Peter Vail

Peter R. Vail ( born January 13, 1930 in New York City ) is an American geologist and geophysicist, renowned as a pioneer in the sequence stratigraphy and seismic stratigraphy as a result of his work in the petroleum geology and marine geology.

Vail graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor 's degree in 1952 and Northwestern University, where in 1956 he took his master's degree and received his doctorate in the same year. After that he went as a geophysicist and petroleum geologist at Exxon, where he was a Senior Research Scientist and remained until 1986. In 1976 he was a visiting scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In 1986 he was W. Maurice Ewing professor of oceanography at Rice University.

Vail revolutionized the geological interpretation of data of reflection seismology and showed that these correlate with fluctuations in sea level and could be used as a method in the stratigraphic mapping. In 1977 he published with other geologists from Exxon a graph of global sea-level changes in the Earth's history ( Vail Curve ), which they had obtained from marine geological research in petroleum geology. It was based on proprietary stratigraphic and seismic information from the oil company and was therefore initially not independently verifiable by scientists.

In 2005 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute and 1986, the William Smith Medal of the London Geological Society. In 2003 he received the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America and he was awarded the Sidney Powers Memorial Award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists ( as well as their President's Award ) and the Virgil Kauffman Gold Medal of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. In 1992, he received the Medal Twenhofel.

Writings

• Bilal Haq Jan Hardenbol, Peter Vail Chronology of Fluctuating Sea Levels Since the Triassic, Science, Volume 235, 1987, p 1156-1167
• RM Mitchum, S. Thompson, Peter Vail Seismic stratigraphy and global changes of sea level, part 3: Relative changes of sea level from coastal onlap, in CE Clayton (Editor) Seismic stratigraphy - applications to hydrocarbon exploration, Tulsa, Oklahoma, American Association of Petroleum Geologists Memoir 26, 1977, p 63-81.
• J. Hardenbol, RG Todd, Jurassic unconformities Peter Vail, chronostratigraphy, and sea -level changes from seismic stratigraphy and biostratigraphy, in JS Schlee (Editor) Interregional unconformities and hydrocarbon accumulation, Tulsa, Oklahoma, American Association of Petroleum Geologists Memoir 36, 1984, pp. 129-144.