Lawrence Wager

Lawrence Rickard Wager, known as Bill Wager, was a British geologist, explorer and mountaineer, born in Batley, Yorkshire, in 1904. After a first class geology degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he lectured at Reading, then went to East Greenland with the British Arctic Air Route Expedition in 1930, where he identified and named the Skaergaard intrusion, the study of which became his most important contribution to petrology. He joined the 1933 Everest expedition and with Percy Wyn-Harris reached about 28,200 feet without supplemental oxygen. He held the chair of geology at Durham from 1944 and at Oxford from 1950, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1946, and helped found Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and the Journal of Petrology. His book Layered Igneous Rocks, written with Malcolm Brown, appeared in 1968, after his death in 1965.