| 1 | Name: | Dr. Claudio Vita-Finzi | |
| Institution: | Natural History Museum, London | ||
| Year Elected: | 1997 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1936 | ||
Claudio Vita-Finzi is a Scientific Associate at London’s Natural History Museum. Educated in Argentina and the UK, he received his PhD and ScD from Cambridge University. He held a personal chair in Neotectonics at University College London between 1988 and 2001 before moving to the Department of Mineralogy at the Museum. Dr Vita-Finzi has worked on geological chronologies in a wide variety of settings as a means of elucidating the underlying processes. His studies of river deposits in the Mediterranean and the Near East revealed the great changes in the natural landscape of Eurasia that have occurred in the last two millennia. He went on to analyse fault history and the buckling of lithospheric plates in Greece, the Near East, SE Asia and South America, and the role of impacts in the evolution of Venus. His current studies focus on the hydrologic effects of changes in the UV component of solar luminosity. Dr Vita-Finzi is the author of numerous papers on geochronology, tectonics, fluvial geology and geoarchaeology. His books include The Mediterranean Valleys (1969), Recent Earth History (1973), Archaeological Sites in their Setting (1978), Recent Earth Movements (1986), Monitoring the Earth (2002), Planetary Geology (2005), The Sun - a User’s Guide (2008), and A History of the Solar System (2016). He received the G K Warren Prize of the National Academy of Sciences in 1994 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1997. In 2012 he was elected to the British Academy. | |||