Richard Joel Russell (16 November 1895 – 17 September 1971) was an American professor of physical geography and geology at the

Louisiana State University Louisiana State University (officially Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, commonly referred to as LSU) is a public land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The university was founded in 1860 nea ...

who contributed to pioneering studies of long-term

climatology Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "place, zone"; and , '' -logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. This modern field of stud ...

and geomorphology. Russell was born in

Hayward, California Hayward () is a city located in Alameda County, California in the East Bay subregion of the San Francisco Bay Area. With a population of 162,954 as of 2020, Hayward is the sixth largest city in the Bay Area and the third largest in Alameda Coun ...

to Nellie Potter Morril and lawyer Frederick James. His early education was in Honololu where he went to the Punahou Kindergarten. The family moved back to California and studied at the Hayward High School before going to the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

where he began to study forestry in 1915 after becoming interested on a hunting trip in Santa Lucia. At the age of seventeen he was into numerous pastimes and his first publication was on a new technique for processing color photographs. He was drafted into

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

service but discharged after it was found that a compound fracture had set badly making him physically unfit. He was then assigned to teach seamanship and gunnery. After the war he returned to university and began to study paleontology under

John C. Merriam John Campbell Merriam (October 20, 1869 – October 30, 1945) was an American paleontologist, educator, and conservation biology, conservationist. The first vertebrate paleontologist on the West Coast of the United States, he is best known fo ...

and graduated in 1920. He went on expeditions with

Chester Stock Chester Stock (28 January 1892 – 7 December 1950) was an American paleontologist who specialized in the Pleistocene mammalian fauna of the Rancho La Brea tar pits. He served as a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology, ...

into Nevada and Oregon in 1919-20 and took up a teaching fellowship, while also substituting for Professor

Ruliff S. Holway Ruliff Stephen Holway (or Ruliff S. Holway; 4 May 1857 - 2 December 1927) was a professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley between 1904 and 1923. He was interested in the relations between humans and geography. Life Ruliff ...

in teaching geography. During his teaching career, he worked with his students to produce a summary of past climate called ''Climates of California'' which was to prove very influential. He studied petrography and

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 ...

for his doctorate under George D. Louderback in 1926. He then moved to Texas Technical College, Lubbock as an associate professor. He began to work on his climate research and produced ''Dry Climates of the United States'' (1931) which emphasized the use of median values rather than averages. In 1928 he joined

at Baton Rouge and involved in setting up a geography course along with Henry V. Howe. In 1954 he established the Coastal Studies Institute and directed it until 1966. Russell was married twice, first to Mary Dorothy King in 1925 and after her death he married Josephine Burke in 1940. He had a son from the first marriage and four from the second.

References

External links

''Climate Change through the Ages''
in ''Climate and Man'' (1941) {{DEFAULTSORT:Russell, Richard Joel 1895 births 1971 deaths American geologists American climatologists