Joseph William Winthrop Spencer
Joseph William Spencer | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born |
1851-03-26 |
| Died | 1921-10-09 (70 years) |
| Other names | Joseph William Winthrop Spencer |
| Occupation | Geologist, Professor |
Joseph William Winthrop Spencer was a Canadian geomorphologist.[1] Geologists continue to regard him as an important figure in their field, even though he did not believe large glaciers covered the Great Lakes region, due to his thorough field-work on the shores of lost lakes, like Lake Iroquois and Lake Algonquin.[2]
According to The Dictionary of Canadian Biography he was born in Dundas, Upper Canada, in 1851, as Joseph William Spencer.[1] He added the middle name Winthrop in adulthood, because he believed he was distantly related to a prominent American family, named Winthrop.
As a teenager he worked for a druggist in nearby Hamilton.[1]
In 1871 he attended McGill University in Montreal.[1] After graduation he worked for the Geologic Survey of Canada, and a mining company, in Michigan, before traveling to Gottingen, Germany, where he earned a PhD in Geology. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography reports he was just the second Canadian to earn a PhD in Geology.
After earning his PhD, he worked as a professor of Chemistry and Geology at King’s College, in Windsor, Nova Scotia, for two years, before accepting a post at the University of Missouri.[1] He was chair of geology and mineralogy and the first curator of the University's new natural history museum. In 1888 he moved to a professor position at the University of Georgia, and then, in 1894 he worked for a year in Washington DC, before he returned to Canada.
Although Spencer was highly regarded, during his lifetime, he held views at odds with current thinking.[1] He believed the proglacial lakes that became the current Great Lakes were brackish branches of the ocean. He failed to understand how thick the glaciers were. And, although he was the first to recognize that the beaches and escarpments that marked the shores of the proglacial lakes sloped slightly, and varied in elevation, he did not understand this was due to rebounding once the surface was freed of the glaciers great weight.
References
[edit | edit source]- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Gerard V. Middleton. "SPENCER, JOSEPH WILLIAM WINTHROP, geologist, teacher, geomorphologist, and author; b. 26 March 1851 in Dundas, Upper Canada". The Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
- ↑
"View of J.W. Spencer (1851-1921): His Life in Missouri and Georgia, and Work on Proglacial Lakes". Geoscience Canada. 31 (4). December 2004. Archived from the original on 2023-12-24. Retrieved 2026-07-31.
His two seasons of fieldwork (in 1887 and 1888) were the main basis for the numerous papers that he subsequently published that named proglacial lakes (e.g., Iroquois, Algonquin), described their post-glacial deformation, and discussed their origin. Spencer did not accept that the Great Lakes region was ever covered by thick ice sheets: he believed the proglacial lakes formed at sea level, and were not the result of ice-dams.