David G. Gee

David G. Gee (11 December 1937 – 5 October 2023) was a British and Swedish geologist, who worked in Sweden for most of his career. He is known for his leadership of geological expeditions in the high Arctic and for his initiation and leadership of EUROPROBE.

Biography David G. Gee was born in Sutton, Surrey on 11 December 1937. His father was Edward Rowland Gee (1901–1988), a geologist who worked in India and Pakistan and was appointed OBE in 1960.

After spending much of his boyhood in India and later attending schools in England, Gee matriculated in 1958 at the University of Cambridge. His Ph.D. thesis The structural geology of the Biskayer-huken Peninsula, North Spitsbergen was supervised by W. Brian Harland. In 1959 with the geologist Peter F. Friend, Gee made his first trip to Svalbard. He also participated in the Cambridge expeditions, led by Harland, to Svalbard in 1961, 1962, and 1963. In 1964 and 1965 Gee worked part-time for the Norwegian Polar Institute (Norsk Polarinstitutt) — during this employment he mapped parts of Svalbard. His wife is Norwegian. David and Veslemøy Gee were married in December 1965. From 1986 to 1994 he held a Swedish Research Council position as a professor at Lund University. At Uppsala University, he was Professor of Orogenic Dynamics from 1994 until 2004, when he retired as professor emeritus. At Uppsala University he was Dean of Earth Sciences from 1996 to 2002. He spent more than 20 field seasons in the high Arctic and was the leader of expeditions to Svalbard, Novaya Zemlya, the Polar Urals, the Taymyr Peninsula, and Severnaya Zemlya. He was a leading expert on the orogeny of the Scandinavian Caledonides. He and his colleagues have also done research on other Palaeozoic mountain belts of Eurasia. Gee had wide interests in the Earth sciences. In 2006 two large volumes, with partial summaries of research funded by EUROPROBE, were published with Gee and Randell A. Stephenson as editors and with N. I. Pavlenkova as editor. From 1999 to 2001 Gee was the president of the European Union of Geosciences. He has served on several committees and from 2007 to 2009 was a senior advisor to the U.N. International Year of Planet Earth.

Selected publications Articles

Books and monographs