Gary A. Glatzmaier

Gary A. Glatzmaier (* 1949 ) is an American geophysicist. He is known for computer simulations of the earth's geodynamics.

Glatzmaier studied mathematics and physics at Marquette University in Milwaukee with a bachelor's degree in 1971 and was until 1975 as a naval officer and teacher at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Bainbridge, Maryland. He received his doctorate in 1980 from the University of Colorado in Boulder ( Convection in a Rotating Spherical Shell ) and was a post-doctoral student at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, in England (Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge) and at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where he dealt with the physics of the sun. From 1984 he was a physicist at LANL, where he became a LANL Fellow in 1995 and was also a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1996/97 .

From 1998 to 2014 he was Professor of Planetary Science and Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). From 2000 to 2003 he was director of the Center for the Origin, Dynamics and Evolution of Planets at UCSC.

In 1995 Glatzmaier simulated the geodynamo of the earth with his colleagues Paul Roberts and Rob Coe. The model predicted a slightly faster rotation of the solid inner core and also reproduced spontaneous repolarizations of the magnetic field, a dominant axial dipole and a west drift of the non-dipole portion. He also simulated the structure and dynamics in the interior of the Sun (with the prediction of gravity waves), in the interior of large gas planets such as Jupiter and Saturn (whereby the models predict a lateral banding of the wind zones on the surface), the oceans under the ice surface of Jupiter's moons Europa and Titan as well as the dynamics of explosive volcanic eruptions. He also evaluated experiments with rotating liquids in the space shuttle.

In 1996 he received the Sidney Fernbach Award and in 2014 the John Adam Fleming Medal of the American Geophysical Union . He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences .

Fonts (selection)

• with JE Hart, J. Toomre: Space-laboratory and numerical simulations of thermal convection in a rotating hemispherical shell with radial gravity, J. Fluid Mech., Volume 173, 1986, pp. 519-544
• Numerical simulations of stellar convective dynamos. I The model and method, J. Comp. Phys., Vol. 55, 1984, pp. 461-484
• with P. Roberts: Rotation and magnetism of Earth's inner core, Science, Volume 274, 1996, pp. 1887-1891
• with P. Roberts: A three-dimensional self-consistent computer simulation of a geomagnetic field reversal, Nature, Volume 377, 1995, pp. 203-209
• with MA Evonuk: 2D studies of various approximations used for modeling convection in giant planets , Geophys. Astrophys. Fluid Dyn., Vol. 98, 2004, pp. 241-255
• with TM Rogers: Gravity waves in the sun, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc., Vol. 364, 2005, pp. 1135-1146
• with MA Evonuk: The effects of small solid cores on deep convection in giant planets, Planet. Space Sci., Vol. 55, 2007, pp. 407-412
• with DE Ogden, KH Wohletz: Effects of vent overpressure on buoyant eruption columns: Implications for plume stability , Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., Vol. 268, 2008, pp. 283-292.
• Introduction to Modeling Convection in Planets and Stars , Princeton UP 2014

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