Bilal Haq | |
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Born | Bilal Ul Haq 8 October 1948 |
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Scientific career | |
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Punjab]] |
Thesis | Paleogene Calcareous Nannoflora: Rates of Evolution in Cenozoic Calcareous Nannoplankton (1972) |
Doctoral advisor | Ivar Hessland |
Website |
Bilal U. Haq is a Pakistani-American geoscientist (and poet) who is currently affiliated with and divides his time between the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and Sorbonne University's Institute of Earth Sciences in Paris, France. He is best known for his work on the Phanerozoic sea-level fluctuations and eustatic curves that are widely used in the academia and industry as the basis for global stratigraphy and in exploration geology. He is a laureate of the Prestwich Prize for geosciences from France.
Bilal Haq was born in the foothills of Himalayas (Gorakhpur) where his father Mohammad Fazl-i-Haq was a senior ICS officer in the British Indian government. After the independence of India his father opted to serve in the new nation of Pakistan since his family originated from Lahore, now in Pakistan. He received his early education at St. Paul's and Central Model Schools in Karachi and Lahore, respectively. In Lahore, he also earned his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees from the Government College and the Punjab University. In Europe, after receiving a diploma in German language from Dolmetscher Insitut of Heidelberg University, he started his graduate research at the University of Vienna [1] and then moved to Sweden to earn his PhD and DSc degrees in marine geoscience from the University of Stockholm. [2]
Bilal U. Haq's career spans over five decades, and he has carried out research in several disciplines of marine geosciences at the University of Stockholm, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, [3] Exxon Production Research Company in Houston, [4] the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC, [5] the Universities of Copenhagen, [6] Cambridge, Oxford, [7] Paris (UPMC, [8] Sorbonne [9] ) and Utrecht. He has consulted with, provided advice to, or delivered specialized courses to numerous multinational resource companies, and geological surveys around the world through his consulting partnership. [10]
He was seconded to the World Bank in Washington, DC in their Environment Department, where already in 1994 he produced a special report on the effects of climate change and sea-level rise on the economies of developing maritime nations. [11] [12]
In 1994 Haq was also seconded by NSF to the White House's Executive Office of the US president for the Federal Budget where he worked on the science budget for independent science agencies. [13] Haq was appointed an honorary professor at both Tongji University in Shanghai and the Academia Sinica Institute of Ocean Sciences in Qingdao, China, and was a visiting professor at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the UK.
Bilal Haq is also a poet who has published four volumes of poetry, [14] with insights into nature and the nature of man. His poetic license, enabled by his scientific background, has been fondly dubbed by his peers as "geopoetry", and his poetic message is that we have to learn to live with nature, if we are to survive.
Among Haq's many services to the scientific community was his rescue of a prolific fossil site in the Shandong province of China (Confucius' birthplace) through an international appeal, [15] (now a National Geopark). He also conceived and helped create a paleontological Geopark (together with the Chinese biologist and academician, Zheng Shouyi) consisting of giant sculptures based on fossil micro-organisms (Foraminifera) in Zhongshan City in Guangdong Province. [16] [17] Since its opening in December 2009, the sculpture park has been visited by over 200,000 visitors every year, which the Smithsonian magazine declared the second most important "Evo-tourism" site in the world. [18] This was followed by another, larger, Foraminiferal sculpture park in the city of Qingdao, that was established in 2017.
Bilal Haq's research covers a broad spectrum of geosciences, from marine geology to marine sedimentology, paleoceanography, paleoclimatology, paleobiogeography, biostratigraphy, seismic, sequence and global stratigraphy, and natural gas hydrates. In the past his focus was on documenting sea-level changes along the world's continental margins and interior basins for the last 550 million years of Earth history (the complete Phanerozoic Eon). [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] More recently he has directed his attention to influence of tectonics on the sedimentary record. [24] [25] He has also focused on quantifying the amount of total Messinian salt sequestered in the deep Mediterranean evaporite giant and its implications for tectonics in various deep basins and continental margins and the paleoceanography of this enclosed Sea. [26] Haq has published over 150 research papers, book chapters and encyclopedia articles, several of them among the most highly cited in Earth sciences, [27] of which one was chosen as among the top 100 papers in geosciences of all time. [28]
Bilal Haq's honors include the Shepard Medal for excellence in marine geology, [29] [30] the Ocean Sciences Award from the American Geophysical Union, [31] the Antarctic Medal of the US National Science Foundation, and most recently the Prestwich Prize [32] [33] from the Geological Society of France. He has been recognized for his research by the award of a doctoris honoris causa by the Sorbonne University, election to the membership of the European Academy of Science and Letters (Academia Europaea), [34] and to fellowships of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America. Haq has also been honored by his peers with the naming of a fossil plankton species and a genus after him. His international appeal saved a prolific fossil site from destruction (that was later declared a National Geopark) in Shandong Province in China and he helped create two Foraminiferal sculpture parks in Guangzhou and Qingdao.
Bilal Haq has published four volumes of poetry: Reflections (2016), Musings (2017), Ruminations (2017) and Glimpses of Nature and Man (2018). [14]
An extinction event is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp fall in the diversity and abundance of multicellular organisms. It occurs when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the background extinction rate and the rate of speciation. Estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years range from as few as five to more than twenty. These differences stem from disagreement as to what constitutes a "major" extinction event, and the data chosen to measure past diversity.
