{"id":18379,"date":"2025-04-09T18:56:01","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T18:56:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/site.itshrt.com\/worldnews\/xavier-le-pichon-who-modeled-movement-of-earths-crust-dies-at-87\/"},"modified":"2025-04-09T18:56:01","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T18:56:01","slug":"xavier-le-pichon-who-modeled-movement-of-earths-crust-dies-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/site.itshrt.com\/worldnews\/xavier-le-pichon-who-modeled-movement-of-earths-crust-dies-at-87\/","title":{"rendered":"Xavier Le Pichon, Who Modeled Movement of Earth\u2019s Crust, Dies at 87"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- ItShrt World News -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"1882483372\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-0\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Xavier Le Pichon, a French geophysicist whose pioneering model of the earth\u2019s tectonic plates helped revolutionize how scientists understand movements of the earth\u2019s crust, died on March 22 at his home in Sisteron, in the south of France. He was 87.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His death was announced in a statement by the Coll\u00e8ge de France, France\u2019s highest educational institution, where Dr. Le Pichon was a professor emeritus and had held the chair of geodynamics.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Interned in a Japanese concentration camp as a child, Dr. Le Pichon went on to forge a second career as a deep sea explorer and for a time worked with Mother Teresa in India. But it was in the field of geodynamics that he made his greatest contribution: creating, with a computer, a model of the earth\u2019s plates, which are constantly shifting ever so incrementally.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In his formulation there are six such plates, accounting \u201cfor what is essential in tectonic manifestations at the earth\u2019s surface,\u201d as he said in 2002, when he won the <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.balzan.org\/en\/prizewinners\/xavier-le-pichon\/panorama-french\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Balzan Prize<\/a>, which is awarded in scientific fields not covered by the Nobel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-1\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Plate tectonics, with its study of the earth\u2019s surfaces, is the \u201cframework\u201d for understanding earthquakes, volcanoes and the earth\u2019s long-term \u201cclimate stability,\u201d said <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/planetarysolutions.yale.edu\/david-bercovici\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">David Bercovici<\/a>, a geophysicist at Yale; Dr. Le Pichon, he added, was one of the architects of that framework.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Professor Bercovici called him, in an email, \u201cone of the giants in the plate tectonic revolution, especially in bringing the mathematical theory of it into practice as a truly predictive model of how the earth works.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His work built on the theory of plate tectonics developed by the Princeton scientist <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/08\/11\/science\/jason-morgan-dead.html\" title=\"\">W. Jason Morgan<\/a> in 1967; \u201chenceforth,\u201d Dr. Le Pichon wrote, \u201ctectonics entered the era of quantification.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He was one of the first in \u201cstarting a very quantitative way of reconstructing the continents, in a way that continues today,\u201d said John Tarduno, a professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Dr. Pichon came to see the earth as \u201can extraordinary living being, with motions of the oceans and continents,\u201d as he once put it \u2014 a planet that is \u201ccontinuously changing, evolving.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-2\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After years of studying the sea and its floor, including at Columbia University, Dr. Le Pichon achieved his breakthrough in the mid-1960s, during what he called an \u201cincredibly uncomfortable\u201d monthslong cruise sponsored by Columbia to observe a 37,000-mile long ridge in the South Atlantic and Southwest Indian Oceans.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The object was to detect seismic activity along the crest of the ridge and test the prediction made in the 1950s by another French scientist, Jean-Pierre Roth\u00e9, that the ridge straddled those two oceans. \u201cWe were going to zigzag for nine months above this famous seismic line,\u201d Dr. Le Pichon wrote in the 2003 book \u201cPlate Tectonics: An Insider\u2019s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">That trip confirmed it, and he went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Strasbourg in 1966 on the basis of that study.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThe mid-oceanic ridge thus made a triumphal entry into tectonics, and became, on a stroke, the most important structure in the world,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">This was the early 1960s, however, and he was operating \u201cin a world that we call \u2018fixist\u2019 \u2014 things were not moving,\u201d <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/onbeing.org\/programs\/xavier-le-pichon-the-fragility-at-the-heart-of-humanity\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">as he put it<\/a> in a 2009 episode of the podcast \u201cOn Being with Krista Tippett.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-3\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cEarth was considered a place where everything was static,\u201d he said. \u201cThings were moving up and down but never laterally. Continents have always been there. The ocean had always been there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-4\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Dr. Le Pichon initially defended those notions, but he came to realize that they were incorrect. He returned from the laboratory one day and told his wife, \u201cThe conclusions of my thesis are false.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Rather, he sensed that the American geologist <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amnh.org\/learn-teach\/curriculum-collections\/earth-inside-and-out\/harry-hess-one-of-the-discoverers-of-seafloor-spreading\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Harry Hess<\/a> had been correct in postulating in 1962 that the sea floor was continually expanding. There was, after all, seismic activity along the crest of the ridge. Measuring magnetic anomalies along the ridge would be key in proving Dr. Hess\u2019s hypothesis.