Career
In 1924, Clark moved to Montreal to take an assistant professor position in the Geology Department at McGill University. He began by teaching geology, paleontology and stratigraphy. In 1926, Clark began a major project to map the geology of the Quebec Appalachian Mountains along the U.S. border in the Eastern Townships. He published a series of papers on the geology and paleontology of the Townships. These papers established him as a leading geologist in Canada.
In 1927, he married Olive Marguerite Melvenia Prichard, a former student. They had a daughter, Joan.
Clark served as Director of McGill's Redpath Museum from 1932 to 1952. He was largely responsible for personally collecting many of the museum's fossils. After ten years, Clark shifted his focus away from the Eastern Townships. He discovered that early maps of Laval were incorrect, so he proposed the production of a completely new map of the Montreal area. He began that project as well as a project to map the St. Lawrence lowlands in 1938. By the late 1960s, Montreal's development and various projects along the St. Lawrence seaway necessitated a revision of Clark's previous geological studies of the area. He was charged with undertaking the field work. This time the work involved capturing information from the many oil and gas and engineering projects, as well as acquiring core samples from excavations for future research.
Over the years, Clark authored more than 100 scientific publications. He co-authored with Colin W. Stearn The Geological Evolution of North America (1960), which was a standard text in university-level geology.
Clark retired at the age of 100, after 69 years at McGill, in May 1993. He died in Montreal three years later.
Read more about this topic: T. H. Clark
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)