Felix M. Gradstein

As a micropaleontologist and marine stratigrapher Felix also was an active participant in expeditions of the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) and International Ocean Drilling Project (IODP). As a co-chief scientist in 1980 on DSDP Leg 76 in the Blake Bahama Basin the age of the Atlantic Ocean (~ 165 Ma) was discovered.

Felix M. Gradstein (born 1941, in the Netherlands) is a Dutch-Canadian academic and a pioneer in quantitative stratigraphy and geologic time scale. At the University of Utrecht, he studied paleontology and stratigraphy, obtaining his Ph.D. taking a novel biometrical approach in micropaleontology, under the supervision of Professor CW Drooger. In 1976, after working two years for an oil company in Calgary, Canada, he joined the Geological Survey of Canada in its eastern division at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia. During his research there, he was instrumental in developing a novel quantitative method for the analysis of stratigraphic events. In 1992 Felix moved to Norway where he currently has an office at the University of Oslo and is Visiting Research Fellow at, University of Portsmouth, UK. From 1985 - 1989, he was chairman of International Geoscience Project (IGCP) 181 on Quantitative Stratigraphy. From 2000 to 2008 he was chair of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and in 2010 was instrumental in founding the Geologic Time Scale Foundation. For his fundamental work concerning the Geologic Time Scale, geochronology in general, quantitative stratigraphy, and micropaleontology, the European Geosciences Union awarded him in 2010 the Jean Baptiste Lamarck Medal. Prof. Gradstein, a world-renowned stratigrapher discussed debates over the Geologic Time Scale with the Anthropocene working Group.