Maria Klenova

Maria Klenova
Born	1898
Died	1976
Nationality	Russian , Soviet
Fields	Marine Geology
Institutions	Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, USSR Academy of Sciences
Known for	Seabed mapping
Notes A founder of Russian marine science and the first to fully map the seabed of the Barents Sea.

Maria Vasilyevna Klenova (Russian: Мари́я Васи́льевна Клёнова) (1898 – 1976) was a Russian and Soviet marine geologist and one of the founders of Russian marine science.^[1]

Klenova studied to become a professor and later on worked as a member of the Council for Antarctic Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences. During that time she spent nearly thirty years researching in the Polar Regions and become the first woman scientist to do research in Antarctica, specifically at the ANARE (Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions) station at Macquarie Island.

Career

Klenova began her marine geology career in 1925 as a researcher aboard the Soviet research vessel Persey, attached to the Floating Marine Research Institute in the Barents Sea and the archipelagos of Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen, and Franz Josef Land. In 1933 Klenova produced the first complete seabed map of the Barents Sea.

In 1949 Klenova became a senior research associate at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Her work included analyses of seabed geology in the Atlantic Ocean and the Antarctic, and in the Caspian, Barents and White Seas. In the austral summer of 1956 she traveled with a Soviet oceanographic team to map uncharted areas of the Antarctic coast.

The Klenova Valley (84°36′N 55°00′W / 84.6°N 55°W / 84.6; -55), an oceanographic valley discovered in 1981–1983 by the USSR Northern Fleet Hydrographic Expedition is named after her.^[1] Klenova crater on Venus is also named in her honor.

Contributions

Her contributions helped to create the first Antarctic atlas, a groundbreaking four-volume work published in the Soviet Union. Dr. Klenova spent most of her time making observations on board the Russian icebreakers Ob and Lena. Her group took oceanographic measurements in Antarctic and sub-Antarctic waters. Along with Klenova there were seven other women on board the Ob. At that time women were rarely allowed to venture on land and had to rely on their male colleagues to collect and bring back data samples. In between these two voyages she worked at Mirny, a Russian base on the Queen Mary Coast (which is shared by Australian and Polish Research Stations). On the way home Klenova went to Macquarie Island where she became the first female scientist ever to go ashore.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Sixteenth Meeting of the GEBCO Subcommittee on Undersea Feature Names". International Hydrographic Organization. April 2002. http://www.gebco.net/about_us/meetings_and_minutes/documents/gebco_scufn_16_report.pdf. Retrieved 2007-11-15. 

Further reading

• Klenova M.V. and Jastrebova L.A. (1938) Chlorophyll in sediments as an indication of the gas phase of the water. Trans. Inst. Mar. Fisheries, U.S.S.R. 5, 65-70.
• Klenova, M.V. (1939) "Toward the Study of the Nature of the North Caspian Shore Line (Observations from an Airplane)." Nature no. 1 pp. 72-73 (in Russian).
• Klenova, M.V. Geology of the Sea (Moscow, 1948), p. 424. (In Russian)
• Geology of the Volga delta (1951, co-author)
• Geology of the Barents Sea (Moscow, 1960) (In Russian)
• Geological structure of the continental slope Caspian Sea (1962, co-author)
• Precipitation of the Arctic basin based on drift l / s G. Sedov (1962)
• Geology of the Atlantic Ocean (Moscow, 1975) (In Russian)

Persondata
Name	Klenova, Maria
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1898
Place of birth
Date of death	1976
Place of death