An enthusiasm for loess: Leonard Horner in Bonn and Liu Tungsheng in Beijing

Abstract

© 2018 I. Smalley and S. B. Markovic, published by De Gruyter 2018. Liu Tungsheng featured on the list of twelve notable loess investigators prepared for the great LoessFest meeting, held in Heidelberg and Bonn in 1999. He fully deserved his position on this list of eminent loess scholars; in fact it might be argued that his was the major contribution. His contribution was a true paradigm shift in the world of loess investigation.Obruchev and Richthofen had produced an earlier paradigm shift when they propagated the idea that loess deposits form by aeolian deposition-a paradigm shift away from the earlier Lyellian idea of lacustrine or fluvial deposition. But that was a fairly simple shift, a tweak of the sedimentological event structure. Liu, and his co-workers in China, produced a new vision, a new way of looking at loess, not so much a paradigm shift as a paradigm enlargement. Post-Liu the Quaternary era was a new land, a new place with a real chronology and a landscape of events and amazing happenings. Liu related to the amazing. We propose that he played a role in promoting and maintaining an enthusiasm for loess. Loess science has become very precise and the scholars are respected for their exact and insightful observations; but Liu offered an extra dimension, we need to recognize the dimension of enthusiasm; the realization that loess is a remarkable material and the need to propagate that fact. And in recognising Liu as the major loess enthusiast of the 20th Century we should acknowledge Leonard Horner, the first loess enthusiast. Karl Caesar von Leonhard named loess and placed it in a scientific context; Charles Lyell took the idea of loess and spread the science world-wide, but it was Horner, in those few years at Bonn (1831-1833), who recognised loess for the marvellous material that it was and gave us permission to be enthusiastic. Liu followed determinedly in these footsteps; a great scholar, and a great enthusiast. Loess scholarship needs careful and precise investigation and reporting but it also needs a broad sweep of enthusiasm, an appreciation of loess for the extraordinary material that it is.