Chamberlin, Rollin T. (Rollin Thomas), 1881-1948

Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin was born in 1843 in the area of Mattoon, Illinois: in his own words, "on the crest of the Shelbyville moraine…under the great six-tailed comet of 1843." He received his undergraduate degree from Beloit College in 1866. After completing graduate studies at the Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan, he returned to Beloit as Professor of Geology in 1873. He taught there and at Columbia University before serving as President of the University of Wisconsin from 1887 until 1892.

Chamberlin's education and early career coincided with an extremely important period in American geology, both in terms of knowledge and institutional structure. The expansion of mining, the discovery of North American dinosaurs, and the mapping of glaciers provided new opportunities for study. At universities geology was increasingly recognized as a discipline separate from geography and requiring its own department. The developing field was fostered by national organizations such as the United States Geological Survey (USGS, founded 1879) and the Geological Society of America (founded 1888). Chamberlin conducted his first research on glaciers and glacial movement. He was variously State Geologist of Wisconsin (1876 -1882), chief of the USGS Glacial Division (1881-1904) and geologist to the Peary Expedition in Greenland (1894). His work in Wisconsin articulated some of the basic laws of glacier movement and glacial stages, still accepted by geologists. His study of the multiple stages of glaciation informed his interest in climate change and the future habitability of earth.

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