Alexander Fersman was a Soviet geochemist and mineralogist. He made sizable contributions to the solution of the frequency of distribution of the chemical elements in the rocks of the clarkes; was the first to consider the problem of regional geochemistry and the division of European Russia into geochemical districts; and he provided a classification of hypogene processes.
Background
Alexander Fersman was born on November 8, 1883, in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire. His father, Evgeny Aleksandrovich Fersman, was an architect and later a soldier. The atmosphere of his home, which encouraged both art and thought, was unusual in the military environment of that day. Fersman’s mother, Maria Eduardovna Kessler, was a talented pianist and painter; her brother, A. E. Kessler, who studied under the well-known chemist A. M. Butlerov, was also an important influence on the boy’s education.
The Fersman family usually spent the summer holidays on Kessler’s estate near Simferopol, and there, in the Crimean mountains, young Fersman was attracted to mineralogy and began his first mineral collection. The development of his interests was furthered by a trip to Czechoslovakia, to which the family was obliged to go because of the mother’s illness. There, in Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), an old mining area that was no longer prosperous, he could purchase crystals and druses to fill out his mineral collection.
Education
By the time Fersman graduated from the Odessa Classical Gymnasium in 1901, with a gold medal, his interests had already been formed; he was very much interested in mineralogy, he had a good mineralogical collection, and he had accumulated a substantial store of personal observations.
In Novorossisk University, which Fersman entered, the lecture course in descriptive mineralogy was extremely boring, and Fersman at first wished to give up mineralogy and study the history of art instead. Friends of his family, Professor P. G. Melikashvili and the chemist A. I. Gorbov, advised him to give up this idea and to study the structure of matter and questions of molecular chemistry. To B. P. Veynberg, a student of D. I. Mendeleev and a specialist in physical chemistry, Fersman owed his acquaintance with ideas on the nature of crystalline substances, such as ice and frost patterns.
In 1903 Fersman’s father was given command of the First Moscow Cadet Corps, and the son transferred to Moscow University. Here he approached the head of the department of mineralogy, V. I. Vernadsky, who found him a place in his laboratory. There Fersman mastered the goniometric method of measuring crystals. He worked persistently, and while still a student (1904-1907) he published his first seven scientific works, devoted to crystallography and the mineralogy of stolpenite, gmelinite, and other substances. Fersman graduated from the university in 1907.
Career
When Fersman graduated from the university in 1907, Vernadsky retained him in his department to prepare to become a professor. In 1908 Fersman worked in Victor Goldschmidt’s laboratory at Heidelberg University, where he perfected his crystallographic and optical methods. He was commissioned by Goldschmidt to make a tour of the most important jewelers of western Europe and select the most interesting crystals of natural diamonds for study. In Frankfurt, Hanau, and Berlin tens of thousands of carats of diamonds were displayed before him on special tables. As a result of these observations, Goldschmidt and Fersman wrote a joint monograph on the crystallography of the diamond (1911) that is still significant.
At Heidelberg, Fersman attended Rosenbusch’s lectures on petrography. In France, he visited Lacroix’s laboratory in Paris and made a trip to study the pegmatites of the islands in the Elbe. This trip played a large role in determining his scientific interests, for Fersman later dedicated many years to research on pegmatites.
In 1912 Fersman became a senior curator in the mineralogical section of the Geological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the same year, for the first time, he gave a course in geochemistry at Shanyavsky University in Moscow. He also took part in the organization of a popular scientific journal, Priroda, to which he gave considerable attention throughout his life. In it, he published major articles and notes on geochemistry and mineralogy, diamonds, alloys of radium, emeralds, zeolites, platinum, gases, and other useful minerals found in Russia and other countries.
In 1914 the first period of Fersman’s scientific activity came to a close, when his great gift for and inclination toward scientific synthesis and theoretical generalization became apparent.
At the beginning of 1915, a commission was organized in the Academy of Sciences for the study of the natural resources of Russia, and Fersman was elected scientific secretary. In connection with the work of the commission he studied the deposits of various useful minerals in the Crimea, Mongolia, Trans-Baykal, the Urals, the Altai, and various regions of European Russia.
During World War I, Fersman traveled to the front and compiled geological maps showing the location of construction materials and water-bearing and waterproof horizons, knowledge of which was important for successful military operations. During this period Fersman faced, in the broadest form, the problems of use of mineral raw materials. He was interested in economics and technology, as well as in mineralogy and geology.
