Cesare Emiliani

Cesare Emiliani was an Italian-American scientist, considered one of the greatest geologists and micropaleontologists of the 20th century and the founder of paleoceanography.He established that the ice ages of the last half million years or so are a cyclic phenomenon, which gave strong support to the hypothesis of Milankovitch and revolutionized ideas about the history of the oceans and of the glaciations. He was also the proponent of Project "LOCO" (for Long Cores) to the U.S. National Science Foundation. The project was a success providing evidence of the history of the oceans and also serving to test the hypotheses of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics.Cesare Emiliani was honored by having the genus Emiliania erected as home for the taxon huxleyi, which had previousiy been assigned to Coccolithus. He was further honored by receiving the Vega Medal of the Swedish Royal Geographic Society in 1983, and the Alexander Agassiz Medal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1989 for his isotopic studies on Pleistocene and Holocene planktic foraminifera.Emiliani was close to a Renaissance man, familiar with classical literature, fluent in many languages, and a valiant opponent of dogmatic attitudes and mental rigidity wherever found. In his later years he dedicated much time to introduce a calendar reform based on the Holocene calendar (HE) concept to eliminate the BC-AD chronology gap caused by the lack of a Year Zero.