Thomas Clements; Death Valley Expert Chaired USC Department

Thomas Clements, 97, engineering geologist who was an expert on Death Valley, where he discovered Lake Rogers. Born in Chicago, Clements served in the Navy during World War I and earned a degree in engineering mining from the Texas School of Mines and graduate degrees in geology from Caltech. He worked as a metallurgist and engineer before joining the USC faculty in 1929, where he taught for 35 years and chaired the department of earth sciences for 30 years. Clements’ book “Geological Story of Death Valley” was published in 10 editions from 1954 to 1982. In the late 1950s, he was curator of mineralogy and petrology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. After his retirement from USC, Clements was project geologist on California archeological explorations for early man sponsored by the National Geographic Society. Clements was a past president of the Los Angeles Board for Qualifications of Engineering Geologists, the Los Angeles Mineralogical Society, the Brenner Geological Club and the Death Valley Forty-niners, and served on Mayor Sam Yorty’s board of inquiry into the Baldwin Hills Reservoir failure of 1964. Clements and his late wife, Lydia, coauthored several books on Death Valley geology. On Monday in Hollywood.