Hans Stille

Born Oct. 8, 1876, in Hanover; died there Dec. 26, 1966. German geologist (Federal Republic of Germany).

Stille graduated from the University of Göttingen (1899). He began working in the geological survey in Berlin in 1900. He was a professor at the Technische Hochschule in Hanover (from 1908) and at the universities in Leipzig (1912), Göttingen (from 1913), and Berlin (from L932). From 1945 to 1950 he was vice-president of the German Academy of Sciences, and from 1946 to 1950 he served as director of the Geotectonic Institute, which he had founded in West Berlin.

Stille’s works on the tectonics of Europe and comparative historical analysis of the folded regions of Europe, North and South America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Ocean became world famous. Stille developed the idea of the alternation in earth history of long periods of growing consolidation of the crust and shorter global phases of folding, stressing the universality of these phenomena throughout the world. He noted the consistent relationship between manifestations of magmatism and the stages of development of géosynclinal regions, singling out initial, subsequent, and terminal magmatism. He subdivided géosynclinal regions into the highly magmatic eugeosynclines and the weakly magmatic miogeosynclines. He identified (1955) the Assyntic orogenic phase, establishing the importance of a late Precambrian tectonic stage in the development of the earth.