Adam Marian Dziewonski

Background

Dziewonski, Adam Marian was born on November 15, 1936 in Lwow, Poland. Came to the United States, 1965. Son of Jan Roman and Jadwiga (Smulikowska) Dziewonski.

Education

Master of Science, University Warsaw, Poland, 1961. Doctor of Technology Science, Academy Mines and Metallurgy, Cracow, Poland, 1965. Doctor (honorary), Academy Mines and Metallurgy, Cracow, Poland, 1999.

Master of Science (honorary), Harvard University, 1976. DHC, Academy Mines and Metallurgy, Cracow, Poland, 1999.

Career

He spent most of his career at Harvard University, where he was the Frank B. Baird, Junior. Professor of Science. After having earned a Masters from the University of Warsaw, Poland (1960), and a Doctorate of Technical Sciences from the Academy of Mines and Metallurgy, Cracow, Poland (1965) Dziewonski taught at the University of Texas at Dallas for several years before settling at Harvard.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Dziewonski and his collaborators laid the foundation to understanding the underlying cause of tectonic plate motions by exploring convection currents in the Earth"s mantle with radial maps of seismic property variations, based on measurements of seismic waves.

These studies led to the development of the Preliminary reference Earth model (PREM) in collaboration with Don Anderson.

PREM established an accurate radial model of the Earth for seismic velocities, attenuation, and density. Starting in the 1980s, Dziewonski led two original and powerful research efforts.

He extended the radial Earth models to be fully three-dimensional, along the way mapping and interpreting four "grand" structures. The four include two regions of higher-than-average wavespeed, inferred to be cold and sinking mantle, one under the western edge of the Americas and the other under southern Eurasia.

The two other features are large-scale regions of slower-than-average wavespeed, inferred to be hot and rising superplumes, located at the bottom of the mantle under the middle of the Pacific Ocean and Africa.

His other research direction systematically determined the orientation and magnitude of the deformation for most of the significant earthquakes that have been well-recorded. These results are known as the Harvard CMTs (centroid moment tensor solutions) and are continued today at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory by Göran Ekström as the Global CMT Project. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on March 1, 2016.

A. M. Dziewonski, Doctorate. L. Anderson: Preliminary reference Earth model.

Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors 25, South.297–356 (1981).

Achievements

• Adam Marian Dziewonski has been listed as a noteworthy Earth science educator by Marquis Who's Who.

Membership

Fellow American Geophysical Union, American Association for the Advancement of Science (honorary). Member National Academy of Sciences, Seismological Society of America, Society Exploration Geophysicists, Polish Academy of Sciences.

Connections

Married Sybil W. McDonald, November 15, 1967.

Father:

Jan Roman Dziewonski

Mother:

Jadwiga (Smulikowska) Dziewonski

Spouse:

Sybil W. McDonald