Early geological studies and mapping in Sweden

Abstract

AbstractGeological research and teaching in a modern sense started in Sweden around 1820 with the establishment of a school of mining in Falun, central Sweden. Before that time, geology-related studies were carried out by individual people at the Board of Mines and the universities in Uppsala, Lund and Åbo, along with studies in chemistry, mining, mineralogy, agriculture, or just by curiosity triggered by natural phenomena, such as the enigmatic ‘diminution of water’. In 1694, Urban Hiärne wrote and initiated the distribution of a questionnaire with the purpose of collecting information about Sweden's natural resources, some results of which he summarized a decade later. Hiärne, Magnus von Bromell, Christopher Polhem, Emanuel Swedenborg and others were the precursors who, in a sense, prepared the way for the following decades or even century of chemical, mineralogical and, eventually, geological research. The followers were Georg Brandt, Anton von Swab, Carl von Linné, Johan Gottschalk Wallerius, Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, Torbern Bergman, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Johan Gottlieb Gahn and Wilhelm Hisinger, just to mention some of the most renowned. Samuel Gustaf Hermelin was the first person in Sweden to publish a geological map (1767), followed in 1797 by Wilhelm Hisinger, who was the first to publish an illuminated geological map.