Vladimir Vernadsky
(1863-1945)
Vladimir I. Vernadsky was a mineralogist and geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology. He was one of the founders and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Vernadsky is most noted for his 1926 book
The Biosphere in which he unknowingly worked to popularize the Austrian geologist
Eduard Suess' 1875 term "biosphere."
Vernadsky anticipated the later
Gaia hypothesis of
James Lovelock and
Lynn Margulis by hypothesizing that life is a geological force that shapes the earth.
Vernadsky was a near contemporary of
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose concepts of a
noösphere, an
Omega Point, and
Cosmogenesis bear many similarities to Vernadsky's ideas on the evolution of
life and
mind in his "biosphere."
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