Geoffrey King (geophysicist)

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Geoffrey Charles Plume King (born 26 December 1943) is a British geophysicist. He is Senior Research Professor in the Tectonics Laboratory of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, and Honorary Professor at the University of York. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

King was born in the Protectorate of Ugandahis father was working there at the time with the Uganda Geology Survey. [2] He earned a first-class degree in Applied Physics from Durham University in 1965 and completed his PhD at Churchill College, Cambridge in 1969. [3] [4]

Career and research

King was a staff member of the Department of Geophysics at Cambridge until 1986, then worked for the US Geological Survey in Denver and Menlo Park for five years. He also held a concurrent role as an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1987 to 1991. He was employed at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Strasbourg from 1990 to 1995, at which point he joined the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. [5] [6]

He is known in particular for his 1994 Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America paper co-written with Ross Stein and Jian Lin on stress movements in between earthquakes, which was the most heavily-cited earthquake study that decade. [5] [7] Using data from the 1992 Landers earthquake and the Big Bear earthquake that followed hours later, he and his collaborators found that the stress distribution from the first earthquake controlled the distribution of the aftershock sequence. This finding upended the then conventional view that earthquakes only released 'the stress immediately around them' and made Earthquake prediction easier in future. [5] [8] [9] [10]

Selected publications

References

  1. "People". DISPERSE Project. Retrieved 25 May 2025.
  2. "Professor Basil Charles King" (PDF). Proceedings of the Geological Society of Glasgow: 8–9. 1986.
  3. "Results of Final Examinations held in June 1965". University of Durham Gazette. XII (New Series): 12. 30 September 1965. Retrieved 25 May 2025.
  4. The Cambridge University Calendar for the Year 1973-74. University of Cambridge. 1974. p. 22. ISBN   9780521203968.
  5. 1 2 3 "Geoffrey C. P. King". Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. Archived from the original on 7 August 2016. Retrieved 24 May 2025.
  6. "Geoffrey KING Research profile". ResearchGate . Retrieved 24 May 2025.
  7. "Geology & Geophysics : Awards & Recognition". Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Retrieved 25 May 2025. Jian Lin was recognized, with Geoffrey King and Ross Stein, by the Institute for Scientic Information for the ranking of their paper, "Static Stress Changes and the Triggering of Earthquakes," as the most cited paper on earthquake research in the past decade
  8. Mernit, Judith Lewis (June 2011). "Is San Francisco Next? Tokyo is more likely, says a scientist whose work on aftershocks may revolutionize quake forecasting". The Atlantic Monthly . 307 (5). ISSN   1072-7825.
  9. Stein, Ross S. (January 2003). "Earthquake Conversations". Scientific American. 288 (1): 72–79. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0103-72.
  10. King, Geoffrey (January 2004). "An ESSAY by Geoffrey King, Ph.D." ESI Special Topics. Thomson Scientific. Archived from the original on 21 August 2008. Retrieved 25 May 2025.