Ryan, William B. F.

Profile

già Prof. di Geologia nel Lamont-Doherty Observatory, Columbia University

My career started in 1961 on an oceanographic expedition in the Mediterranean Sea during which we discovered salt domes arising from beneath deep basin floors and ridges of folded sediments that I would later interpret as accretionary prisms seaward of island arcs in my PhD dissertation. I had the fortunate opportunity to sample the salt and its sediment cover during first deep-sea drilling in the Mediterranean in 1970. My interests expanded to the origin of the Alpine-Apennine mountain chains using the new paradigm of plate tectonics, the sculpting of submarine canyons using submersibles, the creation of new seafloor at mid-ocean ridge apreading centers, the remote imaging of the ocean floor with side-looking sonar and autonomous underwater vehicles, the collapse of carbonate platforms from their accumulating weight and the postglacial history of the Black and Marmara Seas. I probed the subsidence history of continental margins with a novel method called back-stripping. In 1977 I began teaching courses in marine geology, plate tectonics and paleoceanography at Columbia University up until my retirement in 2004. My legacy is the Marine Geoscience Data System, a vast repository of marine geophysical and geologic information with free access and online exploration with our tool called GeoMapApp.

Other attachments:
Bibliografia del Socio W.Ryan 3029_bibl.pdf
CV del Socio W.Ryan 3029_CV.pdf