The Oligocene is a geologic epoch of the Paleogene Period and extends from about 33.9 million to 23 million years before the present. As with other older geologic periods, the rock beds that define the epoch are well identified but the exact dates of the start and end of the epoch are slightly uncertain. The name Oligocene was coined in 1854 by the German paleontologist Heinrich Ernst Beyrich from his studies of marine beds in Belgium and Germany. The name comes from the Ancient Greek ὀλίγος and καινός, and refers to the sparsity of extant forms of molluscs. The Oligocene is preceded by the Eocene Epoch and is followed by the Miocene Epoch. The Oligocene is the third and final epoch of the Paleogene Period.
Approximately 251.9 million years ago, the Permian–Triassicextinction event forms the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, and with them the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras respectively. It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with the extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. It is also the largest known mass extinction of insects. It is the largest of the "Big Five" mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic. There is evidence for one to three distinct pulses, or phases, of extinction.
The Triassic is a geologic period and system which spans 50.5 million years from the end of the Permian Period 251.902 million years ago (Mya), to the beginning of the Jurassic Period 201.4 Mya. The Triassic is the first and shortest period of the Mesozoic Era. Both the start and end of the period are marked by major extinction events. The Triassic Period is subdivided into three epochs: Early Triassic, Middle Triassic and Late Triassic.
The Doushantuo Formation is a geological formation in western Hubei, eastern Guizhou, southern Shaanxi, central Jiangxi, and other localities in China. It is known for the fossil Lagerstätten in Zigui in Hubei, Xiuning in Anhui, and Weng'an in Guizhou, as one of the oldest beds to contain minutely preserved microfossils, phosphatic fossils that are so characteristic they have given their name to "Doushantuo type preservation". The formation, whose deposits date back to the Early and Middle Ediacaran, is of particular interest because it covers the poorly understood interval of time between the end of the Cryogenian geological period and the more familiar fauna of the Late Ediacaran Avalon explosion, as well as due to its microfossils' potential utility as biostratigraphical markers. Taken as a whole, the Doushantuo Formation ranges from about 635 Ma at its base to about 551 Ma at its top, with the most fossiliferous layer predating by perhaps five Ma the earliest of the 'classical' Ediacaran faunas from Mistaken Point on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, and recording conditions up to a good forty to fifty million years before the Cambrian explosion at the beginning of the Phanerozoic.
Foraminifera are single-celled organisms, members of a phylum or class of Cercozoan protists characterized by streaming granular ectoplasm for catching food and other uses; and commonly an external shell of diverse forms and materials. Tests of chitin are believed to be the most primitive type. Most foraminifera are marine, the majority of which live on or within the seafloor sediment, while a smaller number float in the water column at various depths, which belong to the suborder Globigerinina. Fewer are known from freshwater or brackish conditions, and some very few (nonaquatic) soil species have been identified through molecular analysis of small subunit ribosomal DNA.
The Cryogenian is a geologic period that lasted from 720 to 635 million years ago. It forms the second geologic period of the Neoproterozoic Era, preceded by the Tonian Period and followed by the Ediacaran.
The Eemian was the interglacial period which began about 130,000 years ago at the end of the Penultimate Glacial Period and ended about 115,000 years ago at the beginning of the Last Glacial Period. It corresponds to Marine Isotope Stage 5e. Although sometimes referred to as the "last interglacial", it was the second-to-latest interglacial period of the current Ice Age, the most recent being the Holocene which extends to the present day. The prevailing Eemian climate was, on average, around 1 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer than that of the Holocene. During the Eemian, the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million.
The geology of China consists of three Precambrian cratons surrounded by a number of orogenic belts. The modern tectonic environment is dominated by the continued collision of India with the rest of Asia starting 40–50 million years ago. This has formed the Himalayas and continues to deform most of China. China has vast mineral reserves, a significant earthquake risk in its western regions and rare isolated active volcanoes throughout the country.
Marine invertebrates are the invertebrates that live in marine habitats. Invertebrate is a blanket term that includes all animals apart from the vertebrate members of the chordate phylum. Invertebrates lack a vertebral column, and some have evolved a shell or a hard exoskeleton. As on land and in the air, marine invertebrates have a large variety of body plans, and have been categorised into over 30 phyla. They make up most of the macroscopic life in the oceans.
The sea-level curve is the representation of the changes of the sea level relative to present day mean sea level as gleaned from the stratigraphic record throughout the geological history.
The Institute of Geosciences is a unit of instruction of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). It includes the undergraduate courses of Geography, Geomatics Engineering, Geology. It has a department of study of vertebrate paleontology which has made great contributions to the geopark of Paleorrota.
Wolfgang "Wolf" Helmut Berger was a German-American oceanographer, geologist, micropaleontologist and emeritus professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. His research interests comprise "micropaleontology, marine sedimentation, ocean productivity, carbon cycle, ocean history, climate history, and history of oceanography."
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Sierd A.P.L. Cloetingh is Professor of Earth Sciences at Utrecht University, and since 2014 President of the Academia Europaea.
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