Eleven Earth Scientists in Order of Birth Year, Oldest First, From 1726 to 1917

Born in 1726. He presented his Theory of the Earth to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785 and argued that the same slow processes still observable today, deposition, erosion, uplift and heat, had shaped the Earth over spans of time far longer than commonly assumed. The page notes that the view became known as uniformitarianism.

Born in 1769. He recognized that each layer of rock could be identified by the fossils it contained and that the layers appeared in a consistent order wherever they were found. In 1815 he published A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with Part of Scotland, drawn at five miles to the inch.

Born in 1772. A London pharmaceutical manufacturer and amateur meteorologist, he proposed in 1802 a classification of clouds into four basic types, cirrus, cumulus, stratus and nimbus, named with Latin roots so the same terms could be used across languages.

Born in 1797. His Principles of Geology appeared in three volumes between 1830 and 1833 and developed Hutton's idea that the Earth was shaped by processes still operating today. The page records that Robert FitzRoy gave the young Charles Darwin the first volume before the HMS Beagle sailed.

Born in 1805. A Royal Navy officer who commanded HMS Beagle on the voyage that carried Charles Darwin, he later headed the new Meteorological Department at the Board of Trade, founded in 1854. He set up coastal stations reporting by telegraph and began publishing daily weather forecasts in The Times in 1861.

Born in 1830. A Scottish naturalist and professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh, he served as chief scientist and expedition leader of the HMS Challenger expedition of 1872 to 1876, which sounded ocean depths, dredged the sea floor and recorded temperature and biological samples.

Born in 1862. A Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who argued in a 1904 paper that forecasting could be computed from the atmosphere's present state using the equations of hydrodynamics and thermodynamics. In 1917 he founded the Geophysical Institute in Bergen, home of the Bergen School.

Born in 1871. An American geologist who founded the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and directed it from 1912 to 1940, the first permanent American observatory dedicated to continuous monitoring of an active volcano, Kilauea.

Born in 1881. He set out to test Vilhelm Bjerknes' idea by solving the equations of motion numerically, hand-calculating a six-hour forecast for a single location from May 1910 observations and publishing the attempt in 1922 as Weather Prediction by Numerical Process.

Born in 1906. He earned a geology PhD from Princeton in 1932 and, in 1962, proposed the seafloor spreading hypothesis: that new oceanic crust is created by molten material rising along mid-ocean ridges and pushed outward as it cools. The page calls it one of the foundations of plate tectonics.

Born in 1917. An American mathematician and meteorologist at MIT, he found in 1961 that rounding a starting value in a simplified numerical weather model from six decimal places to three produced a completely different forecast, and published the result in 1963 as Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.