The work of a marine scientist and conservationist who pioneered a response to the Torrey Canyon supertanker environmental disaster of 1967 has been marked by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The late Stella Turk, a leading expert on molluscs on the British and Irish coasts, is among 241 people to have been acknowledged as history “shapers” in the publication’s new edition.
Turk ( née Phillips) was born in St Mary’s on the Scilly isles in 1925, and developed an interest in natural history from a young age. After she married Frank Archibald Turk, a conchologist and marine life expert, she further developed her expertise on the Cornish coast.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry records how the Torrey Canyon disaster of March 1967 had an enormous influence on her work
The supertanker struck a reef between Cornwall and Scilly and leaked some 30 million gallons of crude oil into the sea, polluting a large section of the Cornish coast.
Turk observed that “the rock pools were stripped bare” , and pointed out that quantifying the losses was made difficult by a lack of records of the pre-existing flora and fauna.
“ This seems to have focused the Turks even more sharply on the task of surveying and compiling lists of biological records for the county, continuing their extensive fieldwork, and corresponding with numerous national experts for assistance in specialist groups,” the Oxford publication says.
Turk founded the Cornish Biological Records Unit, which for many years she ran from her home in Reskadinnick, and later worked closely with the Cornish Wildlife Trust.
From 1990, she pioneered what is now Cornwall Wildlife Trust's Marine Strandings Network, which is of international standing.
In 2019, two years after her death in 2017, a research facility at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus was named after her.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history, worldwide, from prehistory to the year 2017. From January 2021 the dictionary includes biographies of 64,071 individuals, written by over 14,000 contributors.
