Brent Dalrymple

Brent Dalrymple

Gary Brent Dalrymple (born May 9, 1937 in Alhambra , California ) is an American geophysicist and geologist who, together with Allan V. Cox and Richard Doell, created the time scale of the reversals of the earth's magnetic field , which was the case with early evidence of plate tectonics in the mid-1960s used by Frederick Vine and Drummond Hoyle Matthews .

Dalrymple received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley , and was then brought to the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park as an expert in isotope dating using the potassium-argon method by Richard Doell and Allan Cox , where their collaboration on paleomagnetism began. In 1965, Dalrymple presented the first complete time history of reversals of the Earth's magnetic field over the past 3.5 million years to the Geological Society of America . He studied at the USGS, among other things, the Hawaii volcanic chain, geysers in California and impact craters on the moon and was Assistant Chief Geologist for the western US region for three years . Dalrymple stayed with USGS until 1994, when he was Professor at Oregon State University and Dean of Oceanic and Atmospheric Science .

He also wrote popular science books and was involved in the fight against the creationist movement in the USA from 1979 , when he was hired by the California judicial authorities to testify in court cases as an expert on the theory of evolution. Dalrymple is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and, since 1992, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2003 he received the National Medal of Science .

Fonts

• The Age of the Earth. Stanford University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-8047-2331-1 .
• Ancient Earth, ancient skies: the age of Earth and its cosmic surroundings. Stanford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8047-4933-7 .

Web links

• Received the National Medal of Science