Marshall Kay

Marshall Kay was an American geologist who lived from 1904 to 1975 and was a professor at Columbia University specializing in stratigraphy, the study of rock layers and their sequences. His research focused on the Ordovician period, with extensive fieldwork in New York, Newfoundland and Nevada, and his stratigraphic analysis provided geological evidence supporting the theory of continental drift. He also worked as a geologist on the Manhattan Project, searching for manganese deposits, and published global studies on the middle and upper Ordovician. He established a family line of geologists: his children and a son-in-law became geology professors at Cornell, Yale and the University of Connecticut, and another son pursued biological anthropology at Duke University. He received the Penrose Medal in 1971.