David T. Griggs

David Tressel Griggs (born October 6, 1911 in Columbus , Ohio , † December 31, 1974 in Snowmass , Colorado ) was an American geophysicist .

Life

Griggs was the son of the botanist Robert Fiske Griggs (1881–1962), after whom the Mount Griggs volcano is named and who was instrumental in founding Katmai National Park in Alaska. He also took his son there with him and David Griggs was particularly impressed by the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes , so he decided to specialize in geophysics while studying physics. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1932 and his master's degree from Ohio State University in 1933, and was then a junior fellow at Harvard University , where he experimented with the behavior of rocks under high pressure and high temperature under Percy Bridgman . In doing so, he recognized the plastic properties that would enable mantle convection and thus mountain formation and similar geological phenomena could be explained. He was ahead of his time, and from the 1960s this was generally recognized in plate tectonics.

During World War II he did radar research at MIT's Radiation Laboratory and shortly after the war he was one of the founders of the RAND Corporation and its first head of the physics department. In 1948 he became professor of geophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was also a consultant for the American defense complex, including 1951/52 as chief scientist of the US Air Force. At UCLA, he founded an experimental petrography laboratory. Most recently, he worked on research into the mechanisms of earthquakes. He died of a heart attack while skiing in Colorado.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1963). In 1970 he received the Walter H. Bucher Medal and in 1973 the Arthur L. Day Medal .

Web links

• Obituary by JM Christie, L. Knopoff, LB Slichter