Brian Leslie Norman Kennett (born 7 May 1948 in Croydon, Surrey, UK [1] ) is a mathematical physicist and seismologist. He is now a professor emeritus at the Australian National University. [2]
Kennett graduated in Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge with a first class bachelor's degree in 1969 and then took the Mathematical Tripos Part III achieving Honours with Distinction in 1970. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical seismology from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in 1973. He was a Research Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge from 1972 to 1976. As a postdoc, he was at the University of California, San Diego from 1974 to 1975, before returning in 1975 to the University of Cambridge, where he was a lecturer until he moved to Australia. In 1984, Kennett joined the Research School of Earth Sciences of the Australian National University (ANU) where he established a strong observational and theoretical program in seismology. He was a visiting scientist at, among other places, the University of Tokyo in 2002 and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2009. From 2006 to 2010 he was director of the Research School of Earth Sciences of the ANU. [2]
Kennett was elected in 1988 a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and in 1996 an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. From 1999 to 2003, he was President of the International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth’s Interior (IASPEI). [2] He was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1994 and as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2005.
Kennett has made significant contributions to research on the Earth's internal structure. [3] His theoretical work on the form of seismograms and their application (e.g., seismic tomography) has contributed to the study of the Earth's mantle, particularly in Australia. He has developed comprehensive models of propagation velocities of seismic waves that serve as a basis for determining the epicenter of an earthquake, including the IASP91 model and the AK135 model. [2]
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: CS1 maint: postscript (link)Seismology is the scientific study of earthquakes and the generation and propagation of elastic waves through the Earth or other planetary bodies. It also includes studies of earthquake environmental effects such as tsunamis as well as diverse seismic sources such as volcanic, tectonic, glacial, fluvial, oceanic microseism, atmospheric, and artificial processes such as explosions and human activities. A related field that uses geology to infer information regarding past earthquakes is paleoseismology. A recording of Earth motion as a function of time, created by a seismograph is called a seismogram. A seismologist is a scientist works in basic or applied seismology.
Keiiti Aki was a Japanese-American professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and then at the University of Southern California (USC), seismologist, author and mentor. He and Paul G. Richards coauthored "Quantitative Seismology: theory and methods".
Don Lynn Anderson was an American geophysicist who made significant contributions to the understanding of the origin, evolution, structure, and composition of Earth and other planets. An expert in numerous scientific disciplines, Anderson's work combined seismology, solid state physics, geochemistry and petrology to explain how the Earth works. Anderson was best known for his contributions to the understanding of the Earth's deep interior, and more recently, for the plate theory hypothesis that hotspots are the product of plate tectonics rather than narrow plumes emanating from the deep Earth. Anderson was Professor (Emeritus) of Geophysics in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received numerous awards from geophysical, geological and astronomical societies. In 1998 he was awarded the Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences along with Adam Dziewonski. Later that year, Anderson received the National Medal of Science. He held honorary doctorates from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and served on numerous university advisory committees, including those at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, University of Chicago, Stanford, University of Paris, Purdue University, and Rice University. Anderson's wide-ranging research resulted in hundreds of published papers in the fields of planetary science, seismology, mineral physics, petrology, geochemistry, tectonics and the philosophy of science.
Keith Edward Bullen FAA FRS was a New Zealand-born mathematician and geophysicist. He is noted for his seismological interpretation of the deep structure of the Earth's mantle and core. He was Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Sydney in Australia from 1945 until 1971.
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Harry Oscar Wood (1879–1958) was an American seismologist who made several significant contributions in the field of seismology in the early twentieth-century. Following the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, California, Wood expanded his background of geology and mineralogy and his career took a change of direction into the field of seismology. In the 1920s he co-developed the torsion seismometer, a device tuned to detect short-period seismic waves that are associated with local earthquakes. In 1931 Wood, along with another seismologist, redeveloped and updated the Mercalli intensity scale, a seismic intensity scale that is still in use as a primary means of rating an earthquake's effects.
John Conrad Jaeger, FRS was an Australian mathematical physicist.
Shyam Sundar Rai is an Indian seismologist and a former chair professor at the department of Earth and Climate Science of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune. He is known for his researches on the seismic structure of Indian continental lithosphere and is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences, India as well as of the Indian Geophysical Union. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences in 1996.
Trevor John McDougallFAGU is a physical oceanographer specialising in ocean mixing and the thermodynamics of seawater. He is Emeritus Scientia Professor of Ocean Physics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and is Past President of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO) of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.
Hrvoje Tkalčić is Australian and Croatian scientist (geophysicist) and Professor E2 at the Australian National University in Canberra.
David Gubbins is a British former geophysicist concerned with the mechanism of the Earth's magnetic field and theoretical geophysics. He is Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at Leeds University.
John Henry Woodhouse is an English geophysicist, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford.
Tatiana B. Yanovskaya was a Russian geophysicist and educator.
Barbara A. Romanowicz is a French geophysicist and an expert on imaging the Earth's interior.
Alik Ismail-Zadeh is a mathematical geophysicist known for his contribution to computational geodynamics and natural hazard studies, pioneering work on data assimilation in geodynamics as well as for outstanding service to the Earth and space science community. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Véronique Dehant is a Belgian geodesist and geophysicist. She specializes in modeling the deformation of the Earth's interior in response to the planet's rotation and the gravitational forces exerted upon it by the Sun and Moon. She has used similar techniques to study Mercury, Venus, Mars and the icy satellites of the outer planets. She primarily works at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, but also serves as an Extraordinary Professor at the Université Catholique de Louvain.
Michel Campillo is a French seismologist and geophysicist who is currently a professor at Grenoble Alpes University.
Annie Souriau is a French seismologist from the commune of Saint-Cloud Paris. She is primarily known for her research into Earth's inner and outer cores, specifically her work examining seismic activity within and around the Pyrenees mountains. Through her and her colleague's research and studies, she has made notable advances to how humans understand the inner workings of the Earth's core while also winning many awards in the process.
Christopher H. Scholz is an American geologist and physicist. He is Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences and of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University and the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory.