Marshall Kay
George Marshall Kay ( born November 10, 1904 in Paisley, Ontario, † September 3, 1975 in Englewood, New Jersey) was an American geologist and professor at Columbia University.
He became known for his research in the Ordovician of New York, Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as Nevada. In addition, he published works that dealt on a worldwide basis with the stratigraphy of the Middle and Upper Ordovician. This work earned him the nickname "Mr. Ordovician " one. His thorough fieldwork yielded much evidence of continental drift and plate tectonics. In him both the still valid classification scheme lithostratigraphic units as well as the concept of palinspastischen reconstruction goes back, the attempt to reconstruct the initial configuration of a folded and disordered layer sequence through mental reshaping.
Kay documented already in the 1920s and 1930s in the careful work great, always active reduction territories he tried to interpret in light of the then applicable Geosynklinaltheorie and to correlate with other similar areas around the world. As in the 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics was created, the solution to the problem of the driving forces for the formation of the so often documented by him and the pair of Miogeosynkline Eugeosynkline offered him. Kay worked until his death in mind to interpret the correlations in the light of the new theory.
1971 Kay was awarded the Penrose Medal.