Thermal Evolution Award

Peter Zeitler, the Iacocca Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, has received the Dodson Prize for career achievements in thermochronology—the study of the thermal evolution, or changes in temperature over time, of the regions of the Earth.

The prize is awarded by the International Standing Committee on Thermochronology for extraordinary contributions to the field or to the international community of thermochronologists.

Zeitler was cited for helping “to define the modern field of thermochronology” and for “seminal contributions” to three dating methodologies—fission-track, argon-argon and uranium-thorium/helium—developed or expanded in the 1980s.

He has spent four decades studying orogeny—the geological processes that cause the Earth’s crust to form topographical features—in the Himalaya Mountains of Pakistan and Tibet and in the Hangay Mountains in Mongolia.

Zeitler’s use of fission-track thermochronology, said the award citation, was highly effective “in reconstructing the cooling histories of metamorphic rocks in the northern Pakistan Himalayas. This work was technically challenging and innovative in ways that made it stand out from previous studies.”