Haraldur Sigurdsson

Haraldur Sigurdsson is an Icelandic volcanologist, born in 1939 in Stykkisholmur, Iceland. After earning his doctorate from Durham University in England in 1970, he researched Caribbean volcanoes at the University of the West Indies before becoming professor of oceanography and volcanology at the University of Rhode Island in 1974, a position he held for four decades. His research reconstructed the eruption dynamics of Vesuvius at Pompeii, identified the volcanic sources behind the deadly 1984 and 1986 gas releases from Cameroon's Lake Monoun and Lake Nyos, and helped establish evidence linking a meteorite impact to the extinction of the dinosaurs, and he served as editor in chief of the 1999 Encyclopedia of Volcanoes.