Jack Oliver

Oliver earned his geophysics doctorate at Columbia in 1953 and later headed seismology at Lamont. With Bryan Isacks and Lynn Sykes, he co-authored the 1968 paper Seismology and the New Global Tectonics, using earthquake observations to support plate motion and subduction.

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After moving to Cornell in 1971, he co-founded COCORP with Sidney Kaufman. The programme adapted seismic-reflection techniques developed for shallower oil exploration to investigate deep continental structure and evolution.

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In 1980 he helped establish Cornell’s Institute for the Study of the Continents as a platform for collaborative geodynamics research. He also wrote about scientific discovery and his experience of the plate-tectonic revolution and trained later generations of Earth scientists.

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