Victor Vacquier

Victor Vacquier, Sr.(October 13, 1907 – January 11, 2009) was a professor of geophysics at theScripps Institution of Oceanographyat theUniversity of California, San Diego.

Vacquier was born inSt. Petersburg,Russia.In 1920, Vacquier escaped theRussian Civil Warwith his family, taking ahorse-drawn sleighacross the ice of the Gulf of Finland toHelsinki,then moving toFranceand (in 1923) to the United States.He received a B.S. inelectrical engineeringin 1927 from theUniversity of Wisconsin,and a master's degree in physics in 1929, but never earned a Ph.D.He worked forGulf Research Laboratories,the research arm ofGulf Oil,inPittsburgh, Pennsylvania,and then duringWorld War IIhe moved to theAirborne Instruments LaboratoryatColumbia University,where he applied thefluxgate magnetometer,an instrument he had invented at Gulf, tosubmarine detection.Following the war, he worked atSperry Gyroscope Inc.developinggyrocompasses;then in 1953 he moved to theNew Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology,where he worked ongroundwaterdetection.At Scripps, where he moved in 1957, he directed a program that used his war-surplus flux magnetometers to measure thepatterns formed by the Earth's magnetic field on the sea floor;his discovery of large shifts in the patterns in theMendocino Fracture Zonewas a major impetus behind the theory ofplate tectonics,which his later measurements of heat flow on the sea floor also strongly supported.

For his researches, Vacquier was awarded theJohn Price Wetherill Medalof theFranklin Institutein 1960, the Albatross Award of theAmerican Miscellaneous Societyin 1963, theJohn Adam Fleming Medalof theAmerican Geophysical Unionin 1973, the Reginald Fessenden Award of theSociety of Exploration Geophysicistsin 1976,and theAlexander Agassiz Medalof theUnited States National Academy of Sciencesin 1995 “for his discovery of the flux-gate magnetometer, and for themarine magnetic anomalysurveys that led to the acceptance of the theory ofsea-floor spreading.”He died inLa Jolla, Californiaon January 11, 2009.

Vacquier's son,Victor D. Vacquier,is also a professor at Scripps, where he studies marinereproductive biology.