Alan Gilbert Smith

Smith was born in Watford, and went to school at Watford Grammar School for Boys. Smith went to university at St John's College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1959 with a B.A. in natural sciences. From 1959 to 1963 he was a graduate student in geology at Princeton University, where he completed a PhD thesis on the Structure and stratigraphy of the northwest Whitefish Range, Lincoln County, Montana under the supervision of John C. Maxwell (1914–2006) and Franklyn B. Van Houten In 1963, Smith was appointed as a research assistant to Edward Bullard in the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics of the University of Cambridge. In 1964 he was appointed a demonstrator in the same department, and lecturer in 1971. Smith retired in 2004. His doctoral students included Michael Welland. ==Research==

Smith's Ph.D. thesis was a major contribution to stratigraphic understanding of the Belt Supergroup. and the geological timescale. has historic importance in the establishment of the validity of plate tectonics. According to Eldridge M. Moores, Smith's 1971 paper Alpine Deformation and the Oceanic Areas of the Tethys, Mediterranean, and Atlantic was "a major breakthrough in our views of the relationship between sea floor spreading, the then new-plate tectonics, and orogeny." the author of The Tectonic Plates Are Moving! (Oxford University Press, 2018). In 2003 Smith and co-author Kevin T. Pickering, proposed a unifying explanation for Earth's icehouse periods during the past 620 million years. ==Family==

Smith's father was an engineer and inventor, who developed instruments for the Royal Navy during WWII. In 1962, Smith married Judy Walton, who worked for Princeton University Press at the time. She died in 2010. Smith died in 2017, and was survived by their daughter and granddaughter. ==Awards and honours==

• 1961 – Fellow of the Geological Society of London • 1970 – Sedgwick Prize, University of Cambridge • 1976 – Lyell Fund, Geological Society of London • 1981 — Bigsby Medal, Geological Society of London • 2004 – Medal from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki for his work on the tectonics of Greece • 2006 – Mary B Ansari Best Reference Work Award 2006 from the Geoscience Information Society (GIS) for an outstanding geoscience publication (A Geologic Time Scale 2004, edited by Felix M. Gradstein, James G. Ogg and Alan G. Smith) • 2007 – Distinguished Career Award, International Division, Geological Society of America • 2008 — Lyell Medal, Geological Society of London ==Selected publications==

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Books • • • • • • • ==References==