Allan V. Cox

Allan Verne Cox (born December 17, 1926 in Santa Ana , † January 27, 1987 in Palo Alto , California) was an American geophysicist whose work on dating the reversals of the Earth's magnetic field made an important contribution to plate tectonics .

Cox first studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley , but dropped out to go to the merchant navy and then did his military service. After returning he studied geology in Berkeley and received his doctorate in 1959 under John Verhoogen (1912-1993), then one of the few supporters of plate tectonics. He then went to the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park , where he worked with geophysicists Richard Doell (1923-2008) and Brent Dalrymple (* 1937; an expert in dating using the potassium-argon method) on rock magnetism and the three succeeded set up the first time scale for reversals of the earth's magnetic field. This later enabled Frederick Vine and Drummond Hoyle Matthews to provide decisive evidence for plate tectonics through the traces of the extent of the seabeds on both sides of the oceanic ridges.

In 1967 Cox became a professor at Stanford University , where he became dean of geosciences in 1979. He died in a bicycle accident, the circumstances of which raised suspicion of suicide. A few days later, he was to be charged with child abuse.

He was President of the American Geophysical Union from 1978 to 1980 . He received the Arthur L. Day Medal in 1975, the John Adam Fleming Medal in 1969 , the Arthur L. Day Prize in 1984 and the Vetlesen Prize in 1970 . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1969), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1974) and the American Philosophical Society (1984). From 1972 to 1974 he headed the Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism Section of the American Geophysical Union.

Fonts

• with Richard Doell, Brent Dalrymple: Geomagnetic Polarity Epochs and Pleistocene Geochronometry. In: Nature. Volume 198, 1963, pp. 1049-1051.
• with Richard Doell, Brent Dalrymple: Reversals of the earth's magnetic field. In: Scientific American. Volume 216, 1967.
• Geomagnetic reversals. In: Science. Volume 163, 1969, p. 237.
• Plate tectonics and geomagnetic reversals. Freeman, San Francisco 1973.
• with Robert Brian Hart Plate Tectonics: How It Works. Wiley-Blackwell, 1986.

literature

• William Glen The Road to Jaramillo: Critical Years of the Revolution in Earth Science , Stanford University Press 1982
• Alexander E. Gates: Earth Scientists from A to Z, Facts on File, 2003

Web links

• Obituary at the National Academy of Sciences by Konrad B. Krauskopf