Harry E. Wheeler

Harry Eugene Wheeler (1907 – 26 January 1987) was an American geologist and stratigrapher. Eric Cheney called him "the chief theoretical architect of sequence stratigraphy"[1]

Harry Eugene Wheeler
Born1907
Pipestone, Minnesota, United States
Died26 January 1987
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Oregon
Stanford University
Known forSequence stratigraphy
Scientific career
FieldsPaleontology, Stratigraphy
InstitutionsUniversity of Nevada,
University of Washington

Wheeler was a professor of geology at the University of Washington from 1948 until 1976.[2]

Work on stratigraphy

Wheeler's work in the 1950 and 1960s was pivotal in the later development of sequence stratigraphy, which is still used today, for example by petroleum industry geologists.[3] His 1964 paper, Baselevel, Lithosphere Surface, and Time-Stratigraphy[4] evolved the concept of base level to emphasize the continuous spatial and temporal nature of stratigraphy, eventually giving rise to Wheeler diagrams:

But what of stratigraphic discontinuities as manifestations of nondeposition and accompanying erosion? Here we pass into the realm of no less important but completely abstract, area-time framework, in which a discontinuity takes on 'area-time' configuration in the form of the lacuna, which in turn, consists of hiatus and degradation vacuity.

Wheeler diagrams

The Wheeler diagram is a spatio-temporal plot, showing the (usually one dimensional) spatial distribution of sedimentary facies through time in a two-dimensional chart. Three-dimensional seismic data allows the construction of three-dimensional Wheeler 'diagrams', but these are rare because of the difficulty of producing them.

gollark: Immediately undergo exponentiation modulo 7, then.
gollark: I do not understand that sentence ("The alternative is work a political method for political reason.") and it is not pizza, I have had no commercial relations with pizza companies, I am not paid to subliminally advertise pizza, etc.
gollark: I guess maybe in politics/economics/sociology the alternative is something like "lean on human intuition" or "make the correct behaviour magically resolve from self-interest". Not sure how well those actually work.
gollark: - the replication crisis does exist, but it's not like *every paper* has a 50% chance of being wrong - it's mostly in some fields and you can generally estimate which things won't replicate fairly well without much specialized knowledge- science™ agrees on lots of things, just not some highly politicized things- you *can* do RCTs and correlation studies and such, which they seem to be ignoring- some objectivity is better than none- sure, much of pop science is not great, but that doesn't invalidate... all science- they complain about running things based on "trial and error and guesswork", but then don't offer any alternative
gollark: The alternative to basing things on science, I mean. The obvious alternative seems to basically just be guessing?

References
  1. Cheney, E. (1987). Memorial to Harry Eugene Wheeler, 1907–1987. Washington Division of Geology and Earth Resources Bulletin 77, p 393–395.
  2. Illman, Deborah L. (1996). Pathbreakers: A Century of Excellence in Science and Technology at the University of Washington. Office of Research, University of Washington.
  3. Romans, Brian (2007). Theoretical Stratigraphy #1: Wheeler’s baselevel. Post on Clastic Detritus geoblog.
  4. Wheeler, Harry E. (1964). Baselevel, Lithosphere Surface, and Time-Stratigraphy. Geological Society of America Bulletin 75 (7), p. 599-610. doi:10.1130/0016-7606(1964)75[599:BLSAT]2.0.CO;2.


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