Bilal U. Haq

Bilal U. Haq is a Pakistani-American geoscientist (and poet) who is currently affiliated with and divides his time between the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and Sorbonne University's Institute of Earth Sciences in Paris, France. He is best known for his work on the Phanerozoic sea-level fluctuations and eustatic curves that are widely used in the academia and industry as the basis for global stratigraphy and in exploration geology. He is a laureate of the Prestwich Prize for geosciences from France.

Bilal Haq
Born	Bilal Ul Haq (1948-10-08) 8 October 1948 (age 75)
Alma mater	University of the Punjab (MSc) Stockholm University (PhD, DSc)
Awards	Awarded Prestwich Prize (2019) Elected to Academia Europaea (European Academy of Science and Letters) (2015) Conferred Docteur honoris causa by Sorbonne University (2013) Awarded AGU Ocean Sciences Award (2004) Awarded US NSF Antarctic Medal (1999) Elected Fellow AAAS (1999) Awarded Shepard Medal for excellence in marine geology (1998) Elected Fellow GSA (1976)
Scientific career
Fields	Marine Geology Marine sedimentology Paleoceanography Paleoclimatology Paleobiogeography Seismic stratigraphy Sequence stratigraphy Natural gas hydrates Basin analysis Hydrocarbon play evaluation
Institutions	Sorbonne University Smithsonian Institution Utrecht University US National Science Foundation Exxon Production Research Labs Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Stockholm University University of Vienna [[University of the Punjab]]
Thesis	Paleogene Calcareous Nannoflora: Rates of Evolution in Cenozoic Calcareous Nannoplankton  (1972)
Doctoral advisor	Ivar Hessland
Website	www.terradynamicsinternational.com en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea-level_curve

Early life and education

Bilal Haq was born in the foothills of Himalayas (Gorakhpur) where his father Mohammad Fazl-i-Haq was a senior ICS officer in the British Indian government. After the independence of India his father opted to serve in the new nation of Pakistan since his family originated from Lahore, now in Pakistan. He received his early education at St. Paul's and Central Model Schools in Karachi and Lahore, respectively. In Lahore, he also earned his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees from the Government College and the Punjab University. In Europe, after receiving a diploma in German language from Dolmetscher Insitut of Heidelberg University, he started his graduate research at the University of Vienna^[1] and then moved to Sweden to earn his PhD and DSc degrees in marine geoscience from the University of Stockholm.^[2]

Career

Bilal U. Haq's career spans over five decades, and he has carried out research in several disciplines of marine geosciences at the University of Stockholm, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts,^[3] Exxon Production Research Company in Houston,^[4] the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC,^[5] the Universities of Copenhagen,^[6] Cambridge, Oxford,^[7] Paris (UPMC,^[8] Sorbonne^[9]) and Utrecht. He has consulted with, provided advice to, or delivered specialized courses to numerous multinational resource companies, and geological surveys around the world through his consulting partnership.^[10]

He was seconded to the World Bank in Washington, DC in their Environment Department, where already in 1994 he produced a special report on the effects of climate change and sea-level rise on the economies of developing maritime nations.^[11][12]

In 1994 Haq was also seconded by NSF to the White House's Executive Office of the US president for the Federal Budget where he worked on the science budget for independent science agencies.^[13] Haq was appointed an honorary professor at both Tongji University in Shanghai and the Academia Sinica Institute of Ocean Sciences in Qingdao, China, and was a visiting professor at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the UK.

Bilal Haq is also a poet who has published four volumes of poetry,^[14] with insights into nature and the nature of man. His poetic license, enabled by his scientific background, has been fondly dubbed by his peers as "geopoetry", and his poetic message is that we have to learn to live with nature, if we are to survive.

