Eleanora Knopf

Eleanora Frances Knopf (née Bliss; July 15, 1883 – January 21, 1974) was an American geologist who worked for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and did research in the Appalachians during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Her father was General Tasker Howard Bliss — a career soldier who became Chief of Staff of the US Army during the First World War as well as a principal representative of the United States in the Allied Councils.

After two years at Berkeley (1910-1911), she returned to Bryn Mawr to work with Anna Jonas Stose (another one of Bascom's students), on the study of the metamorphic rocks near the college.

[4] They collaborated on multiple papers, and went on to publish the most notable ones, such as one relating to the structure of metamorphic rocks called Schists, and another regarding the geology of McCalls Ferry.

In 1913 she published her findings in the American Museum of Natural History of the first American sighting of mineral glaucophane, located in Pennsylvania[9] [10] which had never been found before in the east part of the Pacific Coast in the U.S.[5] In 1917, she was promoted to a geological assistant where she worked with the Maryland State Geological Survey and the federal survey.

After searching overseas for new ways to precisely study the region, she settled upon the methods of Bruno Sander (from Innsbruck University) in which the fine structure of the rock was examined — the grains and the optical properties.

Eleanora Knopf was one of several American women geologists who spent time working in the Appalachians during the twentieth century.

[12] Although these observations were opposed to one of primary principles of geomorphology at the time, Knopf implied that remnant landforms should still survive for an extended period due to unequal erosion.

As a result of her research, her findings in elation to deformation and the visual effects of the rock formations lead to the creation a new division of Geological study.

Her father, General Tasker Bliss, about 1918.