Abstract Gregory’s remarkable career and his scientific work are detailed and critically assessed. Accounts of his heroic 1893 expedition to the Rift Valley (a term he coined) in Kenya (now the Gregory Rift), his first crossing of Spitzbergen, and his resignation as Leader of the first British Antarctic Expedition of 1901, when racing to the Pole under Scott became the priority, draw on unpublished letters. While in Melbourne he published on mining geology and a series of geography textbooks. His 1901 Lake Eyre expedition in Central Australia initiated the phrase “The Dead Heart of Australia” and controversy over the source of artesian water. In the Chair of Geology in Glasgow from 1904, he built up the largest first-year geology class in the UK, over 400 students. He worked in every field of geology and every continent except Antarctica. He was also involved with the search for a “homeland” for the Jews in Libya and Angola. He shrewdly realized that Wegener’s Continental Drift Theory erroneously supposed that the Pacific Ocean was wider than now before the Atlantic opened. This led to his influential rejection of Continental Drift. He drowned in Peru traversing the Andes having published over 30 books and nearly 400 articles.

The concepts of creativity and beauty have been intertwined for centuries and have been examined by both artists and scientists. This is a personal essay reflecting on the nature of creativity, its manifestations in artists and scientists, and the challenge of maintaining creativity as we age.

Learning geoscience and becoming a professional geoscientist require high-level spatial thinking. Thus, geoscience offers an intriguing context for studying people's mental representations and processes as they pertain to large-scale, three-dimensional spatial cognition and learning, from both cognitive science and geoscience perspectives. This paper discusses major tasks that professional geoscientists and geoscience learners deal with, focusing on the spatial nature of the tasks and underlying cognitive processes. The specific tasks include recognizing, describing, and classifying the shape of an object; describing the position and orientation of objects; making and using maps; envisioning processes in three dimensions; and using spatial-thinking strategies to think about nonspatial phenomena. Findings and implications from cognitive science literature that could be incorporated into geoscience teaching and some questions for future research are also discussed.