2002 Medals and Awards
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2002 Medals and Awards PENROSE Maxwell (1963 and 1974 GSA oratory, and modeling work. An iridium Presidents, respectively). After receiv- layer at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) MEDAL ing his Ph.D., Walter worked for a time boundary reportedly has been discov- Presented to Walter Alvarez for the American Overseas Petroleum ered in more than 100 sites around the Company, exploring in the world, as has the “smoking gun”—an Mediterranean and North Sea regions. impact site in Yucatán, and “splash” de- Out of this work came several contribu- posits around the Gulf of Mexico and in tions to the tectonics of North Africa, the Atlantic east of Florida. Several Sicily, and Corsica-Sardinia, one of other extinction events in earth history which was a co-edited book entitled have been ascribed to impacts. The Geology and History of Sicily. The original paper has been Walter moved to Lamont- cited more than 1100 times. Four inter- Doherty Geological Observatory in disciplinary, so-called “Snowbird” con- 1971 and to UC Berkeley in 1977. ferences have focused on the subject of During this time Walter continued his global catastrophes and earth history. work in the Mediterranean with a series The first two of these conferences were of important papers on paleomagnet- held in Snowbird, Utah, in 1982 and ism, magnetostratigraphy, Cretaceous- 1988, the third in Houston in 1994, and Walter Alvarez Tertiary stratigraphy, and upon struc- the most recent in Vienna in 2000. (All tural features observed in the complexly these conference proceedings have been deformed rocks of Italy and the Alps. published as GSA Special Papers.) Citation by Eldridge Moores Walter was one of the first workers to Walter has been directly in- President Naldrett, Vice document the rotation of Corsica and volved with much of this work. It has President Burchfiel, ladies and gentle- Sardinia during the Neogene, a work been interesting to watch him handle men. It is my privilege and honor to in- which presages the now well-known the notoriety, as well as the controversy, troduce to you Walter S. Alvarez, the complex microplate interactions that that this issue has generated. He has be- 2002 GSA Penrose Medalist. Walter is characterize the entire Alpine- come a master of what he calls “the a true renaissance man who has made Himalayan belt, as well as other colli- gentle art of scientific trespassing.” This outstanding contributions to the field of sional plate margins. His work on the he defines as working in a profoundly geology. application of fold distortion to trans- interdisciplinary field and overcoming port direction determination and on the Walter and I go way back—we the problems caused by differences in origin and significance of solution were graduate students together at the training of one’s co-workers, differ- cleavage stand as landmark contribu- Princeton in the early 1960s; we got ent scientific cultures, and different per- tions. More recently he has worked on married within a week of each other, ceptions of a scientific hierarchy or the Quaternary volcanic province and we had a joint bachelor party, a pecking order, not to mention judging around Rome. subject on which we have a mutual pact the quality of work in different fields of “omertà” (the Italian word for the Walter’s research on and overcoming the barriers of discipli- Mafia’s “code of silence”). Cretaceous stratigraphy and magne- nary-specific jargon. Through it all, In the 35 years since receiving tostratigraphy in northern Italy led to Walter has remained a cheerful, hard- his Ph.D., Walter has been a prolific re- his discovery with his coworkers, his working, extremely versatile, imagina- searcher and writer on a variety of sub- father Luis Alvarez, Frank Asaro and tive, and very well organized geologist. jects. His geologic work includes con- Helen Michel, of an iridium-rich layer This work has placed Walter at the fore- tributions to South American geology, at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. front of a revolution in geology every Mediterranean tectonics, structural ge- When they published this discovery in bit as important as the plate tectonic ology, magnetostratigraphy, and, of 1980, they provocatively suggested that revolution of the 1960s; that is, the course, impacts. Walter’s Ph.D. work the layer resulted from a meteorite im- planetary revolution—our ideas of was on the Guajíra peninsula, pact that caused the mass extinctions at Earth’s place in space. We now know Colombia, the northernmost tip of the end of the Cretaceous. This origi- that there have been and will be peri- South America. He was one of the last nally revolutionary, controversial hy- odic catastrophic collisions between the students of the Caribbean Research