Gelmersen, Grigorii Petrovich

Gel’mersen, Grigorii Petrovich 

Born Sept. 29, 1803, in Dukershof, Estonia; died Feb. 3, 1885, in St. Petersburg. Russian geologist. Graduated from the University of Dorpat (now Tartu) in 1825 and from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1838.

Gel’mersen became a permanent academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1850. He was the director of the St. Petersburg Mining Institute from 1865 to 1872 and was one of the organizers and the first director of the Geological Committee (beginning in 1882). He conducted geological research in the Urals, the Altai, and Middle Asia and studied the Donets and Dombrov coal basins, iron ore in the Moscow region, mud volcanoes and oil deposits on the Taman and Kerch peninsulas, and so on. He made several maps, including one of the first geological maps of European Russia (1841).