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:
“We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)
“Whether or not his newspaper and a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called “real life” of the so- called average man, one thing is fortunately certain: namely, that the average man himself is but a piece of fiction, a tissue of statistics.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The conclusion suggested by these arguments might be called the paradox of theorizing. It asserts that if the terms and the general principles of a scientific theory serve their purpose, i. e., if they establish the definite connections among observable phenomena, then they can be dispensed with since any chain of laws and interpretive statements establishing such a connection should then be replaceable by a law which directly links observational antecedents to observational consequents.”
—C.G. (Carl Gustav)