96 | Great Geologists
Amadeus
Grabau
Portrait of Amadeus Grabau from 1946.
China is now a powerhouse of geoscience research, but one-hundred years ago that was far from the case. In
contrast to the intense research activity in Europe and America, geology was barely taught at Chinese universities
and there was only an embryonic geological survey. Overall, the geological profession was held in low regard.
That changed with the arrival of an American geologist at Peking University in 1920, Amadeus William Grabau. Not
only did Grabau revolutionise the status of geology in China and highlight the country’s geology to the world, he
also tied the observations he made there with his knowledge of geology in Europe and America to create a new
global synthesis. Years ahead of his time, he recognised the importance of a dynamic earth with mobile continents
and global sea-level change. Grabau can rightly be considered an important pioneer of sequence stratigraphy,
eustasy, paleogeography and sedimentology.
Grabau was born in the town of Cedarburg, Wisconsin, in 1870, to a family with a long history of Lutheran ministry.
When he was 15, the family moved to Buffalo, New York, where he became involved with the local Society for
Natural History and the allied Agassiz Association (named after Louis Agassiz) which promoted field trips in order
to ‘study nature, not books’. Botany was his first interest, but Grabau soon began collecting fossils, especially
trilobites and other Devonian fossils, from the now celebrated locality of 18 Mile Creek on the south side of Lake
Erie. An evaluation of the stratigraphy and fauna of this area formed his Bachelors thesis at Massachusetts Institute
for Technology (MIT) and was subsequently published as an extended field guide by the Buffalo Society for Natural
History (1898, 1899). Still regarded as a classic of its kind today, the guide was republished in 1994.
Grabau extended his research to the stratigraphy of the Niagara Falls area and New York state in general and
was accepted at Harvard University to undertake a PhD on the evolutionary history of the mollusc Fucus. By the
early 1900s, he had established himself as a researcher who ‘got things done,’ first as a professor at Rensseler
Polytechnic and then at Columbia University.
These were extremely productive and happy times for Grabau. He rapidly established himself as one of the leading
Paleozoic specialists in North America and met his wife, Mary Antin, during the course of a field trip for members
of the general public interested in natural history. Mary, a Russian émigrée, was to become a celebrated figure in