Earth Science’s Gordon has two papers on AGU journal’s top 40 list

Earth Science’s Gordon has two papers on AGU journal’s top 40 list

Rice geophysicist Richard Gordon earned a rare honor when two of his papers were chosen as being among the 40 best out of some 31,000 papers published in the 40-year history of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Richard Gordon

AGU commemorated the journal’s 40th anniversary with a special open-access collection. In a letter online, the editors said the collection’s 40 articles were chosen because they showcase “the ground-breaking research consistently published in Geophysical Research Letters.”

Gordon, Rice’s W.M. Keck Foundation Professor in Geophysics and chair of the Department of Earth Science, is one of the world’s leading experts in plate tectonics. His research centers on the movements of Earth’s 25 nearly rigid tectonic plates. Tectonic plates form Earth’s surface and are in constant motion. Where two plates collide, they form mountain ranges like the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau or a deep sea trench like the Marianas Deep. Earthquakes and tsunamis are often associated with tectonic movement.

The two papers chosen for the AGU special collection are the 1990 study “Current Plate Velocities Relative to the Hotspots Incorporating the NUVEL-1 Global Plate Motion Model,” which Gordon co-authored with Alice Gripp, and the 1994 study “Effect of Recent Revisions to the Geomagnetic Reversal Time Scale on Estimates of Current Plate Motions,” which Gordon co-authored with Seth Stein and longtime collaborators Charles DeMets and Donald Argus. Collectively, the two studies have been cited more than 3,200 times by other scientists.

The purpose of the AGU is to promote discovery in Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity. The organization has more than 62,000 members.