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...