W. B. Harland

Phenomenally productive investigator of the history of the Earth

Walter Brian Harland, geologist and teacher: born Scarborough, Yorkshire 22 March 1917; Demonstrator, Department of Geology (later Earth Sciences), Cambridge University 1946-48, Lecturer 1948-66, Reader 1966-84; Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge 1950-84, Life Fellow 1984-2003; married 1942 Elisabeth Lewis (one son, three daughters); died Cambridge 1 November 2003.

W. B. Harland's life in research and education spanned a remarkable period of change in the scientific study of the Earth. His original contributions were based on making observations on rock outcrops, and he devised methods of improving the way such survey can be recorded and made available to others.

Harland became a leading figure particularly in investigations in Arctic areas, where he carried out more summer-season visits than any other British scientist. But he always had an eye for the big picture, and he was energetic in directing and co-ordinating collaborative projects, and in setting up research organisations. In recent years, when powerful, computer-based methods of remote sensing of areas and sophisticated laboratory work on rock samples had become the norm, his incisive thinking and respect for simple original observations, coupled with his phenomenal productivity, maintained his position as an important contributor to research thinking .

In the 1950s Harland was an advocate of the theory of continental drift, at a time when support for the idea was limited to geologists from South Africa and Australasia and most scientists in the northern hemisphere dismissed it as ridiculous. When, in the 1960s, evidence from the oceans showed that continents move because they are attached to the deeper mantle which is in continual slow movement, plate tectonics rapidly became established as the most important advance in geological science for over a century.

Harland's belief that continents had moved relative to each other through geological time, breaking and assembling like the pieces of a jigsaw, was then provided with the independent support that it needed, and his later work on the detailed history of the movements flourished, without the ridicule it had first attracted.

Another aspect of field geology based on rock study that fascinated Harland was the discovery of rocks formed in ancient ice ages, hundreds of millions of years older than the recent Great Ice Age (within the last two and a half million years). He gathered information from all over the world and found that evidence for an Ice Age about 600 million years ago was remarkably widespread.

Although continental movements might have explained some of this distribution, he made the radical suggestion that the Earth had been subjected to extreme glaciation at that time. Current research by many scientists on climate change has recognised this work as forerunner of the "Snowball Earth" theory, that the entire Earth may have been covered with ice.

Like many other geologists, Harland enjoyed wilderness areas, and devoted much of his research to understanding how regions had developed, particularly their mountains and their sedimentary basins. His investigations of mountain belts included important contributions in understanding the relationship between stresses in the Earth and the building of the mountains.

For instance, he coined the word "transpression" to convey the idea that many mountains have resulted from oblique convergence of the margins of the belt, rather than simple, vice-like compression perpendicular to the length of the belt. He also showed that continued transpression or compression could result in extrusion of the core of the belt, parallel to its length. His eye for the value of a new term is clear from the popularity of the name "Iapetus". He picked up this term from a classicist in college who suggested that this name for the mythological father of Atlantis would be a very suitable label for the early ocean that existed roughly where the Atlantic Ocean now is.

Walter Brian Harland was born in Scarborough in 1917 and educated at Bootham School, in York. North Yorkshire's spectacular coast helped greatly to give him an early interest in geology. At the age of 13, he discovered on the coast parts of the spine and limbs of Steneosaurus, a huge Jurassic crocodile. This was exciting enough to feature in the local newspaper and bring north a collector from the British Museum.

In 1935 Harland went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated with double first class honours in Natural Sciences (Geology). In 1938 he embarked on PhD work, with the object of using explosions to investigate the structure of the ground below the surface, particularly in East Anglia.

At Cambridge he became a Quaker, and committed himself to a lifelong interest in the relationship between science, philosophy and religion, although this thoughtfully spiritual side of his character was not revealed to most people. When the Second World War broke out he worked as a conscientious objector on a farm. Before the war, he had been developing a plan to work in China.

In 1942 he travelled to Chengdu to join the teaching staff at West China University to teach geology, and he was joined there eventually by his wife, Elisabeth, whom he had married earlier that year. He set about a programme of instructing his students in methods of survey and studying rocks. Various factors led to their return to Cambridge in 1946, where Harland had been offered a teaching post in the Department of Geology.

In spite of his return to Cambridge, Harland maintained a long-term collaboration with what is now Chengdu University of Technology. He also maintained a lifelong friendship with Joseph Needham, whom he had first met as a student in Cambridge, then in China. Needham became the leading scholar of the history of Chinese science, and Harland was a founder trustee of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge.

