Peter E. Baker (geologist)


Peter Edward Baker was a notable British volcanologist, professor emeritus of Igneous Petrology in the School of Earth Sciences, University of Leeds.

Life

Baker graduated in Geology from University of Sheffield in 1960. He then became a PhD research student and later a research fellow at Oxford University. Baker was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Leeds and later reader. He was made professor of Geology at the University of Nottinghamin 1978, ending 1989, following the Earth Sciences Review. Baker went back to Leeds and retired in 1998.
Baker's work was mainly on volcanoes and volcanic rocks of island arcs and oceanic islands. His work began with Mount Misery volcano on the West Indian island of Saint Kitts; continuing with the volcanoes on the islands of Saint Vincent, Montserrat and Saba, Lesser Antilles. The volcano Tristan da Cunha, in the South Atlantic, erupted in 1961; he and others, led by Ian G. Gass, were members of a Royal Society expedition investigating it.
A lava specimen from Cook Island, South Sandwich Islands was the nearest terrestrial equivalent to some of the boulders analysed during the Mars Pathfinder mission of the late 1990s. The South Sandwich Islands are the type example of a primitive oceanic island-arc. Baker worked there and at Deception Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula, as it had a series of volcanic eruptions.
Baker worked on Ojos del Salado, on the Argentina–Chile border, the highest active volcano in the world. He made a geological map of Easter Island and worked on the Juan Fernandez Islands, which lie between Easter Island and Chile. Peter Baker was secretary general of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior and he was on the editorial board of the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research since 1976.
Peter Baker had a son from his first marriage who he abandoned before he was born and only met once when he was a teenager. There was no reason for this, or that his son could of ever done wrong. He then went on to marry another woman and took on her 2 children as his own.
His granddaughter contacted the University he worked at to which they never heard a reply, although she did get confirmation that someone had passed on the message to him from the university.
This man seems to be very well respected in his professional life, although perhaps not so much in his personal life.

Selected publications