Colin Ballantyne
Colin Kerr Ballantyne is a Scottish geomorphologist, geologist, and physical geographer.
Education and career
Colin K. Ballantyne graduated in 1973 with an M.A. from the University of Glasgow, where he was influenced by Robert John Price to study geomorphology and Quaternary geology. Ballantyne graduated in 1975 with an MSc from Ontario's McMaster University, where he was part of a team led by S. Brian McCann studying high arctic hydrology and fluvial processes. In 1975 Ballantyne returned to Scotland and became a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh. There he graduated in 1980 with a PhD thesis on the periglacial geomorphology of mountains in northwestern Scotland. His PhD thesis was supervised by Brian Sissons.At the University of St Andrews, Ballantyne was a lecturer in geography from 1980 to 1989, a senior lecturer in geography and geology from 1989 to 1994, and a professor of physical geography from 1994 to 31 January 2015, when he retired as professor emeritus. In the School of Geography and Geosciences of the University of St Andrews, he was the head from 1998 to 2000 and the director of research from 2007 and 2012. Since 2000 he is a guest professor at University Centre Svalbard in Svalbard, Norway. He was twice an Erskine Fellow at New Zealand's University of Canterbury, where he has taught summer school courses over many years. As a professor at the University of St Andrews, Ballantyne conducted annual honours field courses in Norway – on one such occasion his students included the future Duke of Cambridge.
Research
Colin K. Ballantyne is the author or co-author of more than 150 articles in refereed journals.Much of Ballantyne's reputation is based upon his reconstruction of the extent and deglaciation chronology of the last British-Irish ice sheet and his 2002 model of paraglacial landscape modification. He and his co-workers have done research on geomorphological mapping, glaciation, and periglaciation, as well as many related topics such as frost weathering, nivation, solifluction, hydrology, debris flow, rockfall, slope stability, and wind erosion. He was the co-author, with Charles Harris, of The Periglaciation of Great Britain, which for the next two decades was an essential reference for periglacial research in the British Isles. In the Hebrides, Ballantyne single-handedly did field mapping and theoretical reconstruction of former glacier limits on all the major islands between Orkney and Arran. In 2012 he was the co-author, with Derek Fabel and Sheng Xu, of an important article that presented convincing evidence that periglacial trimlines, instead of representing the maximum altitude of the last ice sheet, actually represent thermal boundaries which separated wet-based ice at pressure melting point from cold-based ice on summit plateaus. The evidence consisted of establishing the dates of high-level erratic boulders above trimlines on five mountains in northwestern Scotland and empirically demonstrating that the last ice sheet overtopped the five mountains.