Background
Gilbert was born in Vincennes, Indiana.
Gilbert was born in Vincennes, Indiana.
His undergraduate and graduate degrees were earned from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Bachelor of Science, 1953, and Doctor of Philosophy in geophysics, 1956), and he continued at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow until 1957, when he moved to the University of California, Los Los Angeles
At University of California, Los Angeles he was an assistant, then associate, professor, but left to take an appointment as a senior researcher at Texas Instruments. In 1961, he was recruited by Walter Munk to the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, also becoming a professor of Geophysics at the University of California, San Diego. He remained at University of California, San Diego through the remainder of his career, and became an Emeritus Professor.
Gilbert was among the first to recognize that the free oscillations of the Earth (so-called bell-ringing modes) could be measured immediately following large earthquakes, and could be used to produce structural models of the inner earth.
In collaboration with Adam Dziewonski, he applied these ideas first to seismic records from the 1964 Alaska earthquake and then to records from the 1970 Colombia earthquake. In this context he and Backus developed robust methods for inverting seismic data.
By the early 1970s it was clear that better data from long-period seismometers was needed for this kind of work. Gilbert convinced geophysicist/philanthropist Cecil Green to fund a network of seismometers designed to provide data for global studies of the Earth.
The first of 40 stations of this International Deployment of Accelerometers (International Development Association) array (the acronym also commemorating co-philanthropist Ida Green) was installed in 1974, and it continues in operation to this day.
He died due to complications resulting from a car accident in Southern Oregon on August 15, 2014. He was 83 years old.
National Academy of Sciences.