George Wetherill was a physicist and geologist and the Director Emeritus of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC, USA.
16 Facts About George Wetherill
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George Wetherill was born on August 12,1925, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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George Wetherill did his thesis research, on the spontaneous fission of uranium, as well as nuclear processes in nature, as a US Atomic Energy Commission Predoctoral Fellow.
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George Wetherill originated the concept of the Concordia Diagram for the uranium-lead isotopic system; this diagram became the standard means for determining precise ages of rocks, and of detecting the possibility of metamorphism.
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George Wetherill was a member of the Carnegie group that accurately determined the decay constants of potassium and rubidium, an effort that has become fundamental to the measurement of geological time.
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George Wetherill left DTM in 1960 to become a professor of geophysics and geology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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At UCLA, George Wetherill further explored techniques for age-dating, examining extraterrestrial material with radiometric chronology techniques to meteorite and lunar samples.
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George Wetherill's studies concentrated on collisions between objects in the asteroid belt together with resonances between their motions and those of planets.
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George Wetherill computed how these events could move material into Earth-crossing orbits to become meteorites or larger Earth-impacting bodies responsible for the devastating impacts that caused mass extinctions of the majority of living species, including the dinosaurs.
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In 1975, George Wetherill returned to Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism as director.
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George Wetherill remained director until 1991, when he became a staff member.
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George Wetherill developed a technique to calculate numerically the orbital evolution and accumulation of planetesimal swarms, and he used the technique to reach specific predictions of the physical and orbital properties of terrestrial planets.
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George Wetherill has shown that Jupiter plays an important role in the evolution of the Solar System; by ejecting comets from the solar system, it offers a protective presence to the inner planets.
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George Wetherill provided leadership in the scientific community by serving on advisory committees for NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Science Foundation.
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George Wetherill served as president of the Meteoritical Society, the Geochemical Society, the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, the International Association of Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry, and was a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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George Wetherill died at his home in Washington, DCWednesday, July 19,2006, after a long illness.