İhsan Ketin

Who was İhsan Ketin?

İhsan Ketin is a Turkish earth scientist.

He was born in 1914 in the eastern Turkish town of Kayseri located at the foothills of Mt. Aergus. He won a state scholarship to study natural sciences abroad, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s plans of modernizing the newly formed Republic of Turkey. He started his undergraduate studies in Natural Sciences at Berlin University in 1934, and subsequently completed his doctorate at Bonn University in 1938 under the supervision of Hans Cloos, thus becoming the first native of Turkey with a doctorate degree in geology in the Republic of Turkey. Dr. Ketin returned to Turkey in 1938, and started his career as assistant professor at the Geological Institute of Istanbul University. Through a faithful coincidence, the long-dormant North Anatolian fault awoke to activity, first gently with the Tercan quake of 21 November 1939, but then violently with the great Erzincan catastrophe of 28 and 29 December 1939, which claimed the lives of some 45,000 people. Ketin rushed to the field with many other geologists, Turkish and foreign, to map the surface breaks and the fearful damage. After Ketin published his paper on the North Anatolian fault, its importance was acknowledged when he was awarded the coveted Gustave-Steinmann-Medaille, the highest distinction the Geologische Vereinigung gives, in the journal in which Ketin’s paper had been published.