1893–1966
○ Natural causes
A geologist who helped design the Soviet uranium search
In 1943, he proposed concentrating scarce exploration resources on Central Asia rather than searching everywhere.
Dmitry Shcherbakov was a Soviet geologist, geochemist, geographer, and scientific organizer who studied Central Asia and rare metals. His Pamir and Central Asian expeditions helped develop metallogenic methods for predicting ore deposits, while wartime work directed geological knowledge toward strategic resources. In 1943 he joined the Uranium Commission, wrote a report assessing Soviet uranium prospects, and urged concentrating limited time and resources on exploration in Central Asia. That choice helped organize the uranium prospecting network needed by the nascent Soviet atomic project.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1914Senior collector, Fergana radium expedition
- 1921–1930Researcher, Commission for the Study of the Natural Productive Forces
- 1925–1930Head of the mineralogical-geochemical section, State Radium Institute
- 1928–1936Scientific head, Pamir and Central Asian expeditions
- 1930–1938Deputy director, Geochemical Institute and Institute of Geological Sciences
- 1942–1943Head, Caucasus expedition of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Geological Sciences
- 1943Member, Uranium Commission at the All-Union Institute of Mineral Resources
- 1953–1966Full member, Academy of Sciences of the USSR
Related historical events
Organizer of Soviet geology, 1953-1963
On 23 October 1953 Shcherbakov was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and almost at the same time he became academician-secretary of its Department of Geological and Geographical Sciences, placing him at the head of Soviet geology and geography as a whole. In the 1950s he coordinated all radiological research carried out in the country; for him uranium was the driving element behind the rapid postwar growth of geological science. He held that the expansion of prospecting and research had not only laid the foundations of a theory of uranium ore formation but had substantially advanced the general theory of ore formation.
Research continued alongside the organizational work. When he briefly took charge of the Central Asian expedition again in the early 1950s, his new studies substantiated one of the main criteria of prospecting, regional mineralization: the Precambrian substrate beneath active mobile zones, acted on by magmatic processes, gases and hydrothermal solutions, had contributed greatly to individual metallogenic provinces being mineralized with particular metals.
He held several posts at once. He worked on the Commission for Determining the Absolute Age of Geological Formations, was a member of the Academy's Council for the Study of Productive Forces, and edited the journals Izvestiya AN SSSR, Geological Series (from 1954) and Priroda (from 1957). From 1955 he headed the Interdepartmental Scientific Council on Antarctic Research at the Academy of Sciences. In 1963 he left the post of academician-secretary, judging that he should make way for younger people, and thereafter directed two research departments at the Institute of Ore Deposit Geology, Petrography, Mineralogy and Geochemistry. In these years he continued his work on the tectonics and metallogeny of activated regions, receiving the Karpinsky Gold Medal in 1963 for his work in geology, petrography and mineral resources, and the Lenin Prize in 1965 for establishing the geological and geochemical foundations of mineral prospecting.