Harland's teaching work was always of paramount importance to him, both in formal lectures and in small group tutorials. During his career at Cambridge, from 1946 to 1984, he was Demonstrator, Lecturer and then Reader in the Department of Geology (which later became part of the Department of Earth Sciences). He felt great loyalty to the university and department, and shouldered many tasks in its administration and development. For 30 years he edited the Geological Magazine, an international journal based in the department. He taught many courses at all levels, and these are remembered particularly for the fresh insights and bold views they provided.

He pioneered the incorporation of fieldwork as a regular part of the curriculum, and is remembered by perhaps 2,000 students for his leadership, over more than 30 years, of first-year trips to the island of Arran in western Scotland. He really relished the task of training young scientists to make simple observations and then argue on the basis of these observations, ignoring all preconceptions. His energy and staying power in the field were legendary, and the picture remains in many minds of his leading a half-mile-long crocodile of students round the north Arran shore, with geological titbits of information relaying backwards from the dynamic head.

Immediately on graduation in the summer of 1938, Harland had joined a geographical expedition to Spitsbergen, on which he was the geologist. The members suffered real hunger from lack of food, but Harland became fascinated by the geological potential in this high Arctic island group, where the rock exposures are particularly extensive. After his Chinese work, and on return to Cambridge, he decided to revisit Spitsbergen, and he started to develop the remarkable programme that eventually resulted in no less than 43 summer seasons of expeditionary fieldwork, of which he personally led 29.

His increasing activity in the Arctic naturally led to involvement with the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, but he was always more geologist than polar man. He was convinced of the benefit to the teaching of the department that his expeditions provided, in addition to their research importance. More than 300 undergraduates and staff, including about 50 graduate collaborators, were involved. Out of the necessary organisation he founded the Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme (CASP) in 1975, which in 1988 became a scientific research company with charitable status, which now employs some 30 staff and works worldwide. Harland was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his exploration and mapping work.

Harland believed in the crucial importance of preserving information and making it available. The research group that he led in Spitsbergen operated a universal system for numbering localities, samples and photographs, and this provided the central basis for much collaborative work. All observations and materials collected were the property of the group, and private collecting was simply not an option. He developed a system where pieces of information were regarded as standard units that could be preserved and handled in a standard way, which ultimately became computer-based. Work using this system was extensively used, particularly in projects in China and Canada.

He also believed strongly in the responsibility to collaborate with other scientists. For seven years from 1963 he was Honorary Secretary of the Geological Society of London. He decided that it would benefit the science if the society became more of a centre for collaborative research, and his method of achieving this was to initiate a remarkable series of multi-contribution books, which eventually led to the society's Special Publications series that has now produced more than 200 volumes.

Harland was author, principal contributor and/or managing editor of volumes on The Phanerozoic Timescale (1964), The Fossil Record (1967) and Mesozoic and Cenozoic Orogenic Belts (1974). The idea of these major collaborative works was a new one, and involved Harland in much diplomatic effort, as well as the normal editorial grind. He was awarded the London Geological Society's Lyell Medal.

Starting with the first of the above books, Harland became the leading figure in compiling information on the geological timescale. He believed that the essential feature of such compilations was to provide organised, high-quality information. He produced all four editions of the timescale (1964, 1971, 1982, 1990), each one incorporating as much as possible of the latest and increasingly accurate laboratory dates. Not for nothing did he become known internationally as "Timescale Harland".

Harland also became an important player on the worldwide geological scene when he became Secretary of the International Geological Correlation Programme. This encouraged large numbers of collaborative projects, usually involving workers from Third World countries, and the programme continues to flourish, supporting his driving concerns with high quality information and its logical analysis.

He had a well-developed sense of patterns in space in three-dimensions. This is an essential skill for anyone studying the structures that develop when layers of rock have been folded and broken by faults in mountain belts. Harland produced remarkable three-dimensional cardboard cut-outs to illustrate geometries to students. But this skill was not simply used in his science. He also relished designing gadgets for surveying and measuring, for example, the orientation of samples for magnetic measurement, and for really practical tasks for his Arctic expeditions, such as the resurrecting of light railways, and the planning and modifying of a whole fleet of boats.

Brian Harland enjoyed his role in Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, of which he was a Fellow from 1950, and Life Fellow from 1984. He based much of his later research organisation and writing in his college rooms, and valued his friendships with the people he met.

Peter Friend