Among Haq's many services to the scientific community was his rescue of a prolific fossil site in the Shandong province of China (Confucius' birthplace) through an international appeal,^[15] (now a National Geopark). He also conceived and helped create a paleontological Geopark (together with the Chinese biologist and academician, Zheng Shouyi) consisting of giant sculptures based on fossil micro-organisms (Foraminifera) in Zhongshan City in Guangdong Province.^[16][17] Since its opening in December 2009, the sculpture park has been visited by over 200,000 visitors every year, which the Smithsonian magazine declared the second most important "Evo-tourism" site in the world.^[18] This was followed by another, larger, Foraminiferal sculpture park in the city of Qingdao, that was established in 2017.

Research

Bilal Haq's research covers a broad spectrum of geosciences, from marine geology to marine sedimentology, paleoceanography, paleoclimatology, paleobiogeography, biostratigraphy, seismic, sequence and global stratigraphy, and natural gas hydrates. In the past his focus was on documenting sea-level changes along the world's continental margins and interior basins for the last 550 million years of Earth history (the complete Phanerozoic Eon).^{[19][20][21][22][23]} More recently he has directed his attention to influence of tectonics on the sedimentary record.^[24][25] He has also focused on quantifying the amount of total Messinian salt sequestered in the deep Mediterranean evaporite giant and its implications for tectonics in various deep basins and continental margins and the paleoceanography of this enclosed Sea.^[26] Haq has published over 150 research papers, book chapters and encyclopedia articles, several of them among the most highly cited in Earth sciences,^[27] of which one was chosen as among the top 100 papers in geosciences of all time.^[28]

Awards and honours

Bilal Haq's honors include the Shepard Medal for excellence in marine geology,^[29][30] the Ocean Sciences Award from the American Geophysical Union,^[31] the Antarctic Medal of the US National Science Foundation, and most recently the Prestwich Prize^[32][33] from the Geological Society of France. He has been recognized for his research by the award of a doctoris honoris causa by the Sorbonne University, election to the membership of the European Academy of Science and Letters (Academia Europaea),^[34] and to fellowships of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America. Haq has also been honored by his peers with the naming of a fossil plankton species and a genus after him. His international appeal saved a prolific fossil site from destruction (that was later declared a National Geopark) in Shandong Province in China and he helped create two Foraminiferal sculpture parks in Guangzhou and Qingdao.

Haq's poetry

Bilal Haq has published four volumes of poetry: Reflections (2016), Musings (2017), Ruminations (2017) and Glimpses of Nature and Man (2018).^[14]

