WESTON BLAKE JR. (1930 – 2021)

With the death in Ottawa on 10 January 2021 of Weston Blake Jr., Arctic Quaternary science lost one of its leading practitioners, an internationally-known figure with more than 50 field seasons in Arctic Canada, Greenland, and Svalbard to his credit.Wes was born 26 February 1930 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Weston Blake Sr. and Helen (née Warbasse).Wes grew up in a family of ardent skiers, and a love of the outdoors was instilled in him early.A taste for the Arctic came later, during undergraduate studies in geology at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (A.B.1951).The renowned Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson paid annual visits to Dartmouth, and Wes, in his final year, attended a course in polar geography taught by Trevor Lloyd and David Nutt.Further education on the North followed, at McGill University and on southern Baffin Island where he assisted geomorphologist John Mercer for three months in 1952.At McGill, Wes completed an M.Sc. in forest geography based on fieldwork in Northwest River, Labrador, in 1953.Wes recalled that his office in Montreal was in the attic of Bishop Mountain House, then the Canadian headquarters of the Arctic Institute of North America.In the winter of 1953-54, Wes accompanied David Nutt on a journey by dog team around Lake Melville, Labrador, re-occupying oceanographic stations established during the Blue Dolphin Expeditions.Military service in the U.S. Army's Transportation Arctic Group from 1953 to 1955 gave Wes the chance, in 1954, to spend five months on the Inland Ice of Greenland east of Thule Air Base, testing a crevasse detector and mapping a safe route for heavy tractor trains through the crevassed marginal areas of the ice sheet.Wes made two further visits to Northwest Greenland in 1956 to carry out glacier flow rate measurements north of Thule.There he worked with a group led by Richard P. Goldthwait, who was to become his Ph.D. thesis supervisor at Ohio State University.Wes then spent several years in graduate studies in glacial geology and geomorphology, alternating between Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and the University of Stockholm.Two long field seasons of glacial geological fieldwork in 1957 and 1958 in Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, with the Swedish Glaciological Expedition, under the leadership of Valter Schytt, led to the award of a Ph.D. by Ohio State University in 1962.In 1962, Wes joined the full-time staff of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) in Ottawa as a research scientist.He was surficial geologist on regional bedrock mapping projects on Bathurst Island in 1963 and 1964 and southern Baffin Island in 1965.From 1967 on, he focussed his attention on the glacial history of southern and eastern Ellesmere Island and Northwest Greenland, collaborating with scientists from the GSC and elsewhere and making use of research stations established by Fritz Müller of McGill University and ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Zürich, at Coburg Island, Cape Herschel on Ellesmere Island, and the Carey Islands.Particularly dear to Wes's heart was the Cape

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