Background
He is the grandson of William Imbrie, an American missionary to Japan.
geologist meteorologist university professor
He is the grandson of William Imbrie, an American missionary to Japan.
He then went on to receive a Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University in 1951.
After serving with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy during World World War II, Imbrie earned his bachelor"s degree from Princeton University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978 and was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981. He was awarded the Maurice Ewing Medal in 1986 by the American Geophysical Union and the William H. Twenhofel Medal by the Society for Sedimentary Geology in 1991, the only time the Society has awarded it to a non-member.
Imbrie has been on the faculty of the Geological Sciences Department at Brown University since 1967, where he has held the Henry L. Doherty chair of Oceanography.
He now serves as Professor Emeritus at Brown. Imbrie is probably best known as a co-author of the paper in Science in 1976, "Variations in the Earth"s orbit: Pacemaker of the ice ages".
Using ocean sediment cores, the Science paper verified the theories of Milutin Milanković that oscillations in climate over the past few million years are correlated with Earth"s orbital variations of eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession around the Sun. These changes are now called the Milankovitch cycles.
John Imbrie was featured in the video documentary The Last Ridge: The Uphill Battles of the 10th Mountain Division.
National Academy of Sciences.