pothesis has been corroborated by an Earth and asteroids or comets. And Project of Harry Hess and John enormous amount of detailed field, lab- these collisions have significantly af- The Geological Society of America P. 1 2002 Medals and Awards fected the evolution of the Earth and its All that changed — reversed, the smuggling business. And I discov- life. even — when I went off to college at ered that I had married the perfect geol- Carleton, in Minnesota, where the hori- ogist’s wife — the worse the condi- Walter has received many zontal Paleozoic strata and the glacial tions, the better she liked it. awards and recognitions for his work, deposits are orderly and well behaved. including membership in the National Uncle Harry’s idea of sea- But in exchange, Minnesota taught me Academy of Sciences and the American floor spreading was gaining support, about seasons, and especially about Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addi- and the springtime of a new geology winter, where two-week stretches of tion, he is the recipient of the was sweeping across the world. I sim- 20-below-zero reminded us that the gla- G.K.Gilbert award of the GSA ply watched from my ringside seat at ciers were not long gone, and would Planetary Geology Division, and an Princeton. But friends of mine made soon be back. honorary citizenship of the towns of major contributions, like my roommate Gubbio and Piobbico, Italy. In a certain sense, it was then Eldridge Moores, whose studies of the winter of Geology as well, and as a Mediterranean ophiolites convinced Walter is a man of many tal- student, I absorbed two venerable dog- Harry Hess that ocean floor was made ents and interests. He is a multilinguist, mas that held our science as icebound of basalt, not of serpentinite, as he had speaking Italian, Spanish, German, and as the upper Mississippi in January. The originally proposed. French. He is an accomplished pianist, continents, I learned, have always been a pilot, and an enthusiastic raconteur. I emerged from Princeton in exactly where they are today, and there 1967, into the summer of a revitalized In summary, I believe that was no merit in the foolish ideas of an geology, fully merged with geophysics, Walter Alvarez’s contributions have eccentric German meteorologist named and pouring forth a stream of new dis- been of great importance in a number of Alfred Wegener. And I also acquired a coveries about a dynamic Earth on fields including Caribbean and Alpine- reverence for the doctrine of uniformi- which continents move about, just as Mediterranean geology, structural geol- tarianism — the view that nothing in Alfred Wegener had said they do. In the ogy, and magnetostratigraphy and the past has ever happened at a faster summer of young adulthood, Milly and global impact events. His impact work rate, or by a different process than we I lived an adventurous life, first in has fundamentally changed the way we can observe today. Holland and then in Libya. view the history of the Earth and its life. In 1962 I went to Princeton as He is highly deserving of this award. And then, to follow up on a a new grad student. Through an uncom- Ladies and Gentlemen: Walter Alvarez. growing interest in Mediterranean mi- monly fortunate blind date, I met Milly, croplates and archeological geology, we a most remarkable young woman from moved to Italy, which soon became a Virginia, and we fell in love in Response by Walter Alvarez second home. There, for many years, I Washington DC, where she was a grad have found the fascination of the Thank you so much, Eldridge. student, among the blossoming cherry Apennine Mountains matched only by It is such an honor to receive the trees that brighten the banks of the the kindness of the geologists of Italy, Penrose Medal not only from a lifelong Potomac in the spring. who took me into their friendship and friend, but from someone who has done Springtime was bursting forth shared their country and its geology as much for our science and our Society in geology as well, and Princeton was with me. I have the fondest memories as you have. And my deep thanks to its source. During my first year there, of what the Italian geologists call “geo- GSA, as represented by President Tony Harry Hess published his revolutionary gastronomic excursions,” in which hard Naldrett and Vice President Clark paper with the very first statement of days of field work are followed by din- Burchfiel. And to so many other friends sea-floor spreading. By good fortune I ners in little mountain villages, after and colleagues that I could not begin to became Uncle Harry’s grad student, and which we would sit around in the name them all. was able to do my doctoral research in evening, singing the old traditional I grew up in northern the Guajira Peninsula of Colombia, fol- songs of the Apennines and the Alps.