0000000000319229
AUTHOR
Grzegorz Racki
showing 4 related works from this author
Vladimir P. Amalitsky and Dmitry N. Sobolev – late nineteenth/ early twentieth century pioneers of modern concepts of palaeobiogeography, biosphere e…
2017
The great palaeontological achievements of the Russian scientists Amalitsky and Sobolev, who worked in Russia and Poland at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have previously been outlined in detail. However, their original and surprisingly modern concepts of the development of life on earth have received far less attention. Amalitsky was one of the first scholars who considered the intimate relationship between floral and faunal evolution and the interdependence between a developing biosphere and geological processes. In fact, he documented, for the first time, the existence of a single palaeobiogeographical province during the Permian Period, which we now refer to as the supe…
Comment on “An early Late Triassic long-necked reptile with a bony pectoral shield and gracile appendages” by Jerzy Dzik and Tomasz Sulej
2017
Comment on “An early Late Triassic long-necked reptile with a bony pectoral shield and gracile appendages” by Jerzy Dzik and Tomasz Sulej
Ernst Julius Öpik’s (1916) note on the theory of explosion cratering onthe Moon’s surface—The complex case of a long-overlooked benchmark paper
2014
High-velocity impact as a common phenomenon in planetary evolution was ignored until well into the twentieth century, mostly because of inadequate understanding of cratering processes. An eight-page note, published in Russian by the young Ernst Julius Opik, a great Estonian astronomer, was among the key selenological papers, but due to the language barrier, it was barely known and mostly incorrectly cited. This particular paper is here intended to serve as an explanatory supplement to an English translation of Opik's article, but also to document an early stage in our understanding of cratering. First, we outline the historical–biographical background of this benchmark paper, and second, a …
A Dutch contribution to early interpretations of Meteor Crater, Arizona, USA – Marten Edsge Mulder’s ignored 1911 paper
2018
Abstract Following the first scientific descriptions in the late nineteenth century, the origin of the curious structure currently known as Meteor Crater (or Barringer Crater) in Arizona (USA) remained controversial until well into the twentieth century. Within the context of commercial mining, Daniel Moreau Barringer’s view that it recorded a substratum-penetrative meteorite impact (with the cosmic body still preserved) was commonly discarded. Marten Edsge Mulder (1847–1928), Dutch professor of medicine, found fault with Barringer’s non-explosive model. In 1911, Mulder advanced, in an ignored paper written in Dutch, a novel model of an explosive meteorite (‘meteor’ in Mulder’s terminology)…