Israel Charles White (Monongalia County, West Virginia, USA, November 1, 1848 - Baltimore, Maryland, November 24, 1927) was an eminent geologist and professor, internationally known, and the first state geologist of West Virginia.
White was born on a farm in Battelle district[1] of western Monongalia County and grew up in Morgantown.[2] White graduated from West Virginia University in June 1872 with a bachelor's degree in Geology[2] and did postgraduate studies in Geology and Chemistry from Columbia School of Mines and received a doctoral degree from the University of Arkansas in 1880. He began his career in 1875 as an assistant geologist in Pennsylvania. In 1877 he assumed the chair of Geology at West Virginia University. He was the first to correlate the coals of Pennsylvania and Ohio and also the first to apply the Anticline Theory to locate wells for oil exploration. He worked as a geologist at the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey for thirty years and became its first director.
In 1904 he was hired by the Brazilian government as head of the "Comissão de Estudos das Minas de Carvão de Pedra do Brasil" (Commission for Studies on Brazilian Coal Mines), whose aim was to identify the potential of Brazilian coal, and whose report, published in 1908, was a milestone for understanding the geology of the Paraná Basin in Southern Brazil. One of the main results of these studies, besides the reconnaissance for coal, was the discovery of Mesosaurus fossils within Permian black shales (Irati Formation), and the Glossopteris flora within the Permian coals. White was one of the first to propose the equivalence between the South American Permian strata and similar rocks of the Karoo Basin in South Africa.[3] This report had an important contribution to the development of Continental Drift Theory, published by Alfred Wegener in 1912.[4]