Soon after the Russian Revolution, Lenin turned to the Academy of Sciences for definitions of the new problems facing science. He talked with Fersman, who was impressed with his concern for efficient placement of industry nearer to mineral raw materials and for guaranteeing the Soviet Republic a domestic supply of raw materials. All this awakened Fersman’s interest and influenced the direction and planning of his scientific research.
In the winter of 1919-1920 Fersman gave a course of lectures at Petrograd (now Leningrad) University on the geochemistry of Russia, and in the following year repeated it at the Geographical Institute of Petrograd.
Fersman made sizable contributions to the solution of an important theoretical problem of geochemistry: the frequency of distribution of the chemical elements in the rocks of the earth’s crust (clarkes). The term “clarke” was proposed by Fersman in honor of the American scientist F. W. Clarke, one of the first to consider this problem in his fundamental work. The Relative Abundance of the Chemical Elements (1889). Fersman calculated the clarkes for most of the elements. Before Fersman, clarkes were expressed in weight percentages. He showed that for geochemical purposes the atomic percentages were more important, thus introducing into science the concept of “atomic clarkes.”
As a result, he discovered the independence of geochemical abundances from the positions of the elements in the periodic system and the concentration and depletion of the various elements. He showed that abundances within the earth’s crust were determined by the effects of the migration of the elements, while abundances in space were related to the stability of the atomic nucleus. He was the first to consider the problem of regional geochemistry and the division of European Russia into geochemical districts, and he provided a classification of hypogene processes. An expanded course of these lectures was published in 1922.
Fersman published the monograph Precious and Colored Stones of Russia, as well as works on feldspar, fuller’s earth, and saline mud.
Noteworthy among his numerous investigations and expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s is his work in the Khibiny Mountains (Kola Peninsula). He first traveled to the Khibiny Mountains in May 1920, as a member of the commission of the Murmansk railroad, which was headed by the president of the Academy of Sciences, A. P. Karpinsky, and the geologist A. P. Gerasimov. Fersman later expended much of his creative energy in the study of the Khibiny Mountains. He led many expeditions, and his research enabled him to combine separate facts and observations into a coherent system providing an integrated view of the formation processes of the geological structures of the Fenno-Scandinavian shield.
The mineralogical and geochemical research in the Khibiny was crowned by the discovery of great deposits of apatite. Fersman was not only a scientist but also the developer of this inhospitable region. At his initiative, the Khibiny mining station was opened in 1937, and Fersman was its first director. This station later grew into an important scientific institution: the Kola branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Fersman’s study of central Asia began in 1924 and continued until the 1940s. At the beginning of his work, it was believed that central Asia had few deposits of useful minerals. He carried out considerable scientific research to show the mineral riches there and thus refuted that erroneous belief. Fersman discovered in the Karakum Desert deposits of virgin sulfur; with his help, a sulfur refinery was built on the site of the discovery and has supplied the Soviet Union with sulfur ever since.
In the Urals, Fersman investigated pegmatite, rare elements, and deposits of copper, chromium, and other useful minerals. In Siberia, he began research showing the value of further study and the great richness of the deposits there. Fersman wrote the important works Geochemical Problems of Siberia and Geochemical Problems of the [Soviet] Union.
During World War II, Fersman was concerned with military geology and problems of securing strategic materials. He headed the Commission for the Geological-Geographical Services of the Red Army, to which he attracted many important specialists. He traveled to the front many times with reports and lectures on strategic materials and military geology. In this period he wrote several books and articles on strategic materials of the Soviet Union and Germany, and by comparing them showed that the Soviet Union’s military potential guaranteed its victory.
Fersman gave much attention to the history of science. He tried to show the origins of scientific ideas and the achievements of researchers, in particular, his predecessors D. I. Mendeleev and V. I. Vernadsky. With particular warmth, he wrote of those who, with him, created the new science of geochemistry and of his teachers Vernadsky, Goldschmidt, and G. Hevesy, among others. Fersman had the ability to write sketches that give clear pictures of scientists. Reading his Entertaining Geochemistry, one can learn of the remarkable work of Marie Curie, A. P. Karpinsky, N. S. Kurnakov, P. I. Preobrazhensky, V. G. Khlopin, and many other distinguished scientists. Through his popular articles, sketches, and books, such as Entertaining Mineralogy, Traveling for Rocks, Recollections About Rocks, Tales of Semiprecious Stones, Fersman helped explain the practical significance of theoretical research in geology.
