Vladimir Vernadsky


Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, also spelt Volodymyr Ivanovych Vernadsky, was a Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet mineralogist and geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology. He was one of the founders and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Vladimir Vernadsky is most noted for his 1926 book The Biosphere in which he inadvertently worked to popularize Eduard Suess's 1875 term biosphere, by hypothesizing that life is the geological force that shapes the earth. In 1943 he was awarded the Stalin Prize. Vernadsky's portrait is depicted on the Ukrainian ₴1,000 hryvnia banknote.

Early life

Vernadsky was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, on in the family of the native Kyiv residents Russian Imperial economist Ivan Vernadsky and Anna Konstantinovich, who came from an old Russian noble family. According to family legend, his father's ancestors were Zaporozhian Cossacks. Ivan Vernadsky had been a professor of political economy in Kyiv at the St. Vladimir University before moving to Saint Petersburg; then he was an Active State Councillor and worked in the Governing Senate in St. Petersburg. He was also an editor of a liberal journal which opposed censorship and serfdom. Anna Konstantinovich was a music instructor of Ukrainian Cossack descent.
In 1868 his family relocated to Kharkiv, where he continued his education, and in 1873 he entered the Kharkiv provincial gymnasium. His father gifted scientific books that included On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and Cosmos by Alexander Humboldt, which was his introduction to early evolutionary theory in relation to nature. Along with the books, his uncle Evgraf Korolenko, a retired civil servant, mentored Vernadsky, taking him on long walks under the stars to discuss the earth and the cosmos. This introduction turned Vernadsky's attention from humanities to science.
Vernadsky graduated from Saint Petersburg State University in 1885. As the position of mineralogist in Saint Petersburg State University was vacant, and Vasily Dokuchaev, a soil scientist, and Alexey Pavlov, a geologist, had been teaching Mineralogy for a while, Vernadsky chose to enter Mineralogy.
Vernadsky chose it because of the proximity to his childhood home, which allowed him to care for his recently widowed mother. Vernadsky went on to study as faculty at Saint Petersburg State University in the Physics-Mathematics program where he specialized in crystallography and mineralogy. Vernadsky graduated in 1885 with a thesis on isomorphous mixtures in minerals.
In 1886, Vernadsky married Natalya E. Staritskaya.
In 1888–1890, he traveled through Europe, studying in Germany, France, England, Switzerland, and Italy, the museums of Paris and London, and worked in Munich and Paris. While abroad, he studied under Henry Le Chatelier, Paul Von Groth, and Ferdinand André Fouqué, supporting his decision to focus his studies in crystallography and minerology. While trying to find a topic for his doctorate, he first went to Naples to study under crystallographer Arcangelo Scacchi, who was senile by that time. Scacchi's condition led Vernadsky to go to Germany to study under Paul Groth, curator of minerals in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Vernadsky learned to use Groth's modern equipment, which included a machine to study the optical, thermal, elastic, magnetic and electrical properties of crystals. He also gained access to the physics lab of Leonhard Sohncke, who was studying crystallisation during that period. In the year 1888, Vernadsky had the opportunity to attend the 4th International Geological Congress held in London before moving on to study under Fouqué and Chatelier in Paris. In 1889, when Dokuchaev declined to attend, Vernadsky took over the World Exhibition in Paris on his behalf. His exhibit featured a display on Russian soils where he earned a gold medal for his organization and presentation.
Vernadsky's father had a huge influence on Vladimir. Vladimir later recalled that before moving from Kharkiv to St. Petersburg, he and his father were abroad and in Milan, they read about a circular in Pyotr Lavrov's newspaper "Forward" that forbade printing in Ukrainian in Russia. In his memoirs, he wrote:
In St. Petersburg, a 15-year-old boy noted in his diary on 29 March 1878:

