Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Salvation came when he was offered the Chair of Geology at
Durham in a new Geology Department. He threw himself into teach-
ing and research and rapidly built a department that still retains a fine
reputation. Not only did he return to geochronological research but he
began work that culminated in his proposing that continental drift
was driven by convection currents in the mantle of the Earth, which
were themselves driven by the Earth's internal heat. He also turned his
attention to the study of igneous rocks in Ardnamurchan in Scotland,
and it was here in 1930 that he met Doris Livesey Reynolds
(1899-1985), a lecturer in geology at University College London.
Arthur was bowled over twice, firstly by the geology of the island,
and secondly by Doris. Three years later she was appointed to the staff
of the Geology Department at Durham and was installed in Arthur's
office from where they then both worked. Their developing closeness
raised eyebrows in the college, but following a lingering illness,
Arthur's wife Maggie died. After a respectable period of nine months
Doris and Arthur married, but out of the blue came a surprising and
momentous decision by the university authorities: they would not
renew Doris's contract. Following representations (by her husband)
she was offered a year's extension, but Holmes resigned and the pair
decamped to Edinburgh when in 1943 he was appointed Regius
Professor of Geology. He remained in Scotland for the remainder of
his university career, but moved to London on retirement in 1956
where he died in 1965.
The development of Holmes' geological timescale
From his very early research in 1911 he challenged the geochronolo-
gical views of his older peers, and in his very first paper published in
the Proceedings of the Royal Society that year (when he was only
twenty-one) he gave an age of 1,640 million years for the Archean
rocks of Ceylon based on the decay of uranium to lead in radioactive
minerals that were frequently found in the mineral zircon. Up to that
time this was the oldest date recorded for a rock. In the paper he
reported the results of eight analyses; he had examined seventeen
