Hugo Benioff

Victor Hugo Benioff was an American seismologist, born in 1899 in Los Angeles and died in 1968, who spent his career at the California Institute of Technology. He is best remembered for charting the location of deep earthquakes beneath the Pacific Ocean, work that revealed how earthquake sources grow progressively deeper beneath the overriding plate moving away from a subduction zone trench, a pattern now called the Wadati-Benioff zone. In 1932 he also designed the Benioff seismograph, an instrument for sensing ground movement that came into use in seismic stations around the world, and he later developed a strain instrument recording the stretching of Earth's surface.