Political activities

Vernadsky participated in the First General Congress of the zemstvos, held in Petersburg on the eve of the 1905 Russian Revolution to discuss how best to pressure the government to the needs of the Russian society; became a member of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party ; and served in parliament, resigning to protest the Tsar's proroguing of the Duma. He served as professor and later as vice rector of Moscow University, from which he also resigned in 1911 in protest over the government's reactionary policies.
Following the advent of the First World War, his proposal for the establishment of the Commission for the Study of the Natural Productive Forces was adopted by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in February 1915. He published War and the Progress of Science where he stressed the importance of science as regards to its contribution to the war effort:
After the February Revolution of 1917, he served on several commissions of agriculture and education of the provisional government, including as assistant minister of education.
Vladimir Vernadsky had dual "Russian–Ukrainian" identity and considered the Ukrainian culture as part of Russian imperial culture, and even declined to become a Ukrainian citizen in 1918.

Scientific activities

In 1898, Vernadsky moved to Moscow in order to teach at Moscow University. As head of the mineralogical office, he had the opportunity to restore the Freyesleben collection where he fully cataloged and systemized it. During his work as a professor at Moscow University, he conducted 65 field excursions across Russia with students to Siberia, Urals, Caucasus, and Crimea.
Through his work, Vernadsky first popularized the concept of the noosphere and deepened the idea of the biosphere to the meaning largely recognized by today's scientific community. The word 'biosphere' was invented by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, whom Vernadsky met in 1911.
In Vernadsky's theory of the Earth's development, the noosphere is the third stage in the earth's development, after the geosphere and the biosphere. Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition will fundamentally transform the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are essential features of the Earth's evolution and must have been implicit in the earth all along.
Vernadsky's visionary pronouncements were not widely accepted in the West. However, he was one of the first scientists to recognize that the oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere result from biological processes. During the 1920s he published works arguing that living organisms could reshape the planets as surely as any physical force. Vernadsky was an important pioneer of the scientific bases for the environmental sciences.
Vernadsky was a member of the Russian and Soviet Academies of Sciences since 1912 and was a founder and first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was a founder of the National Library of Ukrainian State and worked closely with the Tavrida University in Crimea. During the Russian Civil War, he hosted gatherings of the young intellectuals who later founded the émigré Eurasianism movement.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s Vernadsky played an early advisory role in the Soviet atomic bomb project, as one of the most forceful voices arguing for the exploitation of nuclear power, the surveying of Soviet uranium sources, and having nuclear fission research conducted at his Radium Institute. He died, however, before a full project was pursued.
On religious views, Vernadsky was an atheist. He was interested in Hinduism and Rig Veda.
Vernadsky's son George Vernadsky emigrated to the United States where he published numerous books on medieval and modern Russian history.
The National Library of Ukraine, the Tavrida National University in Crimea and many streets and avenues in Ukraine and Russia are named in honor of Vladimir Vernadsky.
UNESCO sponsored an international scientific conference, "Globalistics-2013", at Moscow State University on 23–25 October 2013, in honor of Vernadsky's 150th birthday.

Legacy

On 25 October 2019 the National Bank of Ukraine put in circulation a ₴1,000 hryvnia banknote with Vernadsky's portrait.

Selected works

  • Geochemistry, published in Russian 1924
  • The Biosphere, first published in Russian in 1926. English translations:
  • *Oracle, AZ, Synergetic Press, 1986,, 86 pp.
  • *tr. David B. Langmuir, ed. Mark A. S. McMenamin, New York, Copernicus, 1997,, 192 pp.
  • Essays on Geochemistry & the Biosphere, tr. Olga Barash, Santa Fe, NM, Synergetic Press,, 2006

    Diaries

  • Dnevniki 1917–1921: oktyabr 1917-yanvar 1920, Kyiv, Naukova dumka, 1994,, 269 pp.
  • Dnevniki. Mart 1921-avgust 1925, Moscow, Nauka, 1998,, 213 pp.
  • Dnevniki 1926–1934, Moscow, Nauka, 2001,, 455 pp.
  • Dnevniki 1935–1941 v dvukh knigakh. Kniga 1, 1935–1938, Moscow, Nauka, 2006,,444 pp.
  • Dnevniki 1935–1941 v dvukh knigakh. Kniga 2, 1939–1941, Moscow, Nauka, 2006,, 295 pp.