His scientific creativity was characterized by an exceptionally broad scope and an integral view of nature. With a good understanding of the underlying relationships between various phenomena, he was a master of theoretical generalization and scientific synthesis.
Of major significance were Fersman’s works in geochemistry, which he, like his teacher Vernadsky, understood more deeply and more broadly than his contemporaries. According to his definition, geochemistry should concern the history of atoms of chemical elements in the earth’s crust and their behavior under various thermodynamic, physical, and chemical conditions of nature. Fersman showed with great clarity the significance of Mendeleev’s periodic law for geochemistry.
All his life Fersman did research in mineralogy and geochemistry; he showed graphically, vividly, and in a fascinating way that these sciences do not consist of dry ideas, of inanimate, dead objects of nature; rather, they are sciences of the origins and history of natural phenomena, the complex chemical processes that form the face of the earth and that slowly but inexorably transform what appears to be lifeless stone into new chemical compounds. The idea of geochemical character lay at the basis of all his further work, which was closely connected with the study of the useful minerals of the U.S.S.R. It appeared to him that at the foundation of all surrounding life, all surrounding transformations, and even of the very life processes themselves lay the laws of the dispersion and combination of ninety chemical elements, from which the earth and all of space are constructed, and that one cannot, by studying it only in the laboratory, tear lifeless stone away from the great laboratory of nature in which its transformations take place.
In The Chemical Elements of the Earth and Space, Fersman extended the problem of the history of the elements to the universe; in Geochemistry of Russia, he had tried to apply these ideas to the understanding of those different phenomena which take place in widely distant regions of the U.S.S.R. Most important in Fersman’s work is his constant recurrence to the basic problems posed in the past, introducing the study of chemical processes into the chemistry of space while still taking each element back from space to earth and giving attention to its use by man.
In 1932 Vernadsky, following the publication of the monograph Pegmatites, expressed pleasure with this new and important work, through which scientists have come to a deeper understanding of the world’s structure and of the role of atoms in that structure, about which C. F. Shonbein and Faraday had theorized in the late 1830s. The periodicity of properties in space pointed to a spiral pattern of phenomena, the more so since for the periodic system the spiral was very important.
Fersman asserted that the whole course of chemical processes in space is simply a great Mendeleevian system, in which the laws of energetics and the level of energy govern separate cells, moving elements and combinations of elements about in time and space. The places of the elements in the periodic system reflected a definite step in the chemical history of the earth and the universe, between which there is an inner connection.
Views
Fersman’s ideas frequently were ahead of his time, and in many of his works, he foresaw the future, describing future science and technology. In a special sketch, his attention is drawn to future achievements: the use of atmospheric gases, the ozone screen, the warmth of the earth’s depths, atomic energy, the energy of ocean waves and winds, and of new synthetic carbon compounds, and of man’s penetration into space.
In calling the geochemical activity of mankind “technogenesis,” Fersman meant the economic and industrial activity of man, according to his own scale and significance, compared with the processes of nature herself. Technogenesis basically leads to the extraction of chemical elements from the earth, the redistribution of elements from the depths on the earth’s surface, and the agricultural and engineering regrouping of elements.
Analyzing the pattern of use of separate elements, its connection with clarkes, and the role of clarkes of concentration, Fersman showed that man concentrates certain elements (gold, platinum, silver, and so forth) and disperses others (carbon, tin, magnesium, silicon, and so forth). As a result, he defined the basic geochemical relations between man and nature and noted that the laws of geochemistry force man to seek technical solutions in the use of poor lodes with scattered and rare elements.
Membership
In 1919 Fersman was elected to the Academy of Sciences. He was an active leader of the Academy, occupying at various times the posts of vice-president, member of the Presidium, academician-secretary of the Section of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, president of the Council for the Study of Natural Resources, and director of publications. He was also elected a member or corresponding member of sixteen scientific organizations and societies in his native country and abroad.
Personality
Besides imparting his own enthusiasm for science to his students and colleagues, Fersman was modest and encouraged the progress of other researchers.