Martin Harold Phillips Bott

Martin Harold Phillips Bott was a British geologist and geophysicist born July 12, 1926, who died October 20, 2018, and who worked in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Durham, also visiting the Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory at Columbia University in 1970. His research investigated gravity and magnetic anomalies related to granite intrusions, developed digital computer techniques for interpreting geophysical data, studied crustal structure in northern England, Cornwall, and offshore regions, examined the North Atlantic basin and its margins, and authored the textbook The Interior of the Earth; his work shed new light on the mechanism of emplacement of acid igneous intrusions in the crust and he successfully predicted buried granite beneath Weardale, later confirmed by deep drilling. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976 and received the Wollaston Medal in 1992.