Karl Heinz Jacob
Karl Heinz Jacob | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 1940 (age 85–86) Halle (Saale), Germany |
| Residence | Berlin, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Known for | Advocacy of the Expanding Earth hypothesis |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mining engineering, mineral deposits research, Expansion Tectonics |
| Institutions | Technical University of Berlin |
Karl-Heinz Jacob (born 1940 in Halle (Saale), Germany) is a German mining engineer and university professor who is known as one of the leading contemporary advocates of the Earth expansion hypothesis. He served as Professor of mineral deposits and raw materials research at the Technical University of Berlin.
Biography
Jacob was born in 1940 in Halle (Saale). He moved from the German Democratic Republic to West Berlin in 1959 and studied mining engineering at the Technical University of Berlin from 1961 to 1967, gaining practical experience as a labourer in underground ore and coal mines and taking part in mining excursions in France, England, and Italy. After his studies he worked as a prospector at a copper mine in Norway.
In 1974 he earned his doctorate summa cum laude from the Institute of Ore Research and Economic Geology at the Technical University of Berlin, with a dissertation on the distribution of rare earth elements in fluorspar deposits. He held the position of Professor of mineral deposits and raw materials research at the Technical University of Berlin from 1972 until 2004. His teaching and research addressed small-scale mining operations, field evaluation methods for ore deposits, and applied radiometry. From 1988 he conducted experimental research on self-organisation processes and texture formation in rocks under the influence of low-frequency electric fields. He lives in Berlin.
Work
Jacob is associated with Expansion Tectonics, the hypothesis that the Earth has increased in volume over geological time. He has argued that the pattern of continental fit and the distribution of ocean floors are better explained by an expanding Earth than by conventional plate tectonics. He co-organised a colloquium on Earth expansion at the Technical University of Berlin and took part as a speaker at a colloquium on the subject held in Theuern in 2003. In 2003 he co-edited a volume, published in Rome, in honour of the geophysicist Ott Christoph Hilgenberg, an early proponent of the expanding Earth idea. Jacob contributed to the volume The Hidden History of Earth Expansion and has lectured publicly on the theory, including a 2014 talk in Hamburg on the difficulties surrounding the discussion of Earth expansion. The Earth expansion hypothesis he supports remains outside mainstream geoscience, which regards a significant change in the Earth's radius as unsupported by the evidence.