Life and Main Scientific Contributions
Born in Frederick, Maryland, Anderson moved to Baltimore when he was six. He graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute then attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he earned a B.Sc. in geology/geophysics in 1955. He then worked in industry and for the military before moving to Caltech, where he received a Ph.D. in geophysics and mathematics in 1962. He spent most of his subsequent academic career at Caltech's Seismological Laboratory.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Anderson and his collaborators investigated the relations between the behavior of mantle rock under high pressures and temperatures, phase transformations of mantle minerals, and the generation of earthquakes. Furthermore, they contributed significantly to the understanding of tectonic plate motions by exploring convection currents in the Earth's mantle with seismological methods. Among other, these studies have led to the development of the Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM) in collaboration with Adam Dziewonski; PREM establishes a consistent radial model of the Earth for several important geophysical parameters (e.g. seismic velocities, attenuation, and density).
Since the 1980s he has also been known as the originator of some unconventional, provocative, and controversial ideas which depart from the views of the scientific mainstream. For instance, he has developed an alternative model of the mineralogical composition of the upper mantle, according to which its deeper parts consist of piclogite, a relatively pyroxene- and garnet-rich rock, rather than olivine-dominated peridotite with the chemical composition of pyrolite. Another of his hypotheses is that the theory of convective mantle plumes in the Earth, as proposed by W. Jason Morgan, is invalid and that hotspots and oceanic islands such as Hawaii or Iceland are rather caused by chemical/mineralogical anomalies in the upper mantle.
Don Anderson also considered that plate tectonics could not happen without the calcium carbonate laid down by living beings at the edges of subduction zones. The massive weight of these sediments could be softening the underlying rocks, making them pliable enough to plunge.
He has also authored Theory of the Earth, a widely known textbook.
Read more about this topic: Don L. Anderson
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life, main and/or scientific:
“As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
“So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism—despotism during the campaign—is indispensable.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be ‘observed’ are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.”
—Ian Hacking (b. 1936)