(Died: August 18, 1994)
Paleopalynologist
Interests: Expanding Earth Age: 80
Precambrian events indicative of Earth Expansion talked about by Samuel Warren Carey.
Gerhard Kremp was born November 14, 1913, in Berlin, Germany. He earned a Diploma in 1937 at Teachers College in Cottbus, and pursued graduate study at the University of Berlin until January, 1940, when he was drafted into the German military where he served until the end of the war. However, he was granted leave of absence during this time to finish his studies.
In February, 1940, Gerhard Kremp was married to Eva Magdalene Agahd. In 1945 he earned his Doctor Rerum Naturalis from the University of Posen where his dissertation, entitled Die Flora des Braunkohlenlagers von Konin an der Warthe auf Grund der Pollenfuehrung, was supervised by Professor Paul W. Thomson. He served as an Assistant Professor at the Geological Institute of the University of Gottingen from 1945 to 1947.
In 1947 Kremp began work as Research Assistant at the recently founded "Amt fuer Bodenforschung von Nordrhein-Westfalen" (later changed to "Geologisches Landesamt", or State Geological Survey) at Liblar, subsequently being transferred to Herne in 1948, and to Krefeld in 1950. He joined the group working on Carboniferous stratigraphy, concentrating on the coal-bearing deposits of the Ruhr region and neighboring basins, and undertook the task of establishing a stratigraphic subdivisions within the Carboniferous based on the distribution of megaspores, microspores, ostracodes, foraminifera, etc.). With the help of one full-time technician, and some help from a secretary and a second technician shared with the coal petrographers, he produced a number of publications. The publication he co-authored with Robert Potonie in 1955-1956, Die Sporae Dispersae des Ruhrkarbons I-III, is still regarded as the standard for palynostratigraphy of the Ruhr Carboniferous.
In 1955 Kremp emigrated with his family to the United States to work at Pennsylvania State University in the coal petrography laboratory of William Spackman, who was organizing a program to study the uraniferous lignites of South Dakota with support from an Atomic Energy Commission grant. At Penn State Kremp supervised graduate assistants, and with Spackman established in 1956 the Catalog of Fossil Spores and Pollen which they initially co-edited with H. Tate Ames and Hilde Grebe.
In 1959-1960 Kremp was employed as a palynologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, Colorado. Effective October 1, 1960, he accepted the position of Associate Professor in Geochronology and Geology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, specializing in stratigraphic palynology. In 1962 Kremp, along with Professor Terah Smiley, co-hosted the First International Pollen Congress in Tucson, the first of the international conferences later organized and now regularly held under the auspices of the International Federation of Palynological Societies (IFPS).
Among Kremp's 148 publications are numbered two books: his Morphological Encyclopedia of Palynology: An International Collection of Definitions and Illustrations of Spores and Pollen published in 1965, and The Spores of the Pteridophytes Illustrations of the Spores of the Ferns and Fern Allies, published in 1972 in collaboration with T. Kawasaki. The encyclopedia was translated into several languages, and has been reprinted several times.
In 1965 Kremp began seeking oil industry support on behalf of a project to place the world's palynological literature in a computer datafile, which he hoped would ultimately be available to the entire palynological community. He hoped that the nomenclatural information to be contained therein would help palynology avoid the taxonomic chaos which he feared could result from the erection of duplicate names by palynologists working with inadequate reference libraries, and which had afflicted some other microfossils disciplines. His tireless efforts were rewarded when the support materialized and the Kremp Palynological Computer Research Project (now Palynodata, Inc.) became a reality in 1968. The datafile now contains all of the information on the nomenclature, stratigraphic occurrence, and geographic location of each microfossil reported in nearly 18,000 pre-Pleistocene palynological publications. Kremp retired from the University of Arizona as Professor Emeritus on December 31, 1978, to devote full time to his work on Palynodata and the Paleo Data Banks series which he produced.
Among his many honors are included his receipt of the Gunnar Erdtman International Medal of Palynology awarded by the Palynological Society of India in 1970, and his listings in Leaders in American Science, Dictionary of International Biography, and Personalities of the West and Midwest.
Gerhard and Eva Kremp are the parents of three children: Eva (Kremp) Smith; Peter Kremp, DDS; and Sabine (Kremp) Weil. Their shared talent and love for music was evident in their enthusiastic participation in their church's choir and musical programs. To all who knew him Gerhard was a loving and devoted family man; and his kindness, grace, enthusiasm, energy, and deep involvement in palynology were obvious to all those around him. He was an inspiration to his many professional colleagues and graduate students.