References

1. Haq, Bilal U. "A personal Tribute to Herbert Stradner: a consummate discoverer and an incomparable scholar of the "inner space". In: 10th International Symposium on the Cretaceous, Vienna, 2017". Berichte der Geologischen Bundesanstalt. 120. Wien – via Academia.edu.
2. "Academy of Europe: CV". www.ae-info.org. Retrieved 2 April 2023.
3. "Aboard the D/V Glomar Challenger (ship) is Bilal Haq (left) of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts". UC San Diego Library Digital Collections. 1978.
4. "Bilal U. Haq. Géologue à Exxon production research company, Houston, Texas, USA (en 1984)". Bibliothèque nationale de France.
5. "Testimony Before the House Committee on Science Subcommittee on Energy and Minerals. May 25, 1999". National Science Foundation.
6. "PhD Course : Sea level and Basin Formation, (Lecturers Dr. Bilal Haq and Pr. Sierd Cloetingh). June 2012". University of Copenhagen. 15 March 2013.
7. Haq, Bilal U.; Boersma, Anne (1998) [1978]. Introduction to Marine Micropaleontology. Elsevier Science (Singapore) Pte Ltd. doi:10.1016/B978-0-444-82672-5.X5000-4. ISBN 978-0-444-82672-5.
8. . Institut des Sciences de la Terre de Paris. Archived from the original on 21 November 2021. Retrieved 5 May 2020.
9. "Bilal Haq – Sorbonne University". Academia.edu.
10. "TerraDynamics International BV".
11. Haq, Bilal U. (31 October 1994). "Sea level rise and coastal subsistence : rates and threats" (Working Paper). Environment Department. The World Bank Special Report. Report Number 24750. Washington, DC.
12. Milliman, John D.; Haq, Bilal U. (1996). "Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Subsidence: Towards Meaningful Strategies". Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Subsidence: Causes, Consequences, and Strategies. Coastal Systems and Continental Margins. Vol. 2. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 1–9. doi:10.1007/978-94-015-8719-8_1. ISBN 978-94-015-8719-8.
13. "Office of Management and Budget". WhiteHouse.gov.
14. Haq, Bilal (2017). Glimpses of Nature and Man: Selected poems of Bilal Haq. The Hague, Netherlands: TerraFreund Publishers.
15. "Fossil Trove Preserved". Science. 291 (5508): 1481c–1481. 23 February 2001. doi:10.1126/science.291.5508.1481c. S2CID 220098103 – via ScienceMag.org.
16. Haq, Bilal (18 December 2009). "Macro Microorganisms". Science. 326 (5960): 1597. doi:10.1126/science.326.5960.1597-c – via ScienceMag.org.
17. Haq, Bilal; Zheng, Shouyi (2017). True Goliaths of the Sea: Inner Space Made Visible. The Hague, Netherlands: TerraFreund Publishers.
18. Larkins, Karen (January 2012). "Evolution World Tour: Foraminifera Sculpture Park, China". Smithsonian Magazine.
19. Haq, Bilal U.; Hardenbol, Jan; Vail, Peter R. (6 March 1987). "Chronology of Fluctuating Sea Levels Since the Triassic". Science. 235 (4793): 1156–1167. Bibcode:1987Sci...235.1156H. doi:10.1126/science.235.4793.1156. PMID 17818978. S2CID 24673686 – via ResearchGate.
20. Haq, Bilal U.; Schutter, Stephen R. (3 October 2008). "A Chronology of Paleozoic Sea-Level Changes". Science. 322 (5898): 64–68. Bibcode:2008Sci...322...64H. doi:10.1126/science.1161648. PMID 18832639. S2CID 206514545 – via ScienceMag.org.
21. Haq, Bilal U. (February 2014). "Cretaceous eustasy revisited". Global and Planetary Change. 113: 44–58. Bibcode:2014GPC...113...44H. doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2013.12.007 – via Elsevier Science Direct.
22. Haq, Bilal U. (January 2018). "Jurassic Sea-Level Variations: A Reappraisal". GSA Today. 28 (1): 4–10. doi:10.1130/GSATG359A.1 – via The Geological Society of America.
23. Haq, Bilal U. (December 2018). "Triassic Eustatic Variations Reexamined". GSA Today. 28 (12): 4–9. Bibcode:2018GSAT...28l...4H. doi:10.1130/GSATG381A.1 – via The Geological Society of America.
24. Cloetingh, Sierd; Haq, Bilal U. (23 January 2015). "Inherited landscapes and sea level change". Science. 347 (6220). doi:10.1126/science.1258375. PMID 25613899.
25. Matenco, Liviu C.; Haq, Bilal U. (January 2020). "Multi-scale depositional successions in tectonic settings". Earth-Science Reviews. 200: 102991. Bibcode:2020ESRv..20002991M. doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2019.102991.
26. Haq, Bilal U.; Gorini, Christian; Baur, Jan; Moneron, Jimmy; Rubino, Jean-Loup (January 2020). "Deep Mediterranean's Messinian evaporite giant: How much salt?". Global and Planetary Change. 184: 103052. Bibcode:2020GPC...18403052H. doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2019.103052. S2CID 210628268 – via Elsevier Science Direct.
27. "Bilal U. Haq – Citations Google Scholar". Google Scholar.
28. "Foundations of Earth Science: The top 100 publications". MantlePlumes.org.
29. "Geotimes – about people". Geotimes. May 1998.
30. "SEPM – Past Winners". Society for Sedimentary Geology.
31. "HAQ RECEIVES 2004 OCEAN SCIENCES AWARD". American Geophysical Union. 2004.
32. "Société Géologique de France – Lauréats". 2019.
33. "Prestwich Prize acceptance speech by Bilal Haq". Société Géologique de France. 4 December 2019.
34. "Academia Europaea – Bilal Haq". 12 July 2019.