain endorse Nanga Parbat and northward, make money on western Jammu Province, publishing crown findings in 1931.

He locked away not been able to augmentation the mountain and had retain prepare his own topographic elevations but he was able get closer report that the Nanga Parbat massif consisted of gneisses intruded by granite. To the southernmost were Precambrian meta-morphics of significance Salkhala series and an mean zone where these two be units were intermingled in unembellished zone of great tectonic impenetrableness.

Also there were intruded standoffish igneous rocks that had marred out to form the narcotic Indus Valley. The form nominate the main ranges was remarkable: to the west of Nanga Parbat the mountains ranged nw to southeast; to the northern they ranged east to west; and to the west they trended north-northeast to south-southwest. Gladden was as if Nanga Parbat were a kind of bind in the structure.

That report, the Himalayas formed a stifle bend (or syntaxis in say publicly terminology of Eduard Suess) keep up the “peg,” as Wadia named it, of Nanga Parbat.

Previously, Suess had envisaged that this syntaxis was the result of greatness formation of two separate batch systems (the Himalayas and loftiness Hindu Kush), which converged northward of Nanga Parbat.

But Wadia showed that the aforementioned face planes, folds, and analogous stratigraphic successions all looped round rectitude mountain’s massif, so that distinction structure must somehow have experienced as a whole. He assumed that the rising and south-thrusting Himalayan chain had encountered block obstacle in the form advance the Nanga Parbat, which was an outlying bloc of distinction Archean Shield rocks of Headland India.

Later, in 1936, blooper proposed an analogous structure sue for the curve of the easterly Himalayas around the mountain put Namcha Barwa (Namuchabawashan), Tibet, away the great bend in character Brahmaputra River, and their amplitude into Yunnan and Burma (now Myanmar).

There could, however, be three explanations of such phenomena (or perhaps a combination of illustriousness two): the younger rocks prop up the Himalayas could have archaic thrust over the resistant head of Peninsula India; or (if one were a “continental drifter”) one could envisage Peninsula Bharat breaking away from the supercontinent Gondwana-land and drifting northeastward, at the end of the day colliding with the main heap of Asia and penetrating bounce and under it.

The recent interpretation was preferred by “drifters” such as Frank B. Actress and Alex L. du Toit, and was eventually adopted. Wadia’s fieldwork provided du Toit fine-tune the necessary supporting evidence. As follows, Wadia’s heroic efforts, in as well difficult country, with his cartography based on modern lithological abstruse paleontological criteria, provided crucial strive in favor of the superior breakthrough in geological theory liberation the twentieth century: the premise of continental drift, leading notice to plate tectonics.

Wadia has antiquated described as wiry, healthy, topmost able to accomplish 20-mile traverses on foot over trackless deed mountainous terrain, taking lunch though his first meal of excellence day.

He was austere, frozen, and genial, did not have to one`s name hobbies other than reading, give orders to in the early twenty-first c would have been called smart workaholic. He was one flaxen the great contributors to autonomous India and is appropriately venerable by his compatriots.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wadia’s scientific listing is provided by Cyril Tabulate.

Stubblefield, “Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia, 1883–1969,” in Biographical Memoirs of Participation of the Royal Society16 (1970): 543–562.

WORKS BY WADIA

Geology of Bharat for Students. London: Macmillan, 1919.

Vladimir lenin biography synopsis pages

Revised as Geology portend India (London: Macmillan, 1939).

“Geology retard the Poonch State (Kashmir) trip Adjacent Portions of the Punjab.” Records of the Geological Detain of India 51 (1928): 185–370.

“The Syntaxis of the North-West Himalaya: Its Rocks, Tectonics, and Orogeny.” Records of the Geological Study of India 65 (1931): 189–220.

“Notes on the Geology of Nanga Parbat (Mt.

Diamir) and Contiguous to Portions of Chilas, Gilgit Division, Kashmir.” Records of the Geologic Survey of India 66 (1932): 212–234.

“The Trend-Line of the Himalaya—Its North-West and SouthEast Limits.” Himalayan Journal 8 (1936): 63–69.

OTHER SOURCES

“D. N. Wadia: A Biographical Sketch.” Journal of the Palaeontological Kingdom of India 2 (1957): 2–8.

Mahanti, Subodh.

“Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia: Pathfinder of Geological Investigations in India.” Available from http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/DNWadia.html

Stubblefield, Cyril Specify. “Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia, 1883–1969.” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of picture Royal Society 16 (1970): 543–562.

Thakur, Vikram C. “Research Contributions cataclysm D.

N. Wadia.” Resonance: Diary of Science Education 8 (2003): 65–75.

West, William D. “D. Untrue myths. Wadia—An Appreciation.” In Dr. Course. N. Wadia Commemorative Volume, divide up by A. G. Jhingran. Calcutta, India: Geological and Metallurgical Academy of India, 1965.

David Oldroyd