Robin G. C. Bathurst

Robin Gilbert Charles Bathurst (21 March 1920, Chelsea, London – 24 May 2006, Derwen Dêg Fawr, North Wales) was a British geologist, known as a leading expert on the diagenesis of carbonate sediments.

Biography During WW II, Robin G. C. Bathurst served from 1939 to 1943 as an anti-aircraft gunner. He studied at Chelsea Polytechnic and at Imperial College London, where he graduated with a BSc in 1948. From 1948 to 1951 at the University of Cambridge, he studied the Wealden Greensand under Percival Allen and graduated with an MSc In 1959 he was the first to describe radiaxial fibrous calcite (RFC). In 1980 he introduced the important hypothesis that "stromatactis is the cement (and sediment) fill of a system of cavities which developed between submarine-cemented crusts on a carbonate mud mound."

Bathurst received an honorary Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of Liverpool and an honorary D.Sc. in 1974 from the University of London. He received in 1978 the Lyell Medal from the Geological Society of London, and in 1986 the Sorby Medal from the International Association of Sedimentologists. He was one of twenty sedimentologists having biographical entries in the Encyclopedia of Sediments and Sedimentary Rocks (2003, Kluwer). In 2006 the University of Liverpool named in his honour the Bathurst Laboratory, Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

Bathurst gave lectures in many different countries. He worked with the German geologist Johannes Herbert Schroeder (1939–2018) in extending a pre-planned visit to Berlin to include workshops and lectures in Potsdam at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin three months after the 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall.

At the University of Liverpool, Bathurst retired in 1987 as professor emeritus. In retirement, his skill in watercolours of natural scenes led to exhibitions and invitations into professional artists's societies. He married Diana Warren Piper in 1949. Their marriage lasted until his death in 2006, and they had three sons.

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