Esteban Boltovskoy — oceanographer and micropalaeontologist with roots in the Russian Empire
Esteban Boltovskoy, known in Russian as Stepan Boltovskoy, was born on 26 January 1912 in the Russian Empire, in Warsaw according to one biography, into a family of Russian descent, shortly before the First World War and the Revolution. He grew up and was educated in the Soviet Union, where he endured, in the words of a later biographer, a hard youth, and where he published his first scientific papers. During the Second World War he left the USSR with his family; his younger son, Demetrio, was born in Austria in 1947.
In 1948 Argentina offered the family its first opportunity to settle, and Boltovskoy arrived there with his wife and two sons, aged four and one, and a couple of battered suitcases. In the first years the family made a living partly by manufacturing cardboard carnival masks. He then joined the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia in Buenos Aires, where he spent the rest of his career, and from 1953 he published steadily.
Boltovskoy became internationally known for his studies of foraminifera, single-celled marine organisms whose shells record the conditions of the water in which they lived. Using planktonic foraminifera as indicators of different water masses, he produced in the 1950s and 1960s the first detailed schemes of surface circulation and water mixing in the South-West Atlantic, including studies of the Malvinas (Falklands) Current, later confirmed by other methods. He took part in oceanographic cruises, including aboard the Argentine vessel Capitán Cánepa in 1961, proposed new techniques for treating plankton samples, and described at least thirty-five new species of foraminifera.
Between 1953 and 1997 he published more than 150 papers and five books, among them Recent Foraminifera, written with Ramil Wright (second edition 1976), and Foraminíferos del Río de La Plata. He organised at the museum one of the largest foraminifera collections in the world, with more than 13,500 slides. He was made an honorary fellow of the German Palaeontological Society in 1968 and in 1988 received the Cushman Foundation's international prize for excellence in foraminiferal research; a genus of fossil foraminifera, Boltovskoyella, is named after him.
He died in Buenos Aires on 4 September 1997, aged eighty-five. His son Demetrio Boltovskoy became a leading Argentine biologist and oceanographer.
"Left the Soviet Union during the Second World War; his younger son was born in Austria in 1947, and in 1948 he arrived in Argentina with his wife and two sons."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Warsaw, Congress Poland (now Poland) — or elsewhere in the Russian Empire
Born in 1912 in the Russian Empire — in Warsaw, according to one biography — of Russian ancestry, he grew up and was educated in the Soviet Union, where he published his first scientific papers, before emigrating to Argentina after the war.
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Warsaw, Congress Poland (now Poland) — or elsewhere in the Russian Empire. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.