Vladimir Belousov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Belousov (1907 to 1990) was a Soviet earth scientist born in Moscow and a prominent advocate of alternatives to plate tectonics and seafloor spreading during the years of intense debate over those theories. From 1944 he headed the Geodynamics Department at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth in Moscow, became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1953, and was a professor at the Moscow Geological Surveyance Institute from 1943 and at Moscow State University from 1953. He served as President of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics from 1960 to 1963 and was a Foreign Member of the Geological Society of London. In 1942 he proposed that the Earth's material had gradually differentiated by density into its present internal structure, and that this slow movement was the basic cause of motions in the crust. In the 1960s he led three expeditions to the East African Rift, which strengthened his belief that continental crust is transformed into oceanic crust through widespread processes involving basic magmas. His theories were ultimately rejected, yet he remains an important figure in the development of the Earth sciences in the Soviet Union after the Second World War.