Eduard Wenk

Eduard Jean Louis Wenk (4 November 1907, Basel – 19 October 2001, Basel) was a Swiss geologist, petrographer, and mineralogist.

Biography As a teenager, Wenk was keenly interested in the paleontology and botany of the Swiss Jura. He studied as an undergraduate and graduate student (1930 to 1934) at the University of Basel. There he was influenced by Heinrich Preiswerk-Becker (1876–1940), for whom he carried out field work in the Central Alps in 1929. Wenk's 1934 Ph.D. dissertation, with Max Reinhard (1882–1974) as Doktorvater, is entitled Beiträge zur Petrographie und Geologie des Silvretta-Kristalls (Contributions to the petrography and geology of the crystalline rocks of the Silvretta Alps). During a visit to Bruno Sander in Innsbruck, Wenk learned the methods of structural petrology. As a postdoc under Helge Backlund (1878–1958), he studied from 1934 to 1935 at the University of Uppsala. There he also met Jakob Johannes Sederholm, Caesar Eugen Wegmann (1896–1982), Pentti Eskola, and Thomas "Tom" F. W. Barth (1899–1971). Wenk then joined Lauge Koch's expedition to Greenland, which was followed by six Danish East Greenland expeditions in the 1950s. From 1936 to 1939 he worked for Royal Dutch Shell as a petroleum geologist in Borneo. He worked with Paul Niggli at ETH Zurich. In 1952 he became a professor ordinarius at the University of Basel, where he retired in 1975 as professor emeritus. Based on his work on petroleum, petrographic and structural petrology, he recognized, as early as 1943, the relatively young age of metamorphic crystallization in the Central Alps. He created the basis for maps of mineral isograds in the Alps — especially plagioclase isograds. This work also resulted in the 1967 book Die optische Orientierung der Plagioklase.

... in the field, around the evening camp fire, he always had everyone‘s full attention when he told his fascinating stories of adventures with tigers at Borneo, polar bears in Greenland and horrible thunderstorms in the mountains. discovered in 1962, and two Neogene mollusc species from his Borneo expedition in the 1930s (Tibia wenki, Barbatai wenki) were named in his honour.

Selected publications Articles

(See Surtsey.)

1974