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Ryan, William B. F.
Soci Stranieri
Anno di nomina: 2021
Email: wbfryan [@] icloud.com
Profilo
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.