Biographical Memoirs Volume 46 (1975) / Chapter Skim
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13. Richard Joel Russell
13. Richard Joel Russell
Pages 368-395
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From page 369... ...
He began with undergraduate work in forestry and vertebrate paleontology, followed by graduate studies in petrography and structural geology at the same time that he was teaching elementary geography. His subsequent professional activities ranged from work in climatology and geomorphology to the careful examination of the Mississippi River Delta and worldwide beach studies.
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From page 370... ...
Richard's maternal grandmother, Martha Brennan, a widow with three daughters, sailed from New England in 1870 via Panama to San Francisco to marry a childhood sweetheart named Morril, and the family home was established in Alameda. The youngest daughter, Nellie Potter Morril, was the mother of Richard Joel Russell, who was born in Hayward, California, November 16, 1895.
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From page 371... ...
By the time Richard had reached the eighth grade, the family moved to the "ranch," the original land acquired by his grandfather. Richard had the responsibility of breaking the ranch horses, both to saddle and harness, and he rode horseback to school as well as to many camp sites.
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From page 372... ...
Although no openings were immediately available, he was finally accepted in the officer's class and commissioned ensign to teach seamanship and gunnery. At the conclusion of World War I, Richard returned to the University of California, selected vertebrate paleontology as a major under John C
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From page 373... ...
In 1926 he completed his Ph.D. thesis, "Basin Range Structure and Stratigraphy of the Warner Range, Northeastern California." Richard Russell had definite convictions that new Ph.D.'s should not remain on the faculty of their alma mater; thus, in 1926, he accepted the position of Associate Professor of Geology at Texas Technological College at Lubbock.
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From page 374... ...
In 1925, Richard participated in a seminar given by Davis at Berkeley, and he became very critical of the Davisian methods of explanatory description of land forms based on superficial observations that were subjected to deductive methods. In Russell's fieldwork in the Warner Range, he used deductive methods during his first field trips but found that the fundamental structural features of the range history came as the result of good honest inductive study.
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From page 375... ...
In 1931, while attending the International Geographical Congress in Paris, he discovered that he was considered a famous climatologist. Russell had written these papers more as a pleasant hobby involving little effort, but in five successive years he was offered a senior chair of climatology in the United States.
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From page 376... ...
"Physiography of the Lower Mississippi River Delta" was one of several contributions on delta studies published by the Louisiana Department of Conservation in which a combination of geomorphological, archeological and botanical reports were combined in a single bulletin. Russell's discussion in the 1936 publication emphasized the concept that the weight of the sedimentary deposits of successive deltas caused local downwarping of the earth's crust, thus developing a geosyncline.
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From page 377... ...
Russell's noneconomic fieldwork in alluvial morphology focussed attention on him as having the best background to serve as an expert witness in the various land-title lawsuits. He and Henry Howe presented evidence that won state title to extensive waterbodies in southwestern Louisiana.
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From page 378... ...
As Russell pursued his studies of the Quaternary terraces upstream along the Mississippi River, he became involved with exposures of loess—homogeneous, unstratified, slightly indurated and porous calcareous sedimentary rock composed of particles of silt size, yellowish or buff in color, that tend to crop out in vertical faces. Most American geologists favored the concept that, during the Ice Age, rivers transported to broad floodplains fine glacial debris, which was picked up by winds and deposited on or near adjacent bluffs; thus loess is an eolian.deposit.
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From page 379... ...
Russell loved to travel and as his university salary and consulting fees increased, he began a series of foreign trips, starting in 1931 with the International Geographical Congress in Paris. In 1937, he and Henry Howe attended the Geological Congress in Moscow where they presented papers on the Gulf Coast geosyncline and participated in field excursions across the Caucasus to Soviet Armenia and to Novaya Zemlya.
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From page 380... ...
The International Geographical Congress in 1960 Cave him the opportunity to join field symposia in Sweden on alluvial and coastal morphology. The following year, he organized a symposium, "Pacific Island Terraces: Eustatic?
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From page 381... ...
Commonly, several bands of this beach rock are separated by shallow strips of water with the oldest bands seaward and the youngest under the beach; the outer bands are tough and durable in contrast to the friable inner band. All beach rock localities occur where there is coastal recession and the groundwater is heavily charged with calcium carbonate, the cement of the beach rock.
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From page 382... ...
Much of his last years of field studies were spent obtaining background information to enable him to identify problems related to sea coasts. He emphasized that the glacio-eustatic changes of level between land and sea by the melting of continental ice sheets raised the level of oceans by 450 feet during the Recent rise of sea level.
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From page 383... ...
His wide travels formed the basis of Culture Worlds, a widely used text for college geography; Fred B Kniffen was joint author for three editions; Evelyn Pruitt of the Office of Naval Research participated in both the second and third editions.
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From page 384... ...
In 1943, he was Distinguished Lecturer ("Gulf Coast Geosyncline") for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and in 1958 National Lecturer ("Instability of Sea Level")
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From page 385... ...
Richard Joel Russell married Mary Dorothy King of Covina, California, in 1924, and their son, Benjamin James, lives in Hermosa Beach, California. Dorothy died in Baton Rouge in 1936.
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From page 386... ...
Bull.—Louisiana State University Coastal Studies Bulletin Coastal Stud.
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From page 387... ...
Bull., 14:177-78. Alpine land forms of western United States.
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From page 388... ...
, 2:753-63. Physiography of the lower Mississippi River Delta.
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From page 389... ...
Fisk. Isostatic effects of Mississippi River Delta sedimentation.
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From page 390... ...
Baton Rouge, State Department of Education.
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From page 391... ...
1958 Caribbean beach studies preliminary notes on Caribbean beach rock. Coastal Stud.
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From page 392... ...
Second Coastal Geography Conference. (Coastal Studies Institute, Louisiana State University, 1959)
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From page 393... ...
20. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press.
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From page 394... ...
Louisiana State University, Coastal Studies Bulletin no.
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