Lloyd Geldart

Lloyd Geldart

PhD university	California Institute of Technology

Memorial

Lloyd P. Geldart, 97, died on 2 May 2011 at his Guelph (Toronto) home. He was best known in the geophysical community for the two textbooks, Applied Geophysics (coauthored with W. M. Telford and R. E. Sheriff) and Exploration Seismology (coauthored with Sheriff). These were initially published by Cambridge University Press in 1976 and 1982, respectively. Extensive revised editions appeared in 1990 and 1995. These books have been translated into several languages and are still popular today. Geldart also coauthored (with Sheriff) 'Problems in Exploration Seismology and Their Solutions, published by SEG in 2004.

Geldart was educated at Mount Allison (BA) and McGill universities (PhD), with subsequent degrees from the University of Toronto and the California Institute of Technology. He became a weather forecaster for the western half of the Atlantic at the beginning of World War II when many aircraft were being ferried from the Detroit area to Great Britain. In 1942–1947, he was head of the Physics Department at Acadia University (Wolfville, Nova Scotia). In 1949, he shifted to the geophysical industry and held a succession of positions with subsidiaries of the Standard Oil Company of California: research geophysicist at the La Habra Laboratory; chief geophysicist of the Dominion Oil Company in Trinidad; and finally chief geophysicist for Calexico in San Francisco. In 1960, Geldart became the first occupant of the Webster Chair of Applied Geophysics at McGilI University.

In 1968 he became director of the UNESCO project Universidade Federal da Bahia. Subsequently, he became coordinator of CIDA programs at the Brazilian Canadian Embassy in Brazilia. He retired in 1982 but continued working on geophysics books.