In celebration of its 100th year of publication, the Royal Astronomical Society’s Geophysical Journal International (GJI) is publishing a collection of its most historically significant papers. GJI opened its centennial collection with a virtual issue last month featuring “four publications covering the most important advance in the Earth sciences in the 20th century: the theory of plate tectonics,” including two co-authored by Rice’s Richard Gordon, the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geophysics in Rice’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. In 1990, Gordon and collaborators published NUVEL-1, a model that would reign for 20 years as the most precise mathematical description of the relative movements of Earth’s tectonic plates. In 2010, they one-upped themselves with the publication of MORVEL, a more precise framework that accounted for the movements of plates covering about 97% of Earth’s surface. In these and related publications, Gordon and colleagues documented the existence of “diffuse oceanic plate boundaries,” a previously unrecognized class of tectonic plate boundaries that changed the plate tectonics paradigm.
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