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Dr. Le Pichon recalled his eureka moment in the podcast episode: \u201cI was working all the night at the computer. And one night, finally, I put everything together, and I found that Hawaii was getting closer to Tokyo every year by eight centimeters, and things like that. And when I came down for breakfast with my wife, I told her, \u2018I\u2019m going to be the most famous man on the Earth.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-5\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He recalled telling her: \u201c\u2018I have discovered how the earth works. I really know it now.\u2019 And I was so excited.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His passion for what was going on beneath the oceans developed early. After growing up in what was then the French protectorate of Vietnam, he was interned with his family when the Japanese invaded during World War II.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cWhen I was in the concentration camp, we were on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, and I was wondering what was below the water, and I was on the beach,\u201d Dr. Le Pichon said in 2009. \u201cAnd I was saying I have to find out what happens when it gets deeper and deeper. And this question has been present since.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After publishing his breakthrough paper in 1968, presenting the first quantitative global model of plate boundaries and motions, Columbia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered him teaching positions. But he chose instead to head an oceanographic research institute in Brittany, France, where he began his second career as an underwater ocean explorer, making forays into the depths in small submarines in joint Franco-American expeditions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In 1973, in exploring the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, he said, he took one such craft down 3,000 meters, \u201clanding at the place where no human had ever been.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-6\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI had the impression, being a religious man, that I was back to Genesis,\u201d he added, \u201cfinding out the new world.\u201d Other ocean-floor trips in Greece and Japan followed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-7\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">A Roman Catholic who had attended Mass every day from childhood, Dr. Le Pichon experienced what he called \u201ca major crisis in my life\u201d in 1973, and went to work for <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1997\/09\/06\/world\/mother-teresa-hope-of-the-despairing-dies-at-87.html\" title=\"\">Mother Teresa<\/a> in the streets of Calcutta, India.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI was so immersed in my research, I was not seeing the others anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cIn particular, I was not seeing the people in difficulty and suffering. And that was a very, very strong crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The experience in Calcutta transformed him, by his account, and afterward he, his wife and their children went to live and perform charitable work in the French L\u2019Arche community for people with intellectual disabilities. They would live there for nearly three decades. Later, he and his family would help found a similar community and live there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-8\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Xavier Thadd\u00e9e Le Pichon was born on June 18, 1937, in Quy Nhon, in French Vietnam, to Jean Louis Le Pichon, a rubber plantation manager, and Helene Pauline (Tyl) Le Pichon.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The family moved to France in 1945, and Xavier attended the Institut Saint-Paul in Cherbourg and then the Lyc\u00e9e Sainte-Genevi\u00e8ve in Versailles. In 1960, he obtained an undergraduate degree in engineering from the Institut de Physique du Globe<em class=\"css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0\"> <\/em>in Strasbourg and received a Fulbright fellowship to study at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His seminal work was done over the next decade, and in 1973 he wrote, with Jean Bonnin and Jean Francheteau, a book that remains a standard in the field, \u201cPlate Tectonics.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In the 1970s and \u201980s, Dr. Le Pichon taught at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Superieure. He became a professor at the Coll\u00e8ge de France in 1986 and remained there until his retirement in 2008. Besides the Balzan, he won numerous prizes and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He is survived by his wife, Brigitte Suzanne (Barth\u00e9lemy) Le Pichon, a pianist; his children, Jean-Baptiste, Marie, Emmanuelle, Raphaelle, Jean-Marie and Pierre Gieng; 14 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-9\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In lectures and interviews, Dr. Le Pichon linked his discoveries as a scientist to his Catholic faith and the devotional work it inspired. The bridge between the two was his concept of \u201cfragility,\u201d which he said was the \u201cessence of men and women, and is at the heart of humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The earth, too, is fragile. \u201cI have a very close relationship with Earth that I consider a little bit like my mother,\u201d he said in 2009. \u201cAnd that has colored my scientific life. I wanted to know. I wanted to understand. I wanted to find out about it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-798hid etfikam0\">Sheelagh McNeill<!-- --> and <!-- -->Daphn\u00e9 Angl\u00e8s<!-- --> contributed research.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- ItShrt World News -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"1882483372\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/09\/science\/xavier-le-pichon-dead.html\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Xavier Le Pichon, a French geophysicist whose pioneering model of the earth\u2019s tectonic plates helped revolutionize how scientists understand movements<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[441,1138,152,1437,5759,2318,5761,268,5760],"class_list":["post-18379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-deaths-obituaries","tag-earth","tag-france","tag-geology","tag-le-pichon","tag-oceans-and-seas","tag-plate-tectonics","tag-research","tag-xavier"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Xavier Le Pichon, Who Modeled Movement of Earth\u2019s Crust, Dies at 87 - World News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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