Th. G. Sahama

Thure Georg Sahama was a Finnish mineralogist and geochemist, born in 1910 in Viipuri and died in 1983 in Helsinki, who held the chair of geochemistry at the University of Helsinki from 1945 to 1977. Between 1952 and 1975 he carried out extensive volcanological and mineralogical fieldwork on the alkaline lavas of East Africa Nyiragongo volcano, and over his career he helped describe nearly twenty new mineral species. With Kalervo Rankama he co-authored the influential textbook Geochemistry, and the cerium carbonate mineral sahamalite, discovered in California in 1953, was named in his honor.