The Most Influential Geologists of All Time

While people have studied the Earth since the Middle Ages and beyond, geology did not make significant advancements until the 18th century when the scientific community began to look beyond religion for answers to their questions.

Today there are plenty of impressive geologists making important discoveries all the time. Without the geologists in this list, however, they might still be looking for answers between the pages of a Bible. 

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James Hutton

James Hutton, 1726 - 1797. Geologist
James Hutton.

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James Hutton (1726–1797) is considered by many to be the father of modern geology. Hutton was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and studied medicine and chemistry throughout Europe before becoming a farmer in the early 1750s. In his capacity as a farmer, he constantly observed the land around him and how it reacted to the erosional forces of wind and water.

Among his numerous groundbreaking achievements, James Hutton first developed the idea of uniformitarianism, which was popularized by Charles Lyell years later. He also dismantled the universally accepted view that the Earth was just a few thousand years old.

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Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell
Charles Lyell.

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Charles Lyell (1797-1875) was a lawyer and geologist who grew up in Scotland and England. Lyell was a revolutionary in his time for his radical ideas regarding the Earth's age.

Lyell wrote Principles of Geology, his first and most famous book, in 1829. It was published in three versions from 1930-1933. Lyell was a proponent of James Hutton's idea of uniformitarianism, and his work expanded upon those concepts. This stood in contrast to the then-popular theory of catastrophism.

Charles Lyell's ideas greatly influenced the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. But, because of his Christian beliefs, Lyell was slow to think of evolution as anything more than a possibility.

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Mary Horner Lyell

Mary Lyell
Mary Horner Lyell. Public Domain

While Charles Lyell is widely known, not many people realize that his wife, Mary Horner Lyell (1808-1873), was a great geologist and conchologist. Historians think that Mary Horner made significant contributions towards her husband's work but was never given the credit that she deserved.

Mary Horner Lyell was born and raised in England and introduced to geology at a young age. Her father was a geology professor, and he ensured that each of his children received a top-notch education. Mary Horner's sister, Katherine, pursued a career in botany and married another Lyell - Charles' younger brother, Henry.

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Alfred Wegener

Alfred Lothar Wegener, German geophysicist and meteorologist.
Alfred Lothar Wegener.

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Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), a German meteorologist and geophysicist, is best remembered as the originator of the theory of continental drift. He was born in Berlin, where he excelled as a student in physics, meteorology and astronomy (the latter of which he earned his Ph.D. in).

Wegener was a notable polar explorer and meteorologist, pioneering the use of weather balloons in tracking air circulation. But his biggest contribution to modern science, by far, was introducing the theory of continental drift in 1915. Initially, the theory was widely criticized before being verified by the discovery of mid-ocean ridges in the 1950s. It helped spawn the theory of plate tectonics.

Days after his 50th birthday, Wegener died of a heart attack on a Greenland expedition.

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Inge Lehmann

A Danish seismologist, Inge Lehmann (1888-1993), discovered the core of the Earth and was a leading authority on the upper mantle. She grew up in Copenhagen and attended a high school that provided equal educational opportunities for males and females - a progressive idea at the time. She later studied and obtained degrees in mathematics and science and was named the state geodesist and head of the department of seismology at the Geodetical Institute of Denmark in 1928.

Lehmann began studying how seismic waves behaved as they moved through the interior of the Earth and, in 1936, published a paper based on her findings. Her paper proposed a three-shelled model of the Earth's interior, with an inner core, outer core and mantle. Her idea was later verified in 1970 with advances in seismography. She received the Bowie Medal, the top honor of the American Geophysical Union, in 1971.

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Georges Cuvier

Naturalist Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier.

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Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), regarded as the father of paleontology, was a prominent French naturalist and zoologist. He was born in Montbéliard, France and attended school at the Carolinian Academy in Stuttgart, Germany.

Upon graduation, Cuvier took a position as a tutor for a noble family in Normandy. This allowed him to stay out of the ongoing French Revolution while beginning his studies as a naturalist.

At the time, most naturalists thought that an animal's structure dictated where it lived. Cuvier was the first to claim that it was the other way around.

Like many other scientists from this time, Cuvier was a believer in catastrophism and a vocal opponent of the theory of evolution.

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Louis Agassiz

Portrait of Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (Motier, 1807-Cambridge, 1873), Swiss naturalist and paleontologist, engraving
Louis Agassiz.

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Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) was a Swiss-American biologist and geologist that made monumental discoveries in the fields of natural history. He is considered by many to be the father of glaciology for being the first to propose the concept of ice ages.

Agassiz was born in the French-speaking part of Switzerland and attended universities in his home country and in Germany. He studied under Georges Cuvier, who influenced him and launched his career in zoology and geology. Agassiz would spend much of his career promoting and defending Cuvier's work on geology and the classification of animals.

Enigmatically, Agassiz was a staunch creationist and opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution. His reputation is often scrutinized for this.

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Other Influential Geologists

  • Florence Bascom (1862-1945): American geologist and first female hired by the USGS; expert in petrography and mineralogy who focused on the crystalline rocks of the United States Piedmont. 
  • Marie Tharp (1920-2006): American geologist and oceanographic cartographer who discovered mid-ocean ridges
  • John Tuzo Wilson (1908-1993): Canadian geologist and geophysicist that proposed the theory of hotspots and discovered transform boundaries. 
  • Friedrich Mohs (1773-1839): German geologist and mineralogist that developed the qualitative Mohs scale of mineral hardness in 1812. 
  • Charles Francis Richter (1900-1985): American seismologist and physicist that developed the Richter magnitude scale, the way that earthquakes were quantitatively measured from 1935-1979. 
  • Eugene Merle Shoemaker (1928-1997): American geologist and founder of astrogeology; co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with his wife Carolyn Shoemaker and astronomer David Levy.