Heinrich D. Holland

Heinrich Dieter Holland was an American geochemist, born in 1927 in Germany and died in 2012, who escaped Nazi Germany as a child before building a career studying the chemical evolution of Earth atmosphere and oceans. He taught at Princeton University from 1950 to 1972 and then at Harvard University, where he held the Harry C. Dudley professorship of economic geology, and his research on large-scale geochemical and biogeochemical cycles helped establish how the composition of the atmosphere and oceans changed over geological time, including the rise of atmospheric oxygen. His major synthesis, The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans, became a standard reference in the field.