ABSTRACT
Walther Penck was born in Vienna in 1888 and soon became a fine mountaineer. He went with his father to the United States in 1908–9, when Davis was in Berlin, and met G. K. Gilbert who showed them among other features the great fissure caused by the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The Pencks returned home via Hawaii where Walther became so interested in volcanism that he decided to study geology, which he did at Heidelberg and Vienna. In 1912 he was appointed geologist to the Dirección General de Minas in Buenos Aires and, aided by his mountaineering skill, acquired an authoritative knowledge of parts of the southern Andes. Three years later he became Professor of Mineralogy and Geology at the University of Constantinople (Istanbul) and eventually wrote several articles on this fractured landscape. In 1919 he was given the title of Professor at the University of Leipzig and worked steadily on the results of his researches in the Argentine Andes and Anatolia. He also continued active field work in southern Germany and the Eastern Alps, usually accompanied by his wife, in Davis’ words ‘the charming Use’. But he was already ill and on 29 September 1923, at the early age of thirty-five, died of cancer in the mouth.
