Peter William Francis (1944–1999) was a British

volcanologist A volcanologist, or volcano scientist, is a geologist who focuses on understanding the formation and eruptive activity of volcanoes. Volcanologists frequently visit volcanoes, sometimes active ones, to observe and monitor volcanic eruptions, col ...

specialising in the study of active

volcano A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where tectonic plates are ...

es on both the Earth and other planets in the

Solar System The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar S ...

. He was also renowned for his ability as a communicator, reaching the general public in a series of popular and acclaimed books on his subject.

Education and early life

He was born in 1944 in

Mufulira Mufulira, is a town in the Copperbelt Province of Zambia. Mufulira means "Place of Abundance and Peace". The town developed around the Mufulira Copper Mine in the 1930s. The town also serves as the administrative capital of Mufulira District. ...

Zambia Zambia (), officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern and East Africa, although it is typically referred to as being in Southern Africa at its most cent ...

, and studied geology at

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

. His doctoral thesis investigated the

structural geology Structural geology is the study of the three-dimensional distribution of rock units with respect to their deformational histories. The primary goal of structural geology is to use measurements of present-day rock geometries to uncover informatio ...

of Barra, Lewis and Harris in the

Hebrides The Hebrides (; gd, Innse Gall, ; non, Suðreyjar, "southern isles") are an archipelago off the west coast of the Scottish mainland. The islands fall into two main groups, based on their proximity to the mainland: the Inner and Outer Hebrid ...

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

Career and research

His PhD was followed by fieldwork in the central Andes of northern

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...

, a region with which his name would become synonymous in later years. He became a volcanologist recruited to the

Open University The Open University (OU) is a British public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students. The majority of the OU's undergraduate students are based in the United Kingdom and principally study off- ...

in 1971, he continued his fieldwork in the Andes, and complemented this with image analysis using

Landsat The Landsat program is the longest-running enterprise for acquisition of satellite imagery of Earth. It is a joint NASA / USGS program. On 23 July 1972, the Earth Resources Technology Satellite was launched. This was eventually renamed to Lan ...

images which were becoming available in the early-1970s. This work enabled him and co-workers to recognise many large volcanic features in the central Andes, including

debris avalanche Debris flows are geological phenomena in which water-laden masses of soil and fragmented rock rush down mountainsides, funnel into stream channels, entrain objects in their paths, and form thick, muddy deposits on valley floors. They generally ...

deposits from multiple volcanic edifices. One prominent example is the almost perfectly preserved deposit at

Socompa Socompa is a large stratovolcano at the border of Argentina and Chile with an elevation of metres. Part of the Chilean and Argentine Andean Volcanic Belt (AVB), it is part of the Central Volcanic Zone, one of the various segments of the AVB. Th ...

Volcano, Chile. The imagery also revealed several larger structures on the Andean

altiplano The Altiplano (Spanish for "high plain"), Collao (Quechua and Aymara: Qullaw, meaning "place of the Qulla") or Andean Plateau, in west-central South America, is the most extensive high plateau on Earth outside Tibet. The plateau is located at the ...

, which proved to be a series of large

caldera A caldera ( ) is a large cauldron-like hollow that forms shortly after the emptying of a magma chamber in a volcano eruption. When large volumes of magma are erupted over a short time, structural support for the rock above the magma chamber is ...

s. These included the large La Pacana and Cerro Galán calderas. Fieldwork in 1982 at Cerro Galán, in the remote northwest of Argentina, which involved the support of both UK and

Argentine Argentines (mistakenly translated Argentineans in the past; in Spanish (masculine) or (feminine)) are people identified with the country of Argentina. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Argentines, s ...

armed forces, was the last co-operation between the two countries before the Falkland Islands / Las Malvinas conflict later that year. He was visiting scholar at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, Texas, and subsequently as a Visiting Professor in the Planetary Geosciences Division of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, Hawaii, he were followed in 1991 by a return to the Open University, where he was Director of Teaching from 1996 and Professor of Volcanology from 1998. His drive to promote the science of volcanology led to the publication in 1976 of his highly successful Penguin book ''Volcanoes'', which was followed in 1993 by ''Volcanoes: a Planetary perspective''.Francis, P. W., 1993, ''Volcanoes: a Planetary perspective'', Oxford University Press, 443pp These books brought volcanology to a far wider audience than previous works aimed at the scientific community.

Personal life

Peter Francis died after suffering a sudden heart-attack on 30 October 1999, while in Paris, France with his wife Mary.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Francis, Peter William British volcanologists 1944 births 1999 deaths Alumni of Imperial College London Academics of the Open University