Dmitry Vasilyevich Nalivkin (25 August 1889 – 3 March 1982) was a Soviet geologist. He was primarily interested in stratigraphy, but was also responsible in large part for mapping the geology of the Soviet Union.

Biography

Born in Saint Petersburg to a mining engineer, Nalivkin followed his father's footsteps by entering the local Mining Academy in 1907. During his training he began teaching there, and also became involved in fieldwork expeditions in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Early work dealt with Devonian brachiopods in the Kyrgyzstan portion of the Fergana Valley, and he retained an interest in this geological period throughout his career.

Career

He received the A. P. Karpinsky Distinguished Award in 1913 for one of his papers on faunal composition, and this provided him with the means to go to the Russian Biological Station in Villefranche (France) to study mollusks. By 1915 Nalivkin was considered an expert in central Asian geology. He was asked by the Russian Geographical Society to lead an expedition to study ancient glaciations in the Pamir. Their results of their study confirmed traces of two ancient glaciations, as well as producing a stratigraphic succession and the completion of a tectonic map. Nalivkin was awarded the Small Silver Medal of the Geographical Society in recognition of his leadership of the expedition. He was called to military service in 1917, and following demobilisation in late 1917, returned to his studies of Devonian fauna. In 1917 he was elected to the Geological Commission of Russia, and remained with it for more sixty years. During his tenure with the Commission he was responsible for directing research into paleontology, sedimentology and stratigraphy, work which led to the development and extraction of resources such as coal, ores and petroleum. He completed his doctorate in 1924 and was appointed a professor at the Saint Petersburg Mining University. During World War II, his research extended to a search for bauxite as a means of assisting the war effort's need for aircraft metals. After the war, he was in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan when it experienced a catastrophic 1948 earthquake. His most significant contribution came with the creation of the index geological maps of the USSR (and adjacent regions), which attracted considerable international attention. With the completion of his Geological Map of the USSR (1:2,500,000 scale) he was awarded the prestigious Lenin Prize in 1957.

Memberships and awards

Personal life

Nalivkin married fellow geologist A.K. Zvorykina. He died in Saint Petersburg in 1982.