It is a great pleasure to welcome this evening’s keynote speaker John Dewey. His last visit to an IGRM was to the meeting in 2000, held here in Cork.

 

His association with Ireland is a long and happy one. He was a undergraduate at Queen Mary College and studied for his PhD at Imperial College. He carried out his research in that beautiful area many of us know around Leenane on Killary Harbour in Connemara. On arrival there he was overwhelmed by the spectacular geology, the smell of peat fires, the taste of Guinness and above all the warmth and generosity of the local people. He has worked continuously in this area ever since, it has been the site of some of his most significant research and regards it as his geological home.

 

He held lectureships at Manchester and Cambridge in the 1960s and in 1967 took a sabbatical at Lamont Doherty Observatory in New York in 1967.

In 1970 he was appointed as a Professor at the University of New York at Albany and in the next few years engaged in rigorous field work and data synthesis in the Appalachians, Newfoundland (about which he is speaking this evening), as well as continuing work in Ireland and Scotland, critically, right along the strike of the Caledonian Orogen.  During these years he produced classic papers on the origin and significance of ophiolites, the first plate tectonic model for the British Isles and the first application of tectonic theory to the evolution and origin of orogenic belts in the continental crust.

 

He returned to the UK as Professor at the University of Durham in 1982 and in 1986 was appointed to the chair of Geology at Oxford.

Throughout his career in the last 50 years he has become firmly established as the leading authority on global tectonics.  He has worked in the Appalachians, California and Nevada, Norway, Turkey and the Middle East, Tibet, S.Africa, New Zealand, Indonesia, Scotland and the west of Ireland.

 

His outstanding contribution to our science has been internationally recognized with numerous awards from learned societies, honorary fellowships and academic positions.

 

He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985, received the Wollaston Medal from the Geological Society of London (this society’s highest award) in 1999 and the Penrose Medal from the Geological Society of America in 1992 (also this society’s highest award).  In 1997 he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and in 2008 was elected as an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy.

 

In 2000 John returned to the US to the University of California at Davis.

 

He is now in semi-retirement and he spends his time between California, Ireland, the UK, S. Africa, and New Zealand visiting family, colleagues and friends and continues to publish numerous papers on tectonics, the distribution of strain in orogenic belts and the duration of orogenic processes.