W. Jason Morgan
| William Jason Morgan | |
|---|---|
Morgan receiving the National Medal of Science from George W. Bush in 2003
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| Born |
October 10, 1935 Savannah, Georgia, U.S. |
| Nationality |
 United States
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| Fields | Geophysicist |
| Institutions | Princeton University |
| Alma mater |
Georgia Institute of Technology Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Bob Dicke |
| Notable awards |
Japan Prize (1990) Wollaston Medal (1994) Vetlesen Prize (2000) |
William Jason Morgan (born October 10, 1935) is an American geophysicist who has made seminal contributions to the theory of plate tectonics and geodynamics. He retired as the Knox Taylor Professor emeritus of geology and professor of geosciences at Princeton University. He currently serves as a visiting scholar in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.
After having received his BSc in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1957, he went to Princeton University, where he completed his PhD in 1964 under the supervision of Bob Dicke. He joined the faculty of the university immediately afterwards.
His first major contribution, made in the late 1960s, was to relate the magnetic anomalies of alternating polarity, which occur on the ocean bottom at both sides of a mid-ocean ridge, to seafloor spreading and plate tectonics.
From 1971 on he worked on the further development of the plume theory of Tuzo Wilson, which postulates the existence of roughly cylindrical convective upwellings in the Earth's mantle as an explanation of hotspots. Wilson originally applied the concept to Hawaii and explained the increase in age of the seamounts of the Hawaii-Emperor chain with increasing distance from the current hotspot location; however, the concept was subsequently applied to many other hotspots by Morgan and other scientists.
Morgan has received many honors and awards for his work, among them the Alfred Wegener Medal of the European Geosciences Union (1983), the Maurice Ewing Medal of the American Geophysical Union (1987), the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London (1994) and the National Medal of Science of the USA, award year 2002.
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