Francis Birch Lecture

The Francis Birch Lecture is an annual lecture constituting the highest honor in tectonophysics from the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The lecture is named in honor of Francis Birch, famous as a pioneer of solid Earth geophysics. The Birch Lecture, inaugurated in 1992, is presented at the AGU autumn meeting by a recipient whose research has significantly contributed to tectonophysics "through observations, experiments, the development of analytical methods or modeling."[1]

The Birch Lecture forms part of the AGU's Bowie Lecture Series, established in 1989. The AGU's highest honor is the William Bowie Medal, named in honor of William Bowie — the AGU's first president[2] with an international reputation in geodesy, geophysics, and engineering.[3]

The AGU invites the Birch Lecturer and does not accept nominations for the Birch Lectureship.[2]

Birch Lecturers

Name[1] Institution Year Lecture Title
Thomas A. Herring Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1992 Space Geodetic Studies of the Earth's Interior
James R. Rice Harvard University 1993 Problems in Earthquake Source Mechanics
no lecture 1994
Harry W. Green II University of California, Davis 1995 The mechanisms of Deep Earthquakes
Ross S. Stein United States Geological Survey, Menlo Park 1996 Stress Triggering of Earthquakes, or Playing Prediction with Less than Half a Deck
Donald W. Forsyth Brown University 1997 Melting and Mantle Flow Beneath Mid-Ocean Ridges: Constraints from the Seismological Component of the MELT Experiment
Richard G. Gordon Northwestern University 1998 The Plate Tectonic Approximation: Plate Nonrigidity and Diffuse Plate Boundaries
Paul Tapponnier Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris 1999 Localisation and Propagation of Lithospheric Shear Zones Behaviour of the Continental Mantle During Collision, and Growth of the Tibet Plateau
no lecture 2000
Louise H. Kellogg University of California, Davis 2001 Structure and Dynamics An Earth Odyssey
Gerald Schubert UCLA 2002 A Geophysicist's Journey to the Center of the Earth
W. Roger Buck Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) 2003 Splitting, Stretching and Spreading of Lithosphere
Shun-Ichiro Karato Yale University 2004 Where on Earth is the Ocean?
Leigh Royden Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2005 Uplift and Evolution of the Eastern Tibetan Plateau
Claude P. Jaupart Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris 2006 The Deep Roots of Continents
Jean-Philippe Avouac California Institute of Technology 2007 Mountain Ranges and the Deformation of Continents
Suzanne M. Carbotte Columbia University 2008 Focusing in on Mid-Ocean Ridge Segmentation
Jerry X. Mitrovica Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University 2009 A Eulogy for Eustasy
Wang-Ping Chen University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2010 Global Tectonics Ties Quakes, Rocks, and Volatiles in the Mantle Transition Zone
Michael Manga University of California, Berkeley 2011 Hydrological Response to Earthquakes (and was the LUSI Mud Volcano Eruption in Indonesia Caused by an Earthquake?)
Richard H. Sibson Otago University 2012 Inside a Crustal Earthquake — Signals from Field Geology
Roland Bürgmann University of California, Berkeley 2013 M9 Megathrust Earthquake Cycles
David Bercovici Yale University 2014 On the Origin of Plate Tectonics
Kelin Wang Pacific Geoscience Center, Geological Survey of Canada 2015 Subduction Faults as We See Them in the 21st Century
Maya Tolstoy Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory 2016 Taking the Pulse of Mid-Ocean Ridges
Greg Hirth Brown University 2017 Lithospheric Strength and Stress State: Persistent Challenges and New Directions in Geodynamics
Carolina R. Lithgow-Bertelloni UCLA 2018 The inevitable control of Earth's deep interior on the surface
Claudio Faccenna Roma Tre University / University of Texas at Austin 2019 Shaping the Mediterranean from the inside out
Christie D. Rowe McGill University 2020 Walking the seismogenic zone: A field geology perspective on earthquakes
Taras Gerya ETH Zürich 2021 New geodynamic processes and phenomena discovered with numerical modeling: examples and recipes
Demian M. Saffer University of Texas Institute for Geophysics 2022 Fluids, Friction, and the Offshore Subduction Megathrust
Philippe Agard Sorbonne Université 2023

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Birch Lecture & Birch Lecturers, Awards - Tectonophysics". American Geophysical Union.
  2. ^ a b "Francis Birch Lecture, Recognizing Geophysics Scientists". American Geophysical Union.
  3. ^ Soler, Tomás (2014). "William Bowie: Eminent Scientist and First Chairman (1926–1940) of ASCE's Surveying and Mapping Division". Journal of Surveying Engineering. 140: 2–11. doi:10.1061/(ASCE)SU.1943-5428.0000117.


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