Victor Vacquier

Victor Vacquier Sr. (October 13, 1907 – January 11, 2009) was a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

Vacquier was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1920, Vacquier escaped the Russian Civil War with his family, taking a horse-drawn sleigh across the ice of the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki, then moving to France and (in 1923) to the United States. Following the war, he worked at Sperry Gyroscope Inc. developing gyrocompasses; then in 1953 he moved to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where he worked on groundwater detection. which his later measurements of heat flow on the sea floor also strongly supported. and the Alexander Agassiz Medal of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1995 "for his discovery of the flux-gate magnetometer, and for the marine magnetic anomaly surveys that led to the acceptance of the theory of sea-floor spreading.” He died in La Jolla, California on January 11, 2009.