In 1948 one of the most destructive earthquakes in the history of mankind, the intensity of which reached 9-10 points, occurred in the region of Ashkhabad city. According to various estimates, 110,000 to 170,000 people died. The number of injured went off the scale. In the first hours after the disaster, a 60-year-old man came to the emergency response headquarters. "The city is buried under the rubble. I am not a doctor of medicine, but I am a doctor of science. And I want to offer my help," he said. It was the famous geologist Dmitry Nalivkin, who became head of the field hospital on the same day...
The scientist himself survived by a miracle: the earthquake that began in the middle of the night found him in the City Duma. The session of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic, a deputy of which he was, was delayed until 4 o'clock in the morning. Dmitry Vasilievich's life was saved by the thick walls of the fundamental building, while all that was left of his hotel was a mountain of bricks with people buried under them.
Chaos reigned on the streets. The collapsed wall of the prison let loose the criminals who, armed with the arsenal of the nearest police station, rushed to storm the disaster-ravaged savings banks and stores. The looting began.
"The city was defenseless. The police disappeared... The telephone exchange is out of order. Telegraph is destroyed. The railway station is a pile of rubble and mangled rails. There is no airfield. All central, district and local institutions are destroyed. The big city, the capital of the republic, was completely isolated from the surrounding world and disorganized," the geologist described in his memoirs.
In his memory, Dmitry Vasilyevich was forever imprinted with the faces of the victims, who, considering him a doctor, sought help with terrible injuries. Until the end of his days, he remained an ardent supporter of the creation of large state projects on seismic activity forecasting.
This is only one page in the life of this amazing scientist.
Nalivkin was the best expert in the geology of Central Asia. In 1946 he was appointed Chairman of the Presidium of the Turkmen Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, entrusting him with the training of national scientific personnel and choosing the direction of research. By the time of the earthquake, he had already served for 20 years as professor and head of the department of historical geology at the Leningrad Mining Institute, academician of the Academy of Sciences, director of the Institute of Geological Map at Geolkom, deputy director of the Geological Institute of the Academy of Sciences and director of the Laboratory of Lake Sciences.
Dmitry Nalivkin was born in 1889 in the family of a teacher at the Mining Institute. Although his father tragically died in one of the expeditions when the boy was only 10 years old, he also wanted to link his career with the Earth sciences. He was especially interested in geology and paleontology. In 1906, the young man enrolled in the same university, and he was immediately captivated by scientific life.
In 1908 - the young man got a job as a collector in Geolkom, in 1909 - under the guidance of petroleum geologist Dmitry Golubyatnikov he collected and processed Quaternary shells of bivalves of Absheron Peninsula, and from 1911 to 1913, under the leadership of Vladimir Vernadsky and Dmitry Mushketov he participated in expeditions in the Fergana Valley. These geological surveys in Central Asia, where he studied brachiopods in Paleozoic sediments, enabled him to obtain an assistant professor position at the Mining Institute. In addition, they resulted in the doctrine of curvilinear symmetry, finalized and published by the scientist in 1925. It opened fundamentally new horizons in science - it widened the scope of classical symmetry developed by crystallographers and geometers and showed the necessity of an extended and in-depth approach to symmetry laws.
In 1914, Nalivkin worked at the Tyuya-Muyun uranium mine in Kyrgyzstan as part of the Radium Expedition of the Imperial Academy of Sciences.
All this time, he remained a student at the Mining Institute, which he graduated with the gold medal only in 1915. Such a long training was due to the specific organization of studies. Students independently determined the time and the order of passing disciplines and production practices. In five years only young people from wealthy families managed to finish university, the majority were forced to earn money to live and further training during practice, which resulted in an increase from several months to several years.
Nalivkin was already an experienced geologist, and in the year of his diploma he was entrusted with leading the expedition of the Russian Geographical Society to the Pamirs to study the gold-bearing capacity of Bukhara Mountains.
After his military service in 1917, he returned to the Mining Institute, where he then worked for over six decades. He was an assistant, a lecturer, a professor, and the head of the department of historical geology. In addition, Nalivkin systematically read the course of historical geology at the Geographic Institute (now the Geography Department of Leningrad State University), the Polytechnic Institute and the Central Asian State University. During the period of evacuation from 1941 to 1944, he worked at the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute.
The geologist gained all-Russian fame as a scientist who put his theoretical research on stratigraphy, paleontology, and paleozoic paleography and minerals into practice with great success.
For example, his refinement of the stratigraphic dissection of the Devonian system led him to recommend searching for oil in the Ukhta area. And an acute shortage of aluminum, the basic metal for aircraft construction, prompted the scientist to organize large-scale geological expeditions in the Urals in the 20s and 30s. He studied the conditions of formation of bauxite, the ore on which almost the entire global aluminum industry is based.
And Dmitry Nalivkin coped with this next task brilliantly. For the development of raw material base of the Urals and a significant increase in the country's reserves he was awarded the Stalin Prize of the first degree and the title of Honored Worker of Science and Technology of the RSFSR. Thanks to him and his colleagues, the Urals became the only region of the USSR, which gave the country a large amount of the most important defense metal during the hard years of the Great Patriotic War.
A special place in activity of the scientist was occupied by geological maps - he was enthusiastically engaged in development of principles of their creation and organization of geological surveying works. In 1929 Dmitry Vasilievich became director of the Institute of Geological Map of the Main Geological Exploration Office of the USSR. Collection of data on the structure of the outer surface of the Earth's crust on the national scale is a very laborious and time-consuming process. At the 17th session of the International Geological Congress he presented the first geological map of the entire territory of the USSR. From that moment until 1983, thirteen updated versions were published under his editorship. The most successful was the map at a scale of 1:2,500,000, published in 1956. For the first time it had no so-called "white spots. It was hung in school geography classrooms, institutes and research institutes everywhere. The author himself received the Lenin Prize for it in 1957.
In 1933 he was elected a corresponding member, and already in 1946 - an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. One can almost endlessly enumerate the interests and areas of employment of this outstanding geologist. Throughout his life he occupied senior positions in profile divisions of the Academy: Deputy Director of the Geological Institute (1933-1934); Director of the Laboratory of Lake Science (1946-1955); Director of the Library of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1950-1955); work in the Laboratory of Coal Geology (1955), in the Laboratory of Precambrian Geology (1964) and the Institute of Geology and Geochronology of Precambrian (1967). Moreover, in 1956 the scientist founded and headed the Interdepartmental Stratigraphic Committee of the USSR (at VSEGEI), and from 1957 to 1961 he was Chairman of the National Committee of Geologists of the USSR.
More than 400 publications, three orders of the Red Banner of Labor, membership in scientific societies of France, Great Britain, USA, India, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, GDR. In his honor were named 60 species of fossils, two glaciers, the riftogenic belt in the Tien Shan and the cape on the North Island of Novaya Zemlya, two research ships - "Academician Nalivkin", studying the polar seas and the Atlantic Ocean, and "Academician Nalivkin", engaged in search of oil fields in the Caspian Sea. At the beginning of the XXI century his name was given to a new mineral - nalivkinite.
Dmitry Nalivkin died in 1982.
