| Description | Letter from Xavier Le Pichon, 6 November 1987, inviting comments on his enclosed paper an "Introduction to the publication of the extended outline of Jason Morgan's April 17, 1967 American Geophysical Union Paper on 'Rises, Trenches, Great Faults and Crustal Blocks'", which includes a photocopy of Morgan's original typescript notes from 1967*. [Note: the paper was presented on 19 April 1967.] Includes a reply from Dan McKenzie in which he details the situation surrounding the publication of his seminal paper, 2 January [1988]*. |
| Administrative History | The main controversy surrounding McKenzie's seminal paper on plate tectonics, written in conjunction with Robert Parker [published as: McKenzie, D & R L Parker, "The North Pacific: an example of tectonics on a sphere", 'Nature', vol 216 (1967), pp1276-1280] is that Jason Morgan, Princeton University, had presented similar ideas on the subject in his paper 'Rises, Trenches, Great Faults and Crustal Blocks' at the 48th Annual Meeting of the America Geophysical Union (AGU) on 19 April 1967. However whilst McKenzie attended the conference he did not hear Morgan's talk as the abstract published in the conference programme (which Morgan deviated from) held no interest for him. Instead he only discovered that Morgan was working along similar lines after being informed by Bill Menard, who was co-chair at that particular AGU session and later refereed Morgan's paper which had been submitted to the 'Journal of Geophysical Research' [published in the vol 73 (1968), pp1959–1982]. As both parties had reached the same theory separately, McKenzie requested that 'Nature' delay the publication so that both papers could go out simultaneously in March 1968, however it had already been sent to press and was published on 30 December 1967.
After his AGU presentation, Jason Morgan distributed copies of the notes to a small number of conference delegates, amongst whom was the French geophysicist Xavier Le Pichon. |
| Publication Note | Le Pichon's paper was published as: Le Pichon, X. "Introduction to the publication of the extended outline of Jason Morgan's April 17, 1967 American Geophysical Union Paper on 'Rises, Trenches, Great Faults and Crustal Blocks'", 'Tectonophysics', vol 187 (1991) pp1-5. |