Jack Oliver papers

Geologist, Irving Porter Church Professor Emeritus, Cornell University. Oliver was born in Massillon, Ohio, and went on to graduate from Columbia University in 1947, and then earn his master's degree and a PhD in Geophysics there. In 1968, after years of research, Oliver published a paper entitled "Seismology and the New Global Tectonics," that made a groundbreaking argument for the existence of continental drift, now known as plate tectonics. In 1958, while in a New York State seismic station, Oliver observed a seismic wave generated not by an earthquake, but by a nuclear bomb test in Nevada. Overnight he became an authority on the subject, which led to his being an adviser to the White House on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty later than year, and a delegate to negotiations in Geneva in 1959. In 1971, Jack Oliver became the chair of the Department of Geological Sciences at Cornell University, and is known to have transformed the department from obscurity into a world-class facility. While there he and his colleague Sidney Kaufman co-founded the Consortium for Continental Reflection Profiling (COCORP), which has gone on to inspire deep seismic exploration programs in over 20 countries.