Paul Tapponnier

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Paul Tapponnier was born on January 6, 1947 in Annecy, France. He became an engineer from the prestigious Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris in 1970. He started his career at the Universite du Languedoc, in Montpellier, and trained as a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1972 to 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1978 in France. He is a Researcher at the Tectonics Department at the Institut de Physique du Globe, in Paris, and has been distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, Pasadena since 1985. He was also a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology in 2000. He received the Médaille d'Argent du CNRS (1984), the Medaille Alfred Wegener de l'Union européenne des géosciences (1985), the Grand Prix Scientifique de la Ville de Paris (1990), the Best Paper Award (1994) and an Honorary Fellow[1] of the Geological Society of America (1994), the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society (London) (2001).[2] He was made Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (1991), Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (1994). He is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences (United States) (2005),[3] and is a member of the French Academie des Sciences.[4] He is one of the Highly Cited researchers referenced by Thomson-ISI.

In the 1970s, Paul Tapponnier was one of the first to understand the huge potential of satellite imagery (Landsat) for looking at active large-scale tectonics. He has exploited that technique with rare brilliance ever since. In a series of papers written with Peter Molnar between 1975 and 1981[5],[6],[7],[8], he transformed our understanding of Asia’s tectonics. Subsequent fieldwork, only now possible in many of these countries, has confirmed the accuracy of his conclusions from satellite images. His work has set a benchmark of quality and rigour that few have been able to match. Paul Tapponnier has trained a group of graduate students who are now major figures in their own right, and has been responsible for establishing a school of tectonic geology in France that is admired worldwide.

In the early days of this enterprise, he was inspired by two leading figures. One, Maurice Mattauer, was probably the first structural geologist to fully embrace global tectonics. The other, Peter Molnar at MIT, taught him the value of focusing on active faulting to gain insight into the kinematics and mechanics of deformation. The message was clear - look from the big picture down to the outcrop, and examine areas where things are happening fast, today. The 2000 miles-wide region where India collides with Asia was the place. Where else could one hope to unravel continental tectonics at a comparable scale? Satellite images, whose resolution has increased one hundred-fold in the past 25 years, helped meet this challenge. Between 1975 and 1981, he proposed, along with Peter Molnar, that most of today's deformation observed in Eastern Asia, where the greatest continental fault system occurs (20 earthquakes with a magnitude >8 since 1892), is the result of the penetration of India, at a speed of more the 2 inches per year, inside the Asian continent. India, modeled as a rigid block, has made it way over more than 1500 miles, northward, inside Asia, causing the extrusion of the Indochinese peninsula and Southeast Asia. This extrusion also leads to the formation of two rifts, the most famous being that of Lake Baikal. This became the first coherent and global explanation for a great variety of deformations and structures observed in the Himalayan and Tibetan regions.

Paul Tapponnier also studied overlap rifts, classic examples of bookshelf faulting as in the Afar region of Africa.[4] Lately, while keeping his focus on the Red River fault system and Tibet, Paul Tapponnier is making important contributions to the study of the Yammouneh fault in Lebanon. In combination with his studies in Asia, this work confirms that propagation of new faults over thousands of miles is an essential element of continental tectonics. Paul Tapponnier has put the French school of tectonics at the forefront of international research.

Paul Tapponnier is married to acclaimed photographer Kevin Kling.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Geological Society of America web site, award page, accessed October 7, 2006
  2. ^ The Geological Society(UK) web site 2001 award page, accessed October 6, 2006
  3. ^ National Academy of Sciences web site member page, accessed October 7, 2006
  4. ^ a b Académie de science, PARIS, France web site, member page, accessed October 6, 2006
  5. ^ Molnar, P., and Tapponnier, P., 1975, Cenozoic tectonics of Asia: Effect of a continental collision: Science, v. 189, p. 419-425.
  6. ^ Molnar, P., and Tapponnier, P., 1978, Active tectonics of Tibet: Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth, v. 83, p. 5361-5375.
  7. ^ Molnar, P., and Tapponnier, P., 1981, A possible dependence of tectonic strength on the age of the crust in Asia: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 52, p. 107-114.
  8. ^ Tapponnier, P., and Molnar, P., 1979, Active faulting and Cenozoic tectonics of the Tien Shan, Mongolian, and Baykal regions 3425 – 3459.: Journal of Geophysical Research, v. 84, p. 3425-3459.

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