W. Brian Harland
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W. Brian Harland (1917 – 2003) was an eminent geologist at Cambridge University, England. He was educated at Bootham School in York and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated in Geological Sciences and took his PhD; from 1950 until his death he was a fellow of Caius. In Cambridge he was instrumental in the establishment of the Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme (CASP). He played an important early role in the advocation of the theory of continental drift and making the first observations of the global occurrence of glaciation which were to form the foundations of Snowball Earth theory. He was also a foremost figure in the ongoing maintenance of the International Geologic timescale.
He also spent 43 field seasons in the geological mapping of the Polar archipelago of Spitsbergen, beginning in 1938 and lasting through to the 1980s, leading 29 expeditions. The ice field "Harlandisen" on the main island of Svalbard is named in his honour. The University retains a collection of some 70000 specimens collected over these years.
Harland spent much of the Second World War teaching at West China University, and later in life would become a trustee of the Needham Research Institute. He was deeply interested in the interactions between science, philosophy, and religion, and for most of his life was a Quaker.
