İhsan Ketin


İhsan Ketin was a Turkish earth scientist.

Early years

He was born in 1914 in the Central Anatolian 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. Ketin returned to Turkey in 1938, and started his career as assistant professor at the Geological Institute of Istanbul University.

Scientific career

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 Gustav-Steinmann-Medaille, the highest distinction the Geologische Vereinigung e.V. gives, in the journal, in which Ketin's paper had been published.
In 1953, Ketin accepted a new position, the chair in General Geology in the Faculty of Mines at Istanbul Technical University. In 1953, he published his well-known comparison of the San Andreas and North Anatolian faults. Ketin contributed four major papers to the International Tectonic Map of Europe, published in 1960, in which he portrays Turkey as a dominantly asymmetric orogen, accreted from north to south. His tectonic and kinematic views formed the basis for many large-scale tectonic models in Turkey.
Ketin retired from active teaching in 1983, but remained in the Department of Geology as professor emeritus until his death in 1995.

Publications

Selected publications of Ihsan Ketin