Professor Richard (Rick) Sibson elected fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) of London
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Otago Geologist Today Achieves Pre-eminence with Select Royal Society of London Fellowship (20 May 2003) |
Geology Department's Professor Richard (Rick) Sibson has today been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) of London, becoming one of New Zealand's select few "Fellows", and the only one at Otago. Until today's announcement in London, New Zealand boasted eight current FRS (London) – seven living in this country and one in the United Kingdom.
University of Otago Vice-Chancellor, Dr Graeme Fogelberg, said the University is extremely proud of this honour bestowed on Professor Sibson. "Election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society is recognised worldwide as a sign of the highest regard in research. Election is not only a personal honour for Professor Sibson, but also a recognition of the world leading scholarship and research in this area of science being conducted in New Zealand and at the University of Otago. New Zealanders should celebrate this achievement".
Professor Sibson's advances in understanding earthquake faulting have made him a world leader in his field. Author of over 70 scientific papers in national and international journals, the innovative nature of his research and its application both in academia and in the mineral industry have helped to secure his reputation internationally.
Announcement of his election came as a pleasant surprise "The selection process is quite a lengthy one so, although I knew my name had been submitted several years ago," he says, "I really thought I’d dropped off the end of the list. It's actually a humbling experience - it brings home to you how little you really know and understand".
Head of Geology, Professor Alan Cooper says "Rick's election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society is a great honour, primarily to him personally, but by association to the Geology Department and to the University of Otago. It recognises a highly distinguished international research career at the cutting edge of Earth Science – in particular, his contribution to the understanding of the structure, mechanics, and mineralisation of crustal fault zones," he says.
"It's a fitting recognition of his contribution to our profession and to his advocacy and promotion of scholarship in the university system."
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Educated at King's College, Auckland, Professor Sibson graduated from the University of Auckland in 1968 with a First Class Honours degree in Geology, before postgraduate study at Imperial College in the University of London where he received his PhD in 1977. It was his work on an ancient fault zone transecting the islands of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland that convinced him of the integral relationship between structural geology and seismology, helping to build an important bridge between the two disciplines. |
"Rock structures used to be thought of as developing slowly and steadily" he says, " it was thought that sudden movement during earthquakes had little to do with their evolution. Seismologists at the time had little idea of how the fracture and flow properties of rocks affected the mechanics and extent of earthquake rupturing".
His thesis recognised that systematic changes in fault zone rocks could be used to define an important mechanical boundary in the Earth's crust between brittle near-surface faulting and deeper, more ductile shear zones. "This more plastic style of deformation at depth requires temperatures in excess of about 350 degrees Celsius," he says. "This generally limits earthquake activity to depths of less than 10 –20 k in the continents – something that wasn’t known before."
Professor Sibson was then invited to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in California and spent an "intoxicating 6 months" there. "They were incredibly generous," he says, "giving me access to a great deal of seismological data they had accumulated but hadn’t yet interpreted." It was during this period that he was able to correlate the depth distribution of earthquakes in the crust with the fault zone models that he had developed. Moving to the University of California at Santa Barbara in the 1980s, Professor Sibson continued to look at fault zones – trying to understand the dynamics of fault processes and how fluid movement at depth tied into fault instability."
It was during this "golden" period that, with geologists from the Geological Survey of Canada, he wrote a paper offering a mechanical explanation for a particular class of gold-quartz lode formed by earthquake faulting in the mid-crust, a concept since verified by fieldwork in other areas and now widely accepted in the mineral industry. "It goes to show", he says, "that earthquake activity sometimes has its uses".
Professor Sibson returned to New Zealand and Otago in 1990, where he became Professor of Geology and Head of the department – a position he held for six years. He holds firmly to the view that the basic purpose of a university is the promotion of scholarship through teaching and research and continues to maintain his interest in fault zones, getting out into the field as much as he can. "Teaching keeps you honest, and field-based research gives you access to the messages recorded in the rocks - I tend to trust those more than the messages coming out of computers", he says.
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Professor Sibson attributes his life-time love of the outdoors to early excursions with his father, a "schoolmaster, bird-watcher, and inveterate island-hopper". His subsequent career choice, he says, was influenced by his uncle Sir Charles Fleming, paleontologist and naturalist, and also a Fellow of the Royal Society, who gave him "a gentle nudge in the direction of geology."Professor Sibson will fly to London in July, with his wife, Francesca Ghisetti, for the official proceedings which will take place between 9 and 11 July. Though the couple were married four years ago, Francesca joined him in New Zealand just four weeks ago from Sicily, where she was Professor of Structural Geology at the University of Catania.
The text above comes from an official University of Otago media release, dated 20 May 2003. For further information contact
- Dianne Pettis
- Marketing and Communications Co-Ordinator
- Division of Sciences
- Telephone: 03 479 8484
Images by Stephen Read