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.
Louis-Noël Moresi is a Professor of Computational Mathematics & Geophysics at The Australian National University. He has deeply influenced the understanding of the Geophysics community through his own research as well as providing software for the community to use.
Geodynamics is a subfield of geophysics dealing with dynamics of the Earth. It applies physics, chemistry and mathematics to the understanding of how mantle convection leads to plate tectonics and geologic phenomena such as seafloor spreading, mountain building, volcanoes, earthquakes, faulting. It also attempts to probe the internal activity by measuring magnetic fields, gravity, and seismic waves, as well as the mineralogy of rocks and their isotopic composition. Methods of geodynamics are also applied to exploration of other planets.
CitCom is a finite element code designed to solve thermal convection problems relevant to Earth's mantle released under the GNU General Public License. Written in C, the code's latest version, CitComS, runs on a variety of parallel processing computers, including shared and distributed memory platforms.
Michael Manga is a Canadian-American geoscientist who is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Computational geophysics is the field of study that uses any type of numerical computations to generate and analyze models of complex geophysical systems. It can be considered an extension, or sub-field, of both computational physics and geophysics. In recent years, computational power, data availability, and modelling capabilities have all improved exponentially, making computational geophysics a more populated discipline. Due to the large computational size of many geophysical problems, high-performance computing can be required to handle analysis. Modeling applications of computational geophysics include atmospheric modelling, oceanic modelling, general circulation models, and geological modelling. In addition to modelling, some problems in remote sensing fall within the scope of computational geophysics such as tomography, inverse problems, and 3D reconstruction.
Thomas Julian Ahrens was a Professor of Geophysics at Caltech who was known for his study of the terrestrial planets and impact processes on planetary surfaces. Ahrens died on November 24, 2010, at the age of 74.
The Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG) is a community-driven organization that advances Earth science by developing and disseminating software for geophysics and related fields. It is a National Science Foundation-sponsored collaborative effort to improve geodynamic modelling and develop, support, and disseminate open-source software for the geodynamics research and higher education communities.
Carmen Gaina is the Director of the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) a Norwegian Centre of Excellence hosted at the Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Norway.
Sean Carl Solomon is the director of the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, where he is also the William B. Ransford Professor of Earth and Planetary Science. Before moving to Columbia in 2012, he was the director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. His research area is in geophysics, including the fields of planetary geology, seismology, marine geophysics, and geodynamics. Solomon is the principal investigator on the NASA MESSENGER mission to Mercury. He is also a team member on the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission and the Plume-Lithosphere Undersea Melt Experiment (PLUME).
In geology, the slab is a significant constituent of subduction zones.
The following outline is provided as an overview of, and topical guide to, applied physics:
Maria Seton is an Australian geologist in the Faculty of Science EarthByte Group School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Seton's research is in the field of geophysics and geodynamics. Her main focus is the link between plate tectonic and mantle processes. Seton also works on kinematic controls on subduction and back-arc basin formation and the relationship between tectonics and palaeo-climate.
GPlates is open-source application software offering a novel combination of interactive plate-tectonic reconstructions, geographic information system (GIS) functionality and raster data visualisation.
Donald Lawson Turcotte 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. He works at the University of California, Davis.
Nadia Lapusta is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. She designed the first computational model that could accurately and efficiently simulate sequence of earthquakes and interseismic slow deformation on a planar fault in a single consistent physical framework.
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.
Dietmar Müller is a professor of geophysics at the school of geosciences, the University of Sydney.
Michael Ortiz is a dual American-Spanish scientist and researcher in the fields of structural, continuum and computational mechanics and is a Frank and Ora Lee Marble Professor Emeritus of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. Prior to his arrival at Caltech in 1995, he was Professor of Engineering at Brown University.
Donald Vincent Helmberger was an American seismologist; described in his Seismological Research Letters obituary as "one of the most impactful seismologists to have lived". A memorial issue in Earthquake Science was published in his honor February 2022. He served as head of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory from 1998 to 2003, and was the Smits Family Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus upon his death. He was named to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.
