Drummond Matthews (1931-97)

Today's the day ......................... for plate tectonics

I know that this picture is not of the best quality - in fact it's not of any sort of quality at all - but I just had to have it as my blip today.

It comes from a video that I received in the post today from my friend Ken McNamara at the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge.  He had been given it for the museum's archives and thought I might like a copy of it because as he said 'I featured in it'.  He was right!  In fact it's brought back so many memories that I've been thinking about it most of the day.

It's a video of the retirement in 1990 of Drummond Matthews FRS, marine geologist and geophysicist and a key contributor to the theory of plate tectonics.  That's me on the left and the reason that I was there was because I had been his research assistant at the Department of Geodesy & Geophysics in Cambridge from 1973 - 1978.

It was a very exciting time to be working in that field because theories about the earth - that we just take for granted now - were just being discovered.  Drummond Matthews is probably most famous for his work with Fred Vine on sea-floor spreading which you can read about here if you're interested.

It was all a while ago now, of course, but great to have a chance to be reminded of it .............................