Draft:Vadim A. Kravchinsky

Vadim A. Kravchinsky (born in Irkutsk, Russia) is a Russian-Canadian geophysicist. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in geophysics at the Irkutsk National Research Technical University.

He started as an engineer-geophysicist working in the Irtutsk Geophysical Expedition (industry) and defended his PhD thesis in 1995. He became a Director of the Irkutsk Paleomagnetic Laboratory in 1996. He moved to the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (France) as an invited professor and CNRS researcher in 1997. Kravchinsky joined the geophysics group of the Department of Physics at the University of Alberta in 2021, where he became a professor of physics in 2002. In 2003, Kravchinsky obtained a Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant to build a laboratory of paleomagnetism and petromagnetism. His research interests are in the areas of geophysics, paleomagnetism and archeomagnetism, plate tectonics, climate and paleoclimate, and numerical modelling of geophysical and environmental processes.

Kravchinsky and his graduate students and research associates led field trips in Canada, China, France, Mexico, Mongolia, Scotland, Siberia, and the United States. They published manuscripts on plate tectonics and paleomagnetism of Eurasia and North America, magnetostratigraphy, astrochronology and cyclostratigraphy, archeomagnetism and geomagnetism, geophysics theory and time series analysis.

Kravchinsky reconstructed the size of the Mongol-Okhotsk Ocean and the surrounding continents based on the paleomagnetic data from the Mongol-Okhotsk suture zone. His colleagues and he published the longest continental lacustrine climate and geomagnetic records from the deepest lake on Earth, Lake Baikal. He was the first to suggest that mass extinctions in the Paleozoic Era were related to the giant volcanic events recorded in the Large Igneous Provinces. With his co-authors and students, Kravchinsky further developed the quantitative reconstructions of continents, calculating not only their paleolatitudes but also their paleolongitudes  and determining the age of geological events using paleomagnetic dating technique.