Education
After having received his Bachelor of Science in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1957, he went to Princeton University, where he completed his Doctor of Philosophy in 1964 under the supervision of Bob Dicke.
physicist university professor
After having received his Bachelor of Science in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1957, he went to Princeton University, where he completed his Doctor of Philosophy in 1964 under the supervision of Bob Dicke.
He retired as the Knox Taylor Professor emeritus of geology and professor of geosciences at Princeton University. He currently serves as a visiting scholar in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. He joined the faculty of the university immediately afterwards.
His first major contribution, made in the late 1960s, was to relate the magnetic anomalies of alternating polarity, which occur on the ocean bottom at both sides of a mid-ocean ridge, to seafloor spreading and plate tectonics.
From 1971 on he worked on the further development of the plume theory of Tuzo Wilson, which postulates the existence of roughly cylindrical convective upwellings in the Earth"s mantle as an explanation of hotspots. Wilson originally applied the concept to Hawaii and explained the increase in age of the seamounts of the Hawaii-Emperor chain with increasing distance from the current hotspot location.
However, the concept was subsequently applied to many other hotspots by Morgan and other scientists. "The theory of plate tectonics he published in 1968 is one of the major milestones of United States. science in the 20th century," F. A. Dahlen, chair of the Princeton Department of Geosciences, wrote in 2003.
"Essentially all of the research in solid-earth geophysical sciences in the past 30 to 35 years has been firmly grounded upon Jason Morgan"s plate tectonic theory," Dahlen said.
"The scientific careers of a generation of geologists and geophysicists have been founded upon his landmark 1968 paper." J. J. J. J. J.
National Academy of Sciences. French Academy of Sciences.