Knopf, Eleanora Frances (1883–1974)

US geologist who studied metamorphic rocks. She introduced the technique of petrofabrics, a technique for the measurement and interpretation of rock structure, to the USA.

Bliss was born in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, and studied at Bryn Mawr College and the University of California at Berkeley. She spent most of her career working for the US Geological Survey. During the 1930s she was also a visiting lecturer at Yale and at Harvard.

In 1913 in Pennsylvania, she discovered the mineral glaucophane, previously unsighted in America east of the Pacific. In the 1920s Knopf studied the Pennsylvania and Maryland piedmont and the geologically complex mountain region along the New York–Connecticut border.

The technique of petrofabrics had been developed in Austria at Innsbruck University. Knopf applied it to the study of metamorphic rocks and wrote about it in Structural Petrology (1938).