Background
Vacquier was born in Saint St. Petersburg, Russia.
oceanographer university professor
Vacquier was born in Saint St. Petersburg, Russia.
He received a Bachelor of Surgery in electrical engineering in 1927 from the University of Wisconsin, and a master"s degree in physics in 1929, but never earned a Doctor of Philosophy He worked for Gulf Research Laboratories, the research arm of Gulf Oil, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then during World World War II he moved to the Airborne Instruments Laboratory at Columbia University, where he applied the fluxgate magnetometer, an instrument he had invented at Gulf, to submarine detection.
In 1920, Vacquier escaped the Russian Civil War with his family, taking a horse-drawn sleigh across the ice of the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki, then moving to France and (in 1923) to the United States. Following the war, he worked at Sperry Gyroscope Incorporated. developing gyrocompasses. Then in 1953 he moved to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where he worked on groundwater detection.
At Scripps, where he moved in 1957, he directed a program that used his war-surplus flux magnetometers to measure the patterns formed by the Earth"s magnetic field on the sea floor.
His discovery of large shifts in the patterns in the Mendocino Fracture Zone was a major impetus behind the theory of plate tectonics, which his later measurements of heat flow on the sea floor also strongly supported. Vacquier"s son, Victor Doctorate. Vacquier, is also a professor at Scripps, where he studies marine reproductive biology.