| Harry Eugene Wheeler | |
| Birth Date: | 1907 |
| Birth Place: | Pipestone, Minnesota, United States |
| Death Date: | 26 January 1987 |
| Fields: | Paleontology, Stratigraphy |
| Alma Mater: | University of Oregon Stanford University |
| Work Institutions: | University of Nevada, University of Washington |
| Known For: | Sequence stratigraphy |
Harry Eugene Wheeler (1907 – 26 January 1987) was an American geologist and stratigrapher. Eric Cheney called him "the chief theoretical architect of sequence stratigraphy"[1]
Wheeler was a professor of geology at the University of Washington from 1948 until 1976.[2]
Wheeler's work in the 1950 and 1960s was pivotal in the later development of sequence stratigraphy, which is still used today, for example by petroleum industry geologists.[3] His 1964 paper, Baselevel, Lithosphere Surface, and Time-Stratigraphy[4] evolved the concept of base level to emphasize the continuous spatial and temporal nature of stratigraphy, eventually giving rise to Wheeler diagrams:
But what of stratigraphic discontinuities as manifestations of nondeposition and accompanying erosion? Here we pass into the realm of no less important but completely abstract, area-time framework, in which a discontinuity takes on 'area-time' configuration in the form of the lacuna, which in turn, consists of hiatus and degradation vacuity.
The Wheeler diagram is a spatio-temporal plot, showing the (usually one dimensional) spatial distribution of sedimentary facies through time in a two-dimensional chart. Three-dimensional seismic data allows the construction of three-dimensional Wheeler 'diagrams', but these are rare because of the difficulty of producing them.