Rhodes Fairbridge

Who was Rhodes Fairbridge?

Rhodes Whitmore Fairbridge was an Australian geologist and expert on climate change.

Born in Pinjarra, Western Australia, Fairbridge graduated from Queen’s University in Ontario and earned his master’s degree from Oxford. In 1941, he earned a doctorate in geology from the University of Western Australia.

He taught at Columbia University from 1955 until his 1982 retirement. While there, he was supervising editor for the Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences. In the early 1960s, he developed the so-called Fairbridge Curve. a record of changes in sea levels over the last 10,000 years.

Fairbridge died in 2006 in Amagansett, New York of a brain tumor.