Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics

Distinguished Lecture Series

Title: Exploring Our Planet's Record of Deep Time:
The Ocean Drilling Program

Paul J. Fox, Ph.D.
Professor of Oceanography and of Geology and Geophysics, and
Director of Science Operations for the Ocean Drilling Program

Wednesday, April 17, 2002, at 7:30 p.m.
Auditorium, Annenberg Presidential Conference Center
Texas A&M University

Abstract

Planet Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere interact with each other, transferring energy and material at various time and space scales. The planet's history is preserved with great clarity in the sediments and rocks in the world's oceans. The Ocean Drilling Program successfully samples this record, revealing much about the dynamic nature of our planet over a range of time scales. At scales of millions of years continents are rifted, ocean basins open and close, and new mountain ranges form where continents collide. Large-scale plate tectonic interactions trigger transitory events such as large, destructive earthquakes at subduction zones or explosive volcanism. These tectonic processes, and the accompanying changes in the ocean circulation and climate, have other profound effects on our planet. On intermediate time scales, variations in the Earth's orbital parameters have led to periodic variations in climate, the most dramatic of which are the late Cenozoic glacial and interglacial cycles. There are also very short-term oscillations in the Earth's climate system, and catastrophic events such as the impact of large terrestrial bodies. One such impact probably triggered the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The Ocean Drilling Program reveals that Earth history is more appropriately characterized by change than by stasis.

About the Speaker

Dr. Paul J. Fox is a native of New York City. He holds a bachelor's degree in geology from Ohio Wesleyan University and a doctor of philosophy degree in marine geology and geophysics from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York. Before coming to Texas A&M University in 1995, he served as a researcher and faculty member at the Lamont-Doherty Observatory, the State University of New York at Albany, and the University of Rhode Island. He has also served as a visiting scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, the Centre Oceanologique de Bretagne in France, the Institute of Geological Sciences in Moscow, USSR, and the Nordic Institute in Iceland.

Dr. Fox's research interests during the last 15 years include investigation and elucidation of the processes that create oceanic lithosphere along the world-encircling Mid-Oceanic Ridge System. Results from a family of investigative tools (multibeam echo sounders, deep and shallow towed side-scan sonar systems, standard underway geophysical tools and submersibles) are used to elucidate the volcanic and structural processes that characterize the zones of accretion and offsetting transform faults. Earlier in his career, he worked on other research topics including the structure and nature of the oceanic crust as constrained by direct sampling, comparison with ophiolites and physical properties (seismic velocity and magnetic properties) of oceanic rocks, the geology of the Caribbean seas, tectonic reconstructions of the ocean basins of the Atlantic, and the consequences of geostrophic circulation in the North Atlantic.

He has published 143 abstracts of talks presented at national and international meetings and 84 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books including, but not limited to, Nature, Science, the Journal of Geophysical Research, Tectonics, and the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America. He has participated in 36 oceanographic expeditions, serving as the Co-Chief Scientist for 26 of these. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of Sigma Xi. He has served on advisory committees for the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University National Oceanographic Laboratory System, and has been the associate editor or editor of several professional journals.