Drummond Hoyle Matthews

1931-1997

English Geologist and Geophysicist

Together with his colleague and former student Frederick J. Vine (1939-1988), Drummond H. Matthews helped establish the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s. Prior to that time, geologists and geophysicists had remained skeptical about claims that Earth's crust was divided into shifting plates. The findings of Matthews and Vine revolutionized thinking on the subject, and plate tectonics theory later proved useful in areas such as oil exploration and the assessment of volcanic risk.

Born in 1931, Matthews was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and in 1955 went to work as a geologist on the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey. In 1957 he returned to Cambridge, where his students included a promising doctoral candidate named Frederick J. Vine.

While taking part in a 1962 mapping expedition aboard the H.M.S. Owen in the northwestern Indian Ocean, Matthews noted a pattern of magnetic bands or stripes as much as 20 miles or 30 kilometers wide. Such magnetic stripes had been found on the floors of other oceans, but Matthews's was the first such readings in that particular region.

Upon his return to Cambridge, Matthews—along with Vine—examined these findings and discovered curious reversals in polarity, or the direction of the magnetic field, among the stripes. In particular, the two men noted that the polarity of the stripes varied symmetrically: for instance, if the third stripe to the west of a ridge was a wide one with a north magnetic pole near the north geographic pole, the same was true of the third stripe to the east of a ridge. Matthews and Vine presented their findings in the September 1963 issue of Nature.

Half a century earlier, Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) had put forward the theory of continental drift, but his ideas had come under attack in the years preceding the publication of Matthews's and Vine's data. Now the two offered compelling evidence to support not only continental drift, but plate tectonics theory, which began to gain wide acceptance following the presentation of their findings at the December 1966 meeting of the Geological Society of America in San Francisco. This led to a significant change in geological thinking, and ultimately plate tectonics theory found practical application in a wide variety of areas.

Matthews was appointed assistant director of research in the department of geophysics at Cambridge in 1966, and became reader (instructor) in geology in 1971. During the 1970s he published a number of influential papers on the subject of marine geophysics. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974.

Matthews later left his position at Cambridge but continued his research, focusing on the continental crust. He became director of the British Institutions Reflections Profiling Syndicate, or BIRPS, and retired in 1990. Matthews died in July 1997.

JUDSON KNIGHT