Vol. 28 No.4 December 2005

Journal of International Geoscience

Published by the International Union of Geological Sciences

Ignacy Domeyko—an early investigator of Andean geology

I don't want very much—just to be useful to others while I am alive,otherwise life is not worth living.Ignacy Domeyko Letter to Onufry Pietraszkiewicz, 1820

There is time for everything when there is a will and God's blessing;and of all the miseries that people complain about in this world, the only one I have not yet experienced is boredom.Ignacy Domeyko My Journeys: Memoirs of an Exile, 1962–1963. In 2002, the name of Ignacy Domeyko was listed in UNESCO's list of famous persons. The bicentenary of this famous nineteenth-century scholar and teacher, geologist, mineralogist, and ethnographer was widely celebrated in Chile, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, France (Grigelis, ed., 2002).Ten years after his arrival in Chile, Domeyko published an article entitled Mémoire sur la constitution géologique de Chili (Annales des Mines, Series 4, Volume 9, 1846), in which he suggested an ongoing tectonic factor forming the Andean Cordilleras: Tout annonce que le principal mouvement qui survintà l'êpoque de la formation des Andes arriva du c?té de l'Ouest,c'est-à-dire du c?té où une ligne d'escarpements qui marquent lerivage actuel de l'Ocean depuis le cap Horn jusqu'aux montagnes Rocheuses, continue à se soulever d'une manière lente et à peine perceptible, au mugissement des bruits souterrains et sous l'influence des tremblements de terre répétés (p. 414).* This suggestion was far ahead of its time. More than a century later, the theory of plate tectonics confirmed the existence of the Nazca Plate moving eastwards from the Pacific Ocean, fundamentally affecting the geological structure of the Andes (Maksaev and Zentilli, 1999).

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