Subdivision
| • | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Claude Jean Allègre | | | Institution: | Institut Physique du Globe de Paris | | | Year Elected: | 1992 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Claude Allègre was a professor of geochemistry at the University of Paris VI (Pierre and Marie Curie) since 1970, and became professor emeritus at the Institut Physique du Globe de Paris in 2009. He is a world leader in isotope geochemistry and is responsible for bringing this research area into flower in France. His research in a wide variety of isotopic problems with particular emphasis on earth structure and earth dynamics has been of continuing excitement to the scientific community throughout the world. He has been active in unifying the earth sciences community in Europe and is a founder of the European Union of Geosciences, for which he served as president. Dr. Allègre has also been active politically, having served as Minister of Education of France from 1997 to 2000. He has been a major leader in revitalizing science education and research in France. A brilliant and stimulating speaker with wide interests, Dr. Allègre is the author of three books on the development of geosciences for a general audience. His scientific accomplishments have been recognized with many medals and honors, including the Day Medal of the Geological Society of America and the V.M. Goldschmidt Medal of the Geochemical Society. In 1986 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him the Crafoord Prize for his work in isotope geochemistry with G.J. Wasserburg. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Digby J. McLaren | | | Institution: | Royal Society of Canada | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1919 | | | Death Date: | December 8, 2004 | | | | |
| 3 | Name: | Lord Oxburgh | | | Institution: | House of Lords; Shell Transport & Trading Company | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | | | | |
Lord Oxburgh played a key role in providing a dynamic basis for plate tectonics, mainly in collaboration with D. L. Turcotte, who he allegedly persuaded to abandon engineering for geophysics. Lord Oxburgh went on to become a university administrator and wrote a notorious report on U.K. earth science which advocated the concentration of resources into a small number of well-founded geology departments. Since being ennobled he has played a prominent role in U.K. government science policy (as chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defense from 1988-93), and as chairman of Shell Oil he has voiced widely publicized concern over global warming. Formerly a lecturer in geology (1962-78) and professor of mineralogy and petrology (1978-89) at the University of Cambridge, Lord Oxburgh has chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology since 2001. He was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1978 and of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Tim Palmer | | | Institution: | Jesus College, University of Oxford | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Tim Palmer is a Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics at the University of Oxford. Tim’s doctoral research was in general relativity where he formulated the first quasi-local expressions for gravitational energy momentum in generic space times. After his PhD, he moved into weather and climate research. Amongst his research achievements, he discovered the world’s largest breaking waves (in the stratosphere) and established the role of Atlantic ocean variability as a causal factor for long-term drought in the African Sahel.
Tim worked at the UK Met Office and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather forecasts where he pioneered studies to quantify the predictability of the climate system, leading the group which developed operational ensemble-based probabilistic weather and climate prediction in the medium, monthly and seasonal timescales. On returning to Oxford in 2010, Tim’s research interests have included the development of stochastic parametrisation in weather and climate models, and the application of ideas in inexact computing for high-resolution weather and climate prediction. He continued his work on fundamental physics developing deterministic methods based on topological models of the p-adic integers, to reformulate quantum theory as a realistic locally causal theory. Tim contributed to all five IPCC Working Group One assessment reports and led two European Union Climate Projects. He has won the top prizes of the American Meteorological Society and the European Meteorological Society, and won the Dirac Gold Medal of the Institute of Physics, for his work on probabilistic weather and climate prediction. He does a considerable amount of outreach work both on climate change, and on chaos theory. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2003 and was President of the Royal Meteorological Society from 2010-2012. In 2015 he became Commander of the British Empire as part of the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List. In 2019 was elected an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2020 was elected an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Tim Palmer was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2015. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. A. M. Celâl Sengör | | | Institution: | Istanbul Technical University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
An expert on the structure and evolution of the Earth's crust, Ali Mehmet Celal Sengor is one of the foremost authorities on the plate-tectonic evolution of Eurasia and has made important, innovative contributions to the accretionary mechanisms by which continents grow. Born in Turkey in 1955, he earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York in 1982. He then returned to Turkey as a lecturer and reader at Istanbul Technical University, where in 1992 he was named Professor of Geology and head of the Department of Solid Earth Sciences. Dr. Sengor is the author of (with A. Miyashiro and K. Aki) Orogeny (1982) and (with others) The Paleogeographic Atlas of Turkey (1998). He has been widely honored for his prodigious series of articles, books, and monographs, and he has had enormous influence on scientific and educational developments in Turkey. His many awards include the Prix Lutaud-Grand Prix de l' Academie des Sciences dans le Domaine des Sciences de la Terre (1997) and the Bigsby Medal of the Geological Society of London (1999). In 1992 he became the youngest of the ten founding members of the Turkish Academy of Sciences (appointed by the Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey), and he is also a member of the Geological Society of London; Societé Geologique de France; Academia Europaea; Geological Society of America; and National Academy of Sciences. He is fluent in Turkish, English, German and French and gives elegant, exciting and lucid lectures in all of these languages. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Claudio Vita-Finzi | | | Institution: | Natural History Museum, London | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | | |
Claudio Vita-Finzi is a Scientific Associate at London’s Natural History Museum. Educated in Argentina and the UK, he received his PhD and ScD from Cambridge University. He held a personal chair in Neotectonics at University College London between 1988 and 2001 before moving to the Department of Mineralogy at the Museum.
Dr Vita-Finzi has worked on geological chronologies in a wide variety of settings as a means of elucidating the underlying processes. His studies of river deposits in the Mediterranean and the Near East revealed the great changes in the natural landscape of Eurasia that have occurred in the last two millennia. He went on to analyse fault history and the buckling of lithospheric plates in Greece, the Near East, SE Asia and South America, and the role of impacts in the evolution of Venus. His current studies focus on the hydrologic effects of changes in the UV component of solar luminosity.
Dr Vita-Finzi is the author of numerous papers on geochronology, tectonics, fluvial geology and geoarchaeology. His books include The Mediterranean Valleys (1969), Recent Earth History (1973), Archaeological Sites in their Setting (1978), Recent Earth Movements (1986), Monitoring the Earth (2002), Planetary Geology (2005), The Sun - a User’s Guide (2008), and A History of the Solar System (2016). He received the G K Warren Prize of the National Academy of Sciences in 1994 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1997. In 2012 he was elected to the British Academy. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. J. Tuzo Wilson | | | Institution: | University of Toronto | | | Year Elected: | 1971 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1908 | | | Death Date: | 4/15/93 | | | | |
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