David Lawrence Jones

David Lawrence Jones , called Davy Jones, (born November 12, 1930 in Chicago , † October 30, 2007 in Placerville ) was an American geologist and paleontologist, best known for the origin of the Terran concept.

Jones graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in 1952 and from Stanford University with a master's degree in 1953 and a doctorate in 1956. He then worked for the US Geological Survey from 1955 to 1985, when he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley was. In 1996 he retired. He died after a long illness (bone cancer). He owned a winery in Placerville, where he produced Lava Cap branded wines (named after a gold digger name for lava rock over the hypothetical gold formations sought).

He dealt with the tectonics of the Cordilleras in western North America and especially California, initially as part of the theory of geosyncline cycles. In 1964 he was the biostratigraph in the joint work with EH Bailey and Porter Irwin on the Franciscan Complex (understood from Eugeosynkline) and the Great Valley Formations (understood as Miogeosynkline). At the end of the 1960s, this was reinterpreted in the context of plate tectonics as a subduction zone and upstream island arches, and in this context California played an important role in the transfer of plate tectonics, which was victorious in marine geology at the time, to the continental area. Such formations consisting of a subduction zone and upstream volcanic island arches are also an essential part of the Terran concept, as they are also deposited when the microplates collide.

The actual terran concept (the accumulation of microplates on continental masses) emerged in the early 1970s during the geological exploration of Alaska with the participation of Jones. Typical signs were the paleomagnetic and palaeontological data, which were strange in the area around the terrane. The name was first used in 1972 by his colleague William Porter Irwin in the Klamath Mountains , and in 1977 Jones named the Terran Wrangellia for a structure from southern Alaska to British Columbia in Canada. It consists of rocks from the Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) to the Jurassic (including characteristic flood basalts from the Triassic, which Jones and colleagues traced back to a mantle plume) and the terran was originally near the equator in the Panthalassa Ocean. It itself consists of two terranes that collided with each other and attached to the North American continent in the Cretaceous period. Around 1980 the Terran concept for the analysis of the tectonics of the Cordilleras of North America became established and was then applied worldwide.

As a paleontologist, he dealt with mollusks of the Upper Mesozoic Era on the Pacific coast of North America.

In 1995 he received the Mary Clark Thompson Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.

Fonts

• with EH Bailey, WP Irwin: Franciscan and related rocks, and their significance in the geology of Western California, California Division Mines and Geology Bulletin, No. 183, 1964, pp. 1-177
• with Norman J. Silberling , John Hillhouse: Wrangellia — a displaced terrane in northwestern North America: Canadian Jour. Earth Sci., Vol. 14, 1977, pp. 2565-2577
• with Norman J. Silberling (Ed.): Lithotectonic terrane maps of the North American Cordillera: US Geological Survey Open-File Report 84, 1984

Web links

• Biography at the University of Berkeley

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
2. ↑ See biography of Jones at Berkeley University in the web links. According to the popular science book by John McPhee, Annals of the Former World, geologists in the USA had been using the term for a long time, in contrast to the more common term terrain . Obituary for Jones at the University of California, Berkeley ( Memento of the original from April 15, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.