Trond Torsvik, leder for Senter for Jordens utvikling og dynamikk, ble tildelt Arthur Holmes Medal & Honorary Membership under en konferanse i Wien 20. april.
Trond Torsvik. Fotograf: Gunhild M. Haugnes/UiO. Lisens: CC BY 4.0
Arthur Holmes Medal & Honorary Membership regnes som den høyeste utmerkelsen innenfor geologi og faste jords fysikk.
Prisen ble tildelt Torsvik under European Geosciences Unions konferanse i Wien 20. april.
Dette er første gangen en nordmann får denne utmerkelsen.
Torsvik er leder for SFF-senteret Senter for Jordens utvikling og dynamikk, som offisielt åpnet i oktober 2014.
Juryens begrunnelse (på engelsk):
Trond Torsvik is one of the leading authorities in deciphering palaeogeography, and has made fundamental advances in determining the relative and absolute motion of plates.
His research involves linking palaeontology with palaeomagnetism to constrain pre-Mesozoic geography.
He pioneered reconstructions critical for understanding processes leading to the formation and break-up of Pangea and the earlier Precambrian Rodinia supercontinent.
He has shown that the seismic signal of ancient subducted slabs in the mantle places powerful constraints on plate motions.
Torsvik and colleagues have demonstrated that, since 200 Ma, the initial eruption sites of large igneous provinces correlate with the edges of the large low-shear velocity provinces at the core–mantle boundary.
The first to quantitatively demonstrate the correlation, Torsvik recognised the broad implications and significance of plume generation zones for mantle convection, and recently expanded the correlations to the eruption sites of diamond-bearing kimberlites.
With the plume-generation-zone hypothesis implying long-term stability of these large structures in the deep mantle, Torsvik recognised a rare opportunity to constrain palaeo-longitude for times before 200 Ma, an enormously significant result for palaeogeography.
For these reasons, he is a deserving recipient of the 2016 EGU Arthur Holmes Medal & Honorary Membership.
