Marjorie Sweeting facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Marjorie Sweeting
Born	28 February 1920 Fulham, London
Died	31 December 1994 Oxford, England
Resting place	Enstone, Oxfordshire
Scientific career
Fields	Geomorphologist

Marjorie Mary Sweeting (28 February 1920 – 31 December 1994 in Oxford), was a British geomorphologist specializing in karst phenomena. Sweeting had gained extensive knowledge on various topographies and landscapes, by travelling around the world to places such as Greece, Australia, Czechoslovakia, United States, Canada, South Africa, Belize, and most notably China. She published Karst Landforms (Macmillan 1972), and Karst in China: its Geomorphology and Environment (Springer 1995) after many years of work there starting in 1977. The latter is the first comprehensive Western account of China's karst, one of the first western published works on the karst found within China, even in a male dominated field.

Personal life and education

Marjorie May Sweeting was born to George Scotland Sweeting and his wife Ellen Louisa Liddiard in Fulham in 1920. She had no siblings. In her childhood her father G.S. Sweeting was a geology lecturer at the Imperial College, in London.

Her secondary education took place in Mayfield School and she later graduated in 1941 from Newnham College, Cambridge. She was accepted as a Caroline Turle Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge during 1942 for a year, later returning in 1945 for the Marion Kennedy Research. She received her doctorate for her thesis "The Landforms on Carboniferous Limestone of the Ingleborough District in N.W. Yorkshire" in 1948.

Alongside her passion for fieldwork, conferencing and teaching, Sweeting enjoyed the travelling, opera , watching sports and entertaining.

Marjorie Sweeting died in 1994 at the age of 74 after succumbing to cancer, her body was interred at Enstone Village. Marjorie had no living relatives, for this reason her estate contributed funds to St. Hughs College, Newnham College, Oxford, The Royal Geographic Society and Cambridge.

Career

In 1987, Marjorie Sweeting retired from her position as Reader in Geography at The University of Oxford. She was also a Fellow and Tutor at St Hugh's College 1951–87 (Emeritus), and Lecturer and Reader at Oxford University 1954–87. During 1948, Sweeting became a PhD candidate who wrote her thesis based on The Landforms of the Carboniferous Limestone of Ingleborough District, N.W. Yorkshire. In 1951 Marjorie Sweeting was appointed Lecturer and Director of studies in Geography at St. Hugh's College, and in 1983 she was named the Acting head of the school.

Sweeting served on the Karst Commission of the International Geographical Union, where she came to work on a new project titled, Man's Impact on the Karst. Additionally, Sweeting worked with Gordon Warwick in support of the International Speleological Union where she was in charge of the Karst Denudation. Another one of Marjorie's accomplishments in her career was being a leader on an expedition called the “Expedition to Gunung Mulu” from 1977 to 1978. She was the program director for the Landform and Hydrology Survey for the Royal Geographical Society. The expedition was held to observe speeds of erosion and how quickly land was being formed in a forest of equatorial conditions. Much of Sweeting's early work was focused on the shape of Karst landforms, the geological control, and landscape denudation rates. In addition, using her previous interest in rates, she helped establish the importance of mineralogy when controlling weather rates, assisting in field studies and analysis in Jamaica and Puerto Rico. Her book, Karst Landforms (Macmillan 1972), contained the synthesis of her extensive travels, her own and her research students' work, and of her collaborations and discussions with the major researchers in the field of limestone studies. The book is considered a benchmark of its time in karst studies and is especially influential because after its publication, China opened up as a region for research.

After retirement, Marjorie Sweeting continued her research in China which culminated in Karst in China: its Geomorphology and Environment, the manuscript being published posthumously in 1995, shortly after her death. It is the first comprehensive Western account of China's karst, and was especially insightful because of its focus on limestone and varying limestone regions in China-- the most important limestone region of the world-- that was previously unstudied. While it is an important study into karst formations in China, it has been criticized for not outright debunking the differing opinions of karst and other scientific studies within China. A special issue of ‘Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie’ on ‘Tropical and subtropical karst’ was published in her honour in 1997. Marjorie had written over seventy different publications in her life and she was probably the best-known and most influential woman geomorphologist of her time.

A major feature of Marjorie Sweeting’s career was her influence on generations of undergraduates and graduates. Many were the Saturdays and vacation weeks she organized field trips for undergraduates, introducing them to caves and the pleasures of karstic landscapes. Throughout her career, at Oxford, she supervised over thirty graduate students, many of whom went on to make valuable contributions to the field of Geology, specifically in karst. Notably, two of Sweeting’s students were Margaret Marker and Gillian E. Groom. Marker, who studied karst geomorphology and climate change, published over 22 works, and was granted the Gold Medal of the Society of South African Geographers in 1996. Similarly, Groom made contributions on topics like: the Spitsbergen glaciers, the raised shorelines of Gower, and karst limestone.

Achievements

Sweeting contributed largely to the field of karst. Her many awards included those of Gill Memorial Prize of the Royal Geographical Society (1955), Certificate of Merit of the National Speleological Society of America (1959), Honorary Member of the Cave Research Foundation of America (1969), and the Busk medal (1980).

Sweeting was appointed a C.U.F. University Lectureship in 1953. She was awarded the distinction of a personal readership in 1977.

Due to her important and ground-breaking work in the field of geomorphology, The British Society for Geomorphology created "The Marjorie Sweeting Award" in 2008. The award and prize of £200 goes to be the best undergraduate dissertation in the field of geomorphology at any university in the UK.

Other

Unable to continue her studies during World War II, Sweeting went to Denbigh, North Wales as a geography teacher at Howell's School. At war's end, she was one of two women, along with Mabel Tomlinson, on the British national committee to advocate for the teaching of geology in high school.

Marjorie used potholing as a way in which to introduce students to karst systems and caving.

From 1977, when she led the initial expedition, Sweeting worked extensively on the karst landforms of China. There was plenty of scope – karst covers about one-seventh of the country, over five hundred thousand square kilometers. This was the first study of the karst regions of China by a western geomorphologist.

Marjorie was acknowledged not only as an international expert on karst geomorphology but also as a generous and enthusiastic mentor for generations of undergraduate and graduate students.

For much of her career, Marjorie was one of only a small group of female physical geographers in Britain who fought hard and successfully to establish their international scientific reputation.