Rob Van der Voo

Rob Van der Voo (born August 4, 1940 in Zeist ) is a Dutch geologist and geophysicist. He is a leading international expert on paleomagnetism and known for the reconstruction of plate movements in the Paleozoic .

Rob Van der Voo studied at the University of Utrecht with a diploma in geology in 1965 and in geophysics in 1969 and received his doctorate there in 1969, with a dissertation on paleomagnetic data in the Mediterranean (his first publication in 1966 was in the Spanish Pyrenees). In 1970 he went to the United States at the University of Michigan , where he became a professor and headed the faculty from 1981 to 1988 and 1991 to 1995.

In the USA, he initially dealt with the reconstruction of the apparent polar migration in North America in the Paleozoic (APWP, apparently mainly caused by the migration of the continents and plates). At the end of the 1970s he turned to the Armorican Massif of Brittany and took part in the terran analysis of the mountain ranges in western North America, the area in which the terran analysis was made at that time, including Wrangellia (and the Alexander Terran as part of it, for which he appointed the APWP). In the 1980s he clarified the phenomenon of secondary magnetization of paleozoic rocks (such as carbonates) in North America, a problem of remagnetization of the rocks that made paleogeographic reconstruction difficult, and found a way to distinguish remagnetized minerals with the electron microscope. At the end of the 1980s he dealt with the Avalon Terran in Newfoundland with new findings of the terran deposition in northeast North America at Laurentia and the evolution of the Iapetus Ocean in the Ordovician and he dealt with the reconstruction of plate tectonics in China. Then he dealt with the supercontinent Rodinia , its departure and the formation of the subsequent supercontinent Gondwana . With Christopher Scotese , Alfred M. Ziegler and Richard Bambach he was involved in a project of the detailed reconstruction of the plate tectonics in the Paleozoic Era (Paleomap).

He also studied inferences about mantle dynamics and explored the presence of non-dipole components in paleomagnetic data.

He has worked with Trond Torsvik on many regional and global syntheses of plate tectonics in the past .

He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (1978) and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences (1995), Fellow of the American Geophysical Union . He received the Henry Russell Award from the University of Michigan in 1976 and its Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 1990, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Geosciences in 2001 and the Geological Society of America's GP Woollard Award in 1992 . In 2004 he was President of the Geological Society of America.

He was the editor of Tectonophysics , Geological Society of America Bulletin , Tectonics, and Earth and Planetary Science Letters .

Fonts

• Paleomagnetism of the Atlantic, Tethys and Iapetus Ocean, Cambridge University Press 2005
• Paleomagnetic evidence for the rotation of the Iberian Peninsula, Tectonophysics, Volume 7, 1969, pp. 5-56
• Paleomagnetism, continental drift and plate tectonics, Reviews of Geophysics, Volume 13, 1975, pp. 195-236
• Paleomagnetism related to continental drift and plate tectonics, Rev. Geophys. Space Science, Volume 17, 1979, pp. 227-235
• with James Channell: Paleomagnetism in orogenic belts, Reviews of Geophysics, Volume 18, 1980, pp. 455-481
• Pre-mesozoic paleomagnetism and plate tectonics, Ann. Rev. Earth Planetary Sci., Vol. 11, 1982, pp. 191-220
• with Donna M. Jurdy: A method for the separation of true polar wandering and continental drift, including results for the last 55 my, J. of Geophysical Research, Volume 79, 1974, pp. 2945-2952
• with RK Bambach, CR Scotese, AM Ziegler: Paleozoic base maps, J. Geology, Volume 87, 1979, 217-277.
• with Torsvik, Smethurst, Meert, McKendrick: Continental break-up and collision in the Neoproterozoic and Palaeozoic-a tale of Baltica and Laurentia, Earth Science Reviews, Volume 40, 1996, pp. 229-258
• Paleozoic paleogeography of North America, Gondwana, and intervening displaced terranes: Comparisons of paleomagnetism with paleoclimatology and biogeographical patterns, GSA Bulletin, Volume 100, 1988, pp. 311-324
• with R. Dietmar Müller, Trond Torsvik, B. Steinberg, C. Gaina: Global plate motion frames: toward a unified model, Reviews of Geophysics, Volume 46, 2008
• The reliability of paleomagnetic data, Tectonophysics, Volume 184, 1990, pp. 1-9

literature

• Conall Mac Niocaill, Trond Torsvik, Ben van der Pluijm: Rob Van der Voo - an appreciation . In: Tectonophysics . tape 362 , no. 1-4 , February 6, 2003, pp. xi – xii , doi : 10.1016 / S0040-1951 (02) 00628-5 ( PDF ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry in Alexander E. Gates, A to Z of Earth Scientists, Facts on File 2003