Donald Lawson Turcotte (born 22 April 1932) is an American geophysicist most noted for his work on the boundary layer theory of mantle convection as part of the theory of plate tectonics.[2] He works at the University of California, Davis.
Donald Turcotte | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 22, 1932 Bellingham, Washington, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Caltech (BS, 1954) Cornell University (MAeroEng, 1955) Caltech (PhD, 1958) [1] |
| Known for | Geophysics |
| Awards | Arthur L. Day Medal(1981), Charles A. Whitten Medal (1995), William Bowie Medal (2002) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Cornell UC Davis |
| Thesis | An Experimental Investigation of Flame Stabilization in a Heated Turbulent Boundary Layer |
| Doctoral advisor | Frank E. Marble |
| Notable students | Louise Kellogg, E Marc Parmentier, Bruce Malamud |
Education and career edit
Turcotte trained as an engineer, graduating with a PhD in aeronautics and physics from Caltech in 1958. After a year at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Turcotte took up a position at Cornell University, in the graduate school of Aeronautical Engineering.[3] In 1965, Turcotte took a sabbatical at the University of Oxford, in the engineering department. Here he met Ron Oxburgh, who had recently arrived in the Department of Geology, and they began a collaboration in which they developed ideas about convective flow in the Earth's mantle, and its links to the newly emerging ideas of plate tectonics.[4] In 1973, Turcotte moved to the geology department at Cornell where he worked for the next thirty years. After retiring from Cornell in 2003, Turcotte moved to University of California, Davis.
He has won awards including the Arthur L. Day Medal of the Geological Society of America, the William Bowie Medal[5] and the Charles A. Whitten Medal of the American Geophysical Union. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.[6]
In 2008, the American Geophysical Union's Nonlinear Geophysics committee established the Donald L. Turcotte Award, which is given annually to one honoree "in recognition of outstanding dissertation research that contributes directly to nonlinear geophysics."[7]
Books edit
- Donald L. Turcotte and Gerald Schubert, Geodynamics, Cambridge University Press, Third Edition (2014), ISBN 978-1-107-00653-9 (Hardback) ISBN 978-0-521-18623-0 (Paperback)
- Donald L. Turcotte, Fractals and chaos in geology and geophysics, Cambridge University Press, 1997
- Gerald Schubert, Donald L. Turcotte, and Peter Olson, Mantle convection in the Earth and planets, Cambridge University Press, 2001
References edit
- ^ <Donald L. Turcotte. geo.cornell.edu
- ^ Gates, Alexander E. (2003). "Turcotte, Donald L. (1932–)". A to Z of earth scientists. New York: Facts on File. pp. 265–266. ISBN 9781438109190.
- ^ "Donald L. Turcotte".
- ^ Turcotte, Donald L.; Oxburgh, E. Ronald (1969). "Continental drift". Physics Today. 22 (4): 30–39. Bibcode:1969PhT....22d..30T. doi:10.1063/1.3035524.
- ^ "Bowie Medal Citation". www.agu.org. Retrieved 2016-07-28.
- ^ "Donald Turcotte". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2016-07-22.
- ^ "Donald L. Turcotte Award". www.agu.org. Retrieved 2016-08-06.