Jack Oliver, a geoscientist whose work on earthquakes helped prove the theory of continental drift, or plate tectonics, died on 5 January. He was 87.

In the 1960s, Oliver, while studying earthquakes in the South Pacific, was puzzled by the seismic waves of deep earthquakes, emanating from as much as 400 miles below the surface, until he realised that part of the Earth’s crust was being bent down and pushed into the planet’s interior.

“All of the pieces suddenly made sense if you believed plate tectonics was going on,” Larry Brown, a professor of geological sciences at Cornell University and a former student of Oliver told the New York Times. “Jack was a great integrator. He was one who would stand back and say there’s a bigger picture here.”

Oliver’s seminal 1968 paper, Seismology and the New Global Tectonics, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, finally proved that Earth’s crust is slowly shifting and moving, a theory first suggested by German geophysicist Alfred Wegener in 1912 but ignored for much of the next 50 years.

Oliver was born 26 September 1923 in Massillon, Ohio. He studied physics at Columbia University, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1947 after a break in his studies to serve in the United States Naval Construction Battalion (the SeaBees) during the Second World War. He earned his PhD in geophysics from Columbia in 1953.

While working at Columbia’s geological observatory outside New York City, Oliver caused a stir by detecting the seismic waves from a nuclear test explosion in Nevada. This led to him serving as an adviser to the White House on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1958 and 1959, and as a delegate to the negotiations in Geneva.

He moved to Cornell University in 1971 to chair the Department of Geological Sciences (now called Earth and Atmospheric Sciences), where he spent the rest of his career.

Image: Cornell U.