Gerald Lenox-Conyngham

Sir Gerald Ponsonby Lenox-Conyngham Kt FRS FRAS[1] (21 August 1866 – 27 October 1956) was an Irish surveyor and geodesist.

[2] A redetermination of the longitude of Karachi undertaken by Burrard and Lenox-Conyngham in 1894, which required journeys to Europe and the Middle-East, was later found, using radio signals, to be accurate to 0.02 of a second of arc.

[2][4] Burrard suggested that anomalies in latitude found by the Survey in the early 1800s parallel to the mountains to the north might be caused by a large mass below the Indo-Gangetic Plain.

The data showed a negative relative gravitational component in the region of the Plain, a fact readily apparent in modern measurements (see image).

[3] After his return from India in 1920, he planned to settle in Oxford but was invited to join a committee at the University of Cambridge to promote the study of geodesy.

With few funds from the University, he began, solely, teaching undergraduates and later new officers on probation for the Colonial Survey Service who spent a year at the School of Geodesy before they were posted abroad.

He made an expedition to the Great Barrier Reef (regarding the isostasy of Pacific islands), and was asked to visit Montserrat to investigate earthquakes.