Having problems with message search?
Grenville Draper
Department of Earth Sciences
Florida International University
SW 8th Street
Miami, FL 33199
Tel 305-348-3087
Dr Peter Martin-Kaye PhD, 1921-2006
Former senior Government geologist and Plymouth political campaigner, Dr Peter Hilary Alexander Martin-Kaye, has died aged 85.
Born in St John’s Wood, London, on 26 February 1921, Peter was the second child of architect Douglas Niel Martin-Kaye and his wife Mary, a concert pianist. His studies in geology were interrupted by the Second World War, during which time he served in the RAF Air/Sea Rescue in Ceylon and Karachi. He returned to complete his BSc in Geology at Imperial College London in 1948 and earned his PhD in 1954.
Amongst many senior positions, he was Director of Geological Survey in British Guiana between 1961 and 1966 after having led the 1950 expedition which discovered the 440-foot Sakaika waterfall in the Ekereku River, a tributary of the Amazon in Guiana.
In 1966 he returned to the UK to join Huntings Geology and Geophysics Ltd as a senior geologist. His first overseas assignment was as Project Manager of a United Nations Development Programme contract to undertake regional geological mapping in the Red Sea Hills area of Egypt. This was followed by four years as a UN Project Manager in Ethiopia. In 1972 he became an Associate Director of Hunting and was then involved in geological remote sensing from both aircraft and satellite imagery. He was recruited to help interpret the satellite radar data (SIR-A) over Brazil and Guiana. His satellite radar investigations with fellow geologist, Geoff Lawrence, which discovered buried fluvial channels in the Sahara, hit the headlines by proving the existence of a humid climate there 6000 years ago.
He was accepted as a Principal Investigator for NASA’s SEASAT and Shuttle Radar programmes and led teams of geologists on numerous projects, applying radar to mapping and resource exploration. Then, in 1974 he led a major project to advise the Syrian Government on exploitation of their mineral resources. He also carried out studies of industrial sand and salt in Eastern Nigeria and base metals in Ireland.
He persuaded the government to support projects studying the application of satellite radars acquired from SEASAT and the Space Shuttle, as well as studying simulated data in preparation for the launch of the French satellite SPOT. In 1978 he foresaw the ramifications of digital analysis of geological data in the modern age and he instigated a major EEC and industry-funded project to develop this methodology.
In the 1980s when Hunting invested in the world’s only commercially available airborne multi-spectral scanner developed for NASA, Peter was appointed as leader of a team of engineers and scientists, who took the scanner all over the world in the search for minerals and for environmental studies.
In 1989 Peter was instrumental in establishing the Geological Remote Sensing Group, becoming its first Honorary Lifetime Fellow. He also served on the Editorial Board of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy (IMM).
His work took him all over the globe, but it was in 1949 that he married Cecile Jean Abraham who he met whilst on a project in Trinidad. They had one son, Philip Niel, who died aged only 25, tragically.
Peter was fiercely political and upon retiring to Plymouth in the late 1980s he became politically active, serving for a time as chairman of the Plymouth branch of UKIP and himself standing as a candidate in local elections.
As well as his love of opera and the arts, Peter was a talented painter, writer and storyteller. But his lifelong passion was sailing – he earned his membership of the Royal Ocean Racing Club aged just 16 – and he continued sailing the Channel well into his eighties. In his late seventies, when told by doctors who fitted him with a pacemaker that he could not drive a car for a given number of weeks he famously said: “But they didn’t say I couldn’t sail a boat solo across to France – so I did.”
After a long-standing heart condition and after bravely fighting off several bouts of cancer, Peter Martin-Kaye passed away peacefully on 19th August 2006 at St Luke’s Hospice, Plymouth. He will be remembered not only for the visionary leadership he provided in the field of geology, but also for his distinctive sense of humour, his unique way with words, and his indefatigability and sense of justice.
He is survived by his wife, Jean.
A memorial service will be held in Plymouth on Thursday 21st September.
Jayne Martin-Kaye
(Thanks to Derek Morris, Hugo de Boorder, Al & Penny Buckle, John Crook, Geoff Lawrence and Eric Peters)
Fax 305-348-3877
Prof. of Geology,
Fellow of the Geological Society,
Fellow of FIU Honors College
Send Email