Professional Career
Cloud's professional career alternated between the United States Geological Survey (where he was chief paleontologist from 1949-1959) and academia (Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, 1940-41; Harvard University, 1946-1948; University of Minnesota, 1961-1965; then the University of California from 1965 until his death in 1991). While at UCSB he founded that institution's Preston Cloud Research Laboratory, originally dedicated to paleomicrobiology and to studies of the first lunar geological samples from the Apollo 11 space mission.
Cloud was a member of the National Academy of Sciences for thirty years, he was chairman of the Geology Section and occupied positions in its Council and Executive Committee. In 1967-69 he headed the Academy's "Committee on Resources and Man", whose alarming report "Resources and Man" introduced to a wider public, among other things, the work on energy-resources of his friend M. King Hubbert, and the Hubbert peak theory of Peak oil production. He also gave the Hadean geologic eon, Earth's earliest, its name, using the Greek word for the Underworld to refer to a molten state of constant heat.
Cloud was the author of over 200 scientific and lay publications: notably, his 1978 book, "Cosmos, Earth, and Man: A Short History of the Universe", written for a general readership, has been called 'one of the first and finest presentations of "a more ample and more coherent picture of the world"' (Alles), and his 1988 "Oasis in Space: Earth History from the Beginning" a "comprehensive work of synthesis and reflection... a documented history of the earth and life on it... and an impressive capstone to his remarkable scholarship" (Crowell).
One of Cloud's scientific heirs, his nephew John P. Grotzinger, is the Project Scientist for the NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover Mission Team.
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