Lichkov, Boris

Born July 19 (31), 1888, in Irkutsk; died Oct. 20, 1966, in Leningrad. Soviet geologist, doctor of geological and mineralogical sciences (1943).

Lichkov graduated from the University of Kiev in 1912. He worked as a professor (beginning in 1948) in Kiev, Tashkent, Samarkand, and Leningrad. In 1962 he was elected an honorary member of the Geographic Society of the USSR. He was the first director of the Ukrainian Geological Committee and later served as its deputy director (1918–27). Between 1924 and 1934 he was head of the department of underground water of the Hydrologic Institute in Leningrad. His main works dealt with hydrogeology, geomorphology, and theoretical problems of geology. Lichkov proposed one of the first classifications of underground water (1928) that reflected the zonation of hydrogeochemical processes. He also formulated the concept that the hydrosphere played a crucial role in the earth’s history and that the hydrosphere also plays a significant role in the interaction of the earth as a body in space with other bodies of the solar system. Works on the relief zones of the earth and movement of the continents were the basis for his investigation of the general theory of the earth and astrogeology. In his last works (1960, 1965), Lichkov developed a hypothesis about the processes by which a former large asteroid (the earth’s protoplanet) was transformed into the planet earth.