Douglas James Shearman

Douglas James Shearman was a British geologist and sedimentologist born July 2, 1918, in Isleworth, Middlesex, who died May 12, 2003, in Cassington, Oxfordshire, and who worked at Imperial College London from 1949 to 1983. He pioneered understanding of evaporite formation in desert climates, developed staining methods that improved microscopic analysis of limestone cementation, discovered recent anhydrite formation in the sabkha environments of the Persian Gulf, and challenged conventional evaporite deposition theory by proposing upward moving brines as the formation mechanism, also researching halite deposits, dolomitization, and ikaite mineral formation. He received the Lyell Fund in 1967, the Matson Award of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 1981, the Lyell Medal in 1984, and the Wollaston Medal in 1997.