Andrey Pak

Andrey Insunovich Pak was born in November 1926; reference works give neither the exact day nor the place. He was ethnically Korean, and his whole professional life was spent in the geology of Uzbekistan.

In 1951 Pak graduated from Samarkand State University, which at that time bore the name of Alisher Navoi. He then worked in the Krasnokholm geological exploration expedition as chief geologist and head of prospecting parties.

He took part in the search for and exploration of deposits of gold, silver, uranium, phosphorites, turquoise and quartz sands. The best-known result of this work was the Uchkuduk uranium deposit in the Kyzylkum Desert: Pak was among its discoverers and worked in the Uchkuduk exploration party. The Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Combine was later built on the basis of the deposit.

In 1959 a group of geologists, F. N. Abakumov, A. I. Pak, A. A. Petrenko, M. E. Poyarkova and V. I. Kuzmenko, received the Lenin Prize for the discovery of Uchkuduk. Pak was also awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the badge “Discoverer of a Deposit”.

He defended his candidate’s dissertation in 1965. From 1967 until the end of his life he worked at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, first as a senior and then as a leading researcher. In 1984 he became a Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences. The result of his later research was a monograph on the evolution of weathering crusts in Earth’s history (Tashkent, 1987).

Andrey Pak died in 1994.