Precambrian Research 105 (2001) 89 – 91
Obituary
David Bridgwater – a memorial appreciation
www.elsevier.com/locate/precamres
David Bridgwater was one of the doyens of Greenland geology, but his lifetime career amounted to far more than that. In early years he undertook much fundamental mapping for the Greenland Geological Survey (GGU) after which he initiated numerous international ventures in-volving correlations of the geology of North At-lantic regions. Although his early interests centred
on igneous geology and petrology, specific re-search projects took him later into geochemistry, geochronology, fluid transport, and regional tec-tonics, correlations and compilations.
David began his career at Imperial College of London University, where he gained a BSc. de-gree in 1958 at the age of 23. Showing early signs of wanderlust whilst an undergraduate, he took
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part in a glaciological expedition to northern Norway. Although he was thankfully not en-ticed to follow the subject, this expedition pro-vided him with an early formative experience of arctic conditions, geology, and rock exposure, which later blossomed into a career in the northern realms of Europe. After graduation, he was taken on by GGU to undertake mapping in the Ketilidian belt in Southwest Greenland, and after two years was given a permanent position. In his continuing work in Southwest Greenland he concentrated his attention on the ‘big-feldspar’ rapakivi granite plutons and dykes par-ticularly around the village of Sydprøven, which was close to Saˆrdloq village, the focal point of my GGU mapping. I can remember well many wonderful days when David and I shared a GGU motor-cutter, when he was in his element jumping off onto remote islands to study the amazing polished coastal outcrops. These studies led to his first major publication ‘Anorthosite xenoliths and plagioclase megacrysts in Precam-brian Intrusions in South Greenland’ co-au-thored with W.T. Harry. This was accepted for his Danish doctoral thesis in 1968, when he was the first Englishman to defend his thesis in Dan-ish.
David’s next task for GGU in 1967 and 1968 was to map the geologically unknown, very re-mote, and largely uninhabited southeastern coast of Greenland, packed with sea ice and on-land ice. In an open dinghy, it was a considerable achievement to extract the geology under such hard conditions.
In the late 1960s Vic McGregor was making his great breakthrough, pushing back Earth his-tory by 1000 Ma from his knowledge of the field geology around Godtha˚b (Nuuk) and be-fore confirmation by geochronology. David joined him, contributing the regional geology, and they wrote several fundamental papers with others on these early Archaean rocks in the 1970s. When the supracrustal belt at Isua near the ice cap was found to be even older by Steven Moorbath, David took part in the map-ping and interpretation of the belt, which he continued to study for many years.
David and I were involved in early collabora-tion of GGU with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), and in 1969 within Fred Tay-lor’s Torngat Mountain project we were put down with a zodiac and tent by a Cesna aircraft on Saglek fjord on the remote Labrador coast, in order to look for similarities between the Greenland and Labrador coastal regions. David followed this up with a year (1974 – 1975) at the
GSC headquarters in Ottawa. Later on
geochronological data enabled a detailed corre-lation to be made of the Early Precambrian ge-ology of the two regions.
David’s work on Greenland geology led to his admittance in 1977 to the Mathematical Sciences Section of the Royal Danish Academy of Sci-ence and Letters. Following the departure of Professor Arne Noe Nygaard, he was appointed in 1980 to the Professorship of Dynamic Geol-ogy in the Geological Museum. This was a re-search position, which allowed him the opportunity to expand his interests in the North Atlantic regions as well as to continue work in West Greenland. In 1987 David organised a NATO Advanced Research Workshop in Bergen on the geochemical consequences of the move-ments of fluids in the Earth’s crust, and that gave rise to a noteworthy book ‘‘Fluid Move-ments – Element transport and the Composition of the Deep Crust’’. He undertook projects in Norway, NW Scotland, the Baltic and Anabar Shields; four of the papers in this volume result from his activities in the North Atlantic regions and reflect well his involvement with in-ternational colleagues in inter-disciplinary re-search.
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‘‘This cairn was built to the memory of DAVID BRIDGWATER who loved this land and con-tributed much to understanding the Precam-brian geology of Greenland and the Isua region, by three generations of his colleagues and friends on 15 July 1998. May his enthusi-asm for understanding the early history of the Earth live on in present and future generations of geologists. John Myers, Perth, Australia; Martin Whitehouse, Stockholm, Sweden; Mette Sølvang, København, Danmark’’
This cairn and this volume are complementary memorials to David’s achievements.
Brian Windley
