126 | Great Geologists
expeditions there, 29 of which he personally led. Many outcrops
on Spitsbergen are spectacular and Harland used these not
only to geologically map the island, but to provide insight into
the tectonostratigraphy of the Arctic and global geological
phenomena.
The initial expedition in 1938 was arduous. The six-man team
he was part of suffered from severe shortages of food and
particularly bad weather. But far from deterring Harland from
further work, this only served to instill in him the importance of
detailed and meticulous expedition planning. It is not surprising
that in the later part of his career he was awarded the Gold Medal
of the Royal Geographical Society for his Arctic exploration.
Back at Cambridge, Harland began work on his PhD in 1938,
but with outbreak of World War II the following year, his studies
were curtailed. As an undergraduate he had become a Quaker,
and these religious beliefs led him to work on a farm as a
conscientious objector during the early years of the war.
In 1942, he decided to take on a teaching role at Chengdu
University in China. He retained an interest in Chinese culture,
science and geology for the rest of his life, maintaining links
with Chengdu University despite occasional political difficulties.
Whilst at Chengdu he developed a close friendship with Joseph
Needham, the famous chemist and historian of Chinese science.
Both were to become Fellows of Gonville and Caius College in
Cambridge.
In 1946, Harland returned to Cambridge to take on a role as a
geology demonstrator to undergraduates. This progressively
became a lectureship and eventually a readership. He was to be
based in Cambridge and Gonville and Caius College for the rest
of his career. An enthusiastic teacher, he always emphasized the
importance of field geology. His numerous trips leading first-year
undergraduates to study the geology of the Scottish island of
Arran have passed into Cambridge geology department folklore!
His return to Cambridge also saw a return to exploring the
geology of the Arctic, with the initiation of the Cambridge
Spitsbergen Expedition programme. This annual programme of
geological expeditions led to over 300 graduates and staff from
Cambridge having the opportunity to carry out research on and
around Spitsbergen. Many of the major names in geoscience
today were the beneficiaries of this opportunity. The culmination
of decades of research was the publication of the Geology of
Svalbard in 1997. A landmark in Arctic geology research and vital
resource for anyone wishing to unravel the complex geology of
this region.
What then of the wider significance of Harland’s work on
Spitsbergen and on Arctic geology? Comparisons of the geology
of Spitsbergen with Greenland led him to be an early advocate of
Sketch by Brian Harland of the field gear needed for an early
geological expedition to Spitsbergen. This demonstrates
the meticulous planning that typified each expedition he
led. Image provided by and used with the permission of the
Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences.
continental drift (later plate tectonics). Moreover, his observations
of Pre-Cambrian glacial deposits on Spitsbergen led him to
compare and correlate them with similar deposits in other far-
flung parts of the globe. This not only provided further fuel for
the notion of mobile continents, but also led to the notion that
around 600 million years ago, glaciation had been widespread,
even at low latitudes. He was an early adopter of paleomagnetic
data to show that “infra-Cambrian” (= Late Precambrian) glacial
diamictites in Spitsbergen and Greenland were deposited at
tropical latitudes. From these data and the sedimentological