Iurii Bilibin

Born May 6 (19), 1901, in Rostov Iaroslavskii; died May 4, 1952, in Leningrad. Soviet geologist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1946). Graduated in 1926 from the Leningrad Mining Institute.

From 1926 to 1934, Bilibin worked for the “Aldanzoloto” trust, at the Central Geological Survey Research Institute; he was occupied with studies of gold deposits in the northeastern regions of the country. In 1934 he began to work at the All-Union Geological Institute, where, after 1947, he headed the division of metallogeny. In 1950 he became head of the Subdepartment of Minerals of the Department of Geology at Leningrad State University.

Bilibin’s principal works are devoted to the exposition of regularities in the distribution of mineral deposits in the earth’s crust and the establishment of the relation of certain types of ore deposit to the developmental stages of separate zones of the mobile belts of the earth’s crust, characterized by specific appearances of intrusive magmatism. Bilibin worked out questions of the conditions for the formation of gold deposit fields in detail. He received the State Prize of the USSR in 1946 for the discovery of gold-bearing regions in the Northeast. The mineral bilibinite—composition 3(CaPb)O(U,Th)O₂ · 7UO₃ · 10SiO₂ · 19H₂O— is named for Bilibin, as is the urban-type settlement of Bilibino.