Zavaritskii, Aleksandr

Born Mar. 2 (14), 1884, in Ufa; died July 23, 1952, in Moscow. Soviet geologist and petrographer. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939).

Zavaritskii graduated from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1909 and became a professor in 1921. From 1915 to 1935 he worked for the Geological Committee (later the All-Union Geological Institute). He was director of the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939L-41). He was an organizer and director of the Laboratory of Volcanology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1944-52) and academic secretary of the division of geological and geographic sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1946-49). His principal works concern the theoretical petrography and geology of ore deposits. He carried out research in the Urals (in the region of Mount Magnitnaia and the Ilmen Mountains), Kazakhstan, and the Caucasus. He studied the extinct volcanoes of Armenia, the ancient volcanism of the Urals, and the volcanoes of the Kamchatka-Kuril arc. Zavaritskii developed the geometric method of analyzing the composition of rocks using diagrams that give a graphic presentation of all their main chemical properties. This same research marked the beginning of the development of a new branch of science, petrochemistry. In a number of his works Zavaritskii dealt with the metamorphism of ore deposits and the rocks enclosing them. Using the Ural pyrite beds as an example, he deciphered several aspects of the complex process of metamorphic differentiation, that is, the redistribution and redeposition of matter with formation of enriched ore sectors. Zavaritskii perfected the general-purpose optical method of investigating minerals in thin sections that had been established by E. S. Fedorov; he introduced new coordinates for determining the orientation of the optical indicatrix of anisotropic crystalline media using the universal pentaxial stage. The mineral zavaritskite is named after Zavaritskii. He was awarded the State Prize of the USSR (1943, 1946) and the Lenin Prize (1958) for his part in the collective work Fundamental Problems in the Theory of Magmatogenic Ore Deposits. He was awarded two Orders of Lenin.