Dr Margaretha Brongersma-Sanders (1905-1996), Dutch scientist: an annotated bibliography of her work to celebrate 100 years since her birth

Dr Margaretha Brongersma-Sanders, palaeontologist, pioneer geochemist, geobiologist and oceanographer, Officer of the Order of Oranje Nassau was born 100 years ago (February 20th, 1905) in Kampen in The Netherlands. The fields of research that she covered during her lifetime include taxonomy of recent and fossil, principally freshwater fish; “fish kills” and mass mortality in the sea (especially of fish); taphonomy and preservation of fish; upwelling; anoxic conditions, linked to fish mortality and the origin of bituminous black shales and oil; red tides and harmful algal blooms; trace metal enrichment in recent and fossil sediments, especially the Kupferschiefer; the origin of evaporites; algal mats and stromatolites. She was the first to categorise fish mass mortality, emphasizing algal blooms (red tides) and their importance in forming fish-bonebeds and noting their input to oil production especially in open sea upwelling sites. On this basis she spent a decade or more in the 1950s and 60s as a consultant to Shell and became a member of the Dutch Academy of Science Commission on Sea Research. Her major 1957 review is a famous classic in this field. She managed to keep her scientific interests and intellectual life alive at a time when being married and having children and conducting scientific research were not the norm; she even maintained a reasonable scientific career of sorts for the next 50 years, even after official retirement publishing her last scientific paper in 1992. Despite these achievements, which she did on her own terms, when Brongersma-Sanders died in 1996 the fact was hardly mentioned in the scientific press or to the worldwide community.