SOBOLEV 364 



SQBOLEV, V^LADIMIR STEPANQVICH (Petrographer and 

 Mineralogist) 



V. S. Sobolev was born May 30, 1908 in the city of Lugansk 

 and spent his childhood in Vinnitsa. In 1930, he graduated from 

 the Leningrad Mining Institute. In 1936, his monograph, * Pet- 

 rology of the Traprocks of the Siberian Plateau" was accepted 

 as his doctoral dissertation, and he received the title of pro- 

 fessor. In 1951, he was elected Corresponding Member of the 

 Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and on March 28, 1958, he was 

 elected Academician of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. He 

 is currently a member of the Council and the Editorial Council 

 of the Lvov Geological Society. He received a Stalin Prize in 

 1949. 



Sobolev started his research as a student first in 1928 in the 

 Geological Committee and then in the Central Scientific Re- 

 search Institute of Geological Survey and the All -Union Geo- 

 logical Scientific Research Institute. He began his investi- 

 gations in the Ukraine in 1936 and continued them in 1945, 

 following his transfer to the University of Lvov. He has been 

 teaching since 1931. In 1931-41 and 1942-45, he was employed 

 by the Leningrad Mining Institute and in 1939 was made pro- 

 fessor. He also taught in the University of Irkutsk from 1941- 

 45. From 1943 to 1945, he served as Director of the Mineral- 

 ogy Department of the Leningrad Mining Institute and as Di- 

 rector of the Fedorov Institute. In 1945, he joined the University 

 of Lvov as chairman of the Petrography Department. In 1947, 

 he began working at the Institute of the Geology of Minerals in 

 the Ukrainian S.S.R. in Lvov. 



Sobolev is the author of over 100 scientific papers dealing 

 chiefly with three subjects: petrography and mineralogy of 

 Siberia, petrography and mineralogy of the Ukraine, and theo- 

 retical aspects of mineralogy and petrography. He has devoted 

 many years to the study of the traprock of the Siberian Plateau. 

 He demonstrated that the formation of various rock minerals is 

 associated with the crystallization differentiation whose sensi- 

 tive index is the FeO:MgO ratio. His study of the mineralogy 

 of Siberia gave the first description of a rare paragenesis of 

 the contact calcium silicates — spurrite, merwinite, cuspidine. 

 In addition, he has discovered and described the magnetite de- 

 posits in the Ilimpeya River. 



In his monograph on traprock, Sobolev furnished a survey of 

 the corresponding formations of the earth's crust, stressing the 

 similarity of the Siberian plateau geology to that of the Karoo 

 plateau (South Africa). This analogy became more conclusive 



