20th century scientists
Charles Andrew Cotton
Charles Cotton and his family in a rock-strewn paddock in Ireland, 1952. From left: Cotton’s daughter Deirdre, a relative from New York, wife Josephine, son Paul and Charles Cotton himself, Courtesy Deirdre Pillai
Charles Andrew Cotton
To the geologist the form of the surface is a subject of interest because land-forms are produced by the interaction of the various geological processes which he must study in order to understand the mode of production and the transportation and deposition of rock-forming materials … To the geographer, on the other hand, the surface of the earth is of importance as the field of activity of organized beings, and notably as the abode of man.
Charles Cotton, who as a geomorphologist bridged the fields of geology and geography, in the introduction to his first book, Geomorphology of New Zealand, Dominion Museum, 1922, pp2-3
Charles Cotton built on the work of New Zealand’s early geologists to become the country’s most influential geomorphologist, and earn an international reputation through his popular books on geology and geomorphology.
Cotton was born in Dunedin in 1885, but spent most of his early years aboard ship where his father was captain and his mother his teacher. After high school in Christchurch, Cotton studied geology at the Otago School of Mines, and spent two years as director of the Coromandel School of Mines. In 1909, he became geology lecturer at Victoria University College, then professor of geology from 1921 to 1953. In moving from Dunedin to Wellington, Cotton moved from a region with complex and interesting geology to a region dominated by greywacke – an ancient but uninteresting sedimentary rock. Wellington, however, had a rich variety of landforms and Cotton’s biographer, Rodney Grapes, has credited the move to Wellington for Cotton’s progression from geology, the study of the Earth’s overall history, structure and composition, to geomorphology, the study of landforms.
Cotton wrote extensively on the evolution of landforms, with many of his ideas coming together in his first and most influential book, Geomorphology of New Zealand (1922). Although a classroom accident had left him with the use of only one eye, Cotton was an astute observer – and illustrator – of landforms and landscapes. He followed the approach of his mentor, Harvard geologist William Morris Davis, in illustrating the development of landforms with a sequence of diagrams showing the landscape’s progression from youth, through maturity to old age.
Volcanoes as Landscape Forms, Cotton’s fourth book, was published in 1944 to international acclaim. While volcanoes had previously been seen more as geological curiosities than landscape-forming agents, Cotton described volcanic activity as creating new landforms through lava flow, and destroying existing landforms through explosion and engulfment.
As well as writing popular books, Cotton contributed many original ideas. He built on Alexander McKay’s work on faulting, promoting the idea that fault movement could produce uplifted blocks and mountain ranges. In the 1950s, Cotton and his colleague Martin Te Punga were the first to recognise periglacial landscapes – periodically frozen landscapes associated with the margins of glaciers – in New Zealand.
Cotton retired from Victoria University College in 1953 but continued to publish on a range of topics. His extensive and accessible work on all aspects of New Zealand’s geomorphology provided a platform on which subsequent scientists continued to study and interpret the evolution of New Zealand’s landscapes.
By Rebecca Priestley
Medals and awards
Hector Medal 1927, Hutton Medal 1947, KBE 1959
Further reading
Charles Cotton biography – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website
21 articles written or co-authored by Cotton, published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, are available online:
Cotton's article 'Dating Recent Mountain Growth By Fossil Pollen' published in Tuatara in April 1962, has been digitised and is available online:
Rodney Grapes, ‘Sir Charles Cotton, 1885-1970’, in Vincent O’Sullivan (ed) Eminent Victorians: great teachers and scholars from Victoria’s first 100 years, Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, 2000
This image courtesy of Deidre Pillai.
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