Cuchlaine King

Cuchlaine Audrey Muriel King (1922 to 2019) was a British geomorphologist known for her work in glaciology and her extensive writing on the geography of coasts and beaches. Her father was the geologist W. B. R. King. She took a geography degree at Cambridge in 1942, served as a meteorologist and surveyor in the Women's Royal Naval Service during the Second World War, and returned to Cambridge to research sand movement on beaches, earning her doctorate in 1949. She studied how glaciers shape landscapes, joining expeditions to Skaftafell in Iceland in 1953 and 1954 and later working on Baffin Island, at the Austerdalsbreen glacier in Norway and on Arctic expeditions she led herself. Her 1973 book Beaches and Coasts was the first overview of coastal geomorphology, and with John Cole she wrote one of the first books on quantitative methods in geography. She taught at the University of Nottingham from 1959, became a professor in 1969 as one of the earliest women professors of geography in the United Kingdom, and retired in 1982. The university named geography laboratories after her, and she received the David Linton Award in 1991.