Vladimir Obruchev

Vladimir Afanasyevich Obruchev was a Russian and Soviet geologist, born in 1863 in Klepenino, Tver Province, and died in 1956 in Moscow, who specialized in the geology of Siberia and Central Asia. After graduating from the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute in 1886, he led major expeditions across the region studying gold deposits, loess soils and the mechanisms of permafrost, and he advised on the construction of the Trans-Siberian and Central Asian railways. In 1930 he became chairman of the Soviet Commission for the Study of Permafrost and in 1939 the first director of the Geocryology Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and he was also among the earliest Russian writers of science fiction.