Don L. Anderson

Don L. Anderson ( born March 5, 1933, Frederick, Maryland, USA) is an American geophysicist who has made mainly as a seismologist important contributions to the determination of the large-scale structure of the Earth's interior. He is Emeritus Eleanor and John R. McMillan Professor of Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech ).

CV and main scientific achievements

After earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology / Geophysics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ( 1955), Anderson worked for several years in the industry and in the military, before he moved to Caltech in 1962, and there received his doctorate in geophysics and mathematics. He spent his entire academic career following essentially also at the Seismological Laboratory of Caltech.

Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, Anderson and his colleagues have explored the relationship between the behavior of the rocks of the mantle under high pressures and temperatures, phase transformations of mantle minerals and the occurrence of earthquakes. They have also investigated with seismological methods convection currents in the mantle and thus decisively contributed to the understanding of tectonic plate movements. These researches have led, among other things, in 1981 in collaboration with Adam M. Dziewoński to the development of the Preliminary Reference Earth Model ( PREM ), which established a consistent radial model of the Earth for a number of important geophysical parameters (among seismic velocities, attenuation and density).

Since the 1980s he has also appeared by some unconventional, provocative and controversial ideas that deviate from the general doctrine. This includes in particular an alternative model for the mineralogical composition of the upper mantle, therefore, do not exist the deeper areas of Piklogit, a relatively pyroxene and garnet- rich rocks, and from the olivine - dominated peridotite with the composition of pyrolite. Another theory of Anderson is that developed by W. Jason Morgan theory of convective plumes in the mantle is invalid and "hotspots" and oceanic islands such as Hawaii or Iceland instead be caused by chemical and mineralogical anomalies in the upper mantle.

He has also written with Theory of the Earth, an influential and widely used textbook.

For his scientific achievements Anderson has received numerous awards, including the James B. Macelwane Medal ( 1966), the Emil Wiechert Medal of the German Geophysical Society (1986 ), the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1988 ), the William Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union ( 1991), the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1998, with Dziewoński ) and the National Medal of Science of the USA ( 1998).

Important publications

  • AM Dziewoński, DL Anderson: Preliminary reference Earth model. Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors 25, p.297 -356 (1981 )
  • D. L. Anderson: Theory of the Earth. Blackwell Scientific Publications ( 1989)
  • Geophysicists
  • Geologist ( 20th century)
  • Geologist ( 21st century)
  • Americans
  • Born in 1933
  • Man
  • University teachers ( California Institute of Technology)
Frederick (Maryland) Mantle (geology) Integrated Authority File
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