IN MEMORIAM
JOHN C. MAXWELL
John C. Maxwell, educator, geologist, and scholar, died in Austin,
Texas, on January 23, 2006, at the age of 91. He embraced life
with enthusiasm and lightened it with his sense of humor, much
appreciated by his students during long summer traverses in Italy
and California. He was born in Xenia, Ohio, on December 28, 1914,
to Addie Crawford and William Maxwell. He is survived by his
wife of 66 years, Marian Maxwell, and their daughter, Marilyn
Bradford.
After high school, Maxwell was awarded a four-year scholarship
to DePauw University, where he graduated in 1936 with a degree
in geology. From there, he attended the University of Minnesota,
also on a scholarship, and in 1937 graduated with a master's
degree. He then took a job with Sun Oil Company in Beaumont,
Texas, where he met and married Marian Buchanan. At Sun Oil,
he specialized in gravity modeling and the then new skill of
seismic reflection interpretation. The academic world was his
real interest, and in 1940, the couple drove to Princeton University,
where he began work on his Ph.D. and she hoped to find a job.
World War II started during Maxwell’s second
year at Princeton. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was assigned
to a naval intelligence group as an antisubmarine warfare officer.
He was stationed in New York City in the unit headed by Commander
Harry H. Hess, his thesis advisor at Princeton. In January 1944,
Maxwell was transferred to New Caledonia, the headquarters for
all U.S. military forces in the Pacific. He remained there until
October 1945 and was discharged upon his return to the states.
The reunited family returned to Princeton, where John worked
to finish his dissertation, receiving the Ph.D. degree in 1946.
Maxwell’s performance as a graduate student
was so outstanding that he was appointed to the Princeton faculty
as an assistant professor of structural geology and tectonics.
He rapidly rose to the rank of professor. In 1955, he was appointed
chairman of Princeton’s new Department of Geological Engineering
and served in that capacity until 1966, when he became chairman
of the Department of Geological and Geophysical Sciences. In
1970, he accepted the position of the William Stamps Farish Chair
in Geology at The University of Texas at Austin. He served in
that capacity until retirement in 1984.
Maxwell contributed great service to the geosciences.
He was elected president of the American Geological Institute,
1971, and president of the Geological Society of America, 1973.
He was chairman, Earth Sciences Division, National Research Council,
1970-72, and again
1981-85; chairman, Advisory Panel, Earth Sciences Division,
National Science Foundation
1975-76; consultant to Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards
of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1976-1984; vice chairman
of the board of the International Geological Correlations Program,
UNESCO 1979-1984; and member of the scientific panel advisory
committee to the Gas Research Institute on the Siljan Deep Hole
project in Sweden. His service on these panels and organizations
made him a valuable counselor when seeking input on people and
issues.
Maxwell received numerous awards. He graduated
Phi Beta Kappa at DePauw University and was awarded a Thomas
F. Andrews Fellowship at the University of Minnesota. He was
a Fulbright Research Scholar in Italy in 1952 and a Guggenheim
Scholar in Italy during 1961-62. Living in Italy was a life-expanding
cultural experience for his entire family. He was selected as
a distinguished lecturer by the Canadian Institute of Mining
in 1966, and a Sigma Xi National Lecturer in 1967. His 1969-1970
lecture tour for the American Chemical Society earned him their
Speaker of the Year Award. He was also recognized by his alma
maters. In 1972, the University of Minnesota gave him their Outstanding
Achievement Award. In 1988, DePauw University presented him an
Honorary Doctor of Sciences.
John Maxwell’s geologic research had several long-term
themes: laboratory studies of quartz sand compaction; the origin
of rock cleavage; and field studies that focused on gravity tectonics,
soft-sediment deformation, mélange formation, and the
origin and emplacement of ophiolites.
Maxwell’s field research in the 1940s, both
before and after the war, was primarily performed at locations
around the Caribbean, mostly in Venezuela. From 1952-1970, he
made many trips to Italy to examine the ophiolitic and related
rocks of the Apennines near Tuscany and Liguria. He was the first
American geologist to accept that the ophiolite suite was a recurring
rock association found in many mountain belts. In 1964, he co-led
with Italian colleagues an American Geological Institute Summer
Field Institute in the northern Apennines of Italy. This trip
introduced a whole generation of young American structural geologists
to ophiolites and mélanges – enigmatic masses of
chaotically mixed blocks of rock dispersed in a sheared matrix
of shale or serpentine. From 1953-1962, he participated in the
Princeton field courses held in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado,
Wyoming, and Montana. Many Princeton student dissertation projects
arose from places visited during the field course. And of course,
he maintained a steady interest in the geology of the nearby
Appalachians. In the late 1960s, Maxwell began a project to study
the ophiolites and mélanges in the California Coast Ranges.
This program expanded greatly after he moved to Austin, and most
of his Texas graduate students worked on geologic problems in
the Franciscan Complex.
The direct scientific contributions of John C. Maxwell are recorded
in the forty-one formal papers he published and indirectly by
the records of the scores of students he inspired and supervised.
Maxwell’s dissertation studies resulted in the 1948 publication
of a monumental report on the geology of Tobago in the British
West Indies. This paper, which includes a map of the entire island,
remains a cornerstone in understanding the geology of this part
of the southern Caribbean.
Maxwell paralleled his thesis advisor by making geologic observations
while serving in U.S. Navy. Commander Hess discovered guyots
while captaining a transport ship. While stationed in New Caledonia,
Maxwell visited the nickel laterites and chromite deposits. The
nickel deposits were relatively well characterized in the literature
of the day, but the deposits of chromite were essentially undescribed.
Maxwell found time to visit several of the chromite mines and
document his observations. His descriptions, published in 1949,
clearly show that the chromite layering is of igneous origin
and that the associated ultramafic rock was later serpentinized
and intensely deformed. He noted that these rocks were atop a
basement that included glaucophane schists. He didn’t know
it at the time, but this was his first introduction to the association
of blueschists with ophiolites.
Upon becoming a Princeton faculty member, Maxwell established
a program of laboratory experimentation on sandstone compaction
and new field studies concerning the effects of tectonism on
sedimentation. The experimental program led to influential papers
with Peter Verrall concerning porosity loss caused by elevated
pressures and temperatures in deeply buried carbonate rocks in
1953 and quartz sands in 1954. Years of systematic experiments
designed to address the role of compaction and cementation in
porosity reduction of quartz sands resulted in a 1960 paper that
reported data from 230 experiments lasting for time spans ranging
from hours to 100 days. The comparison of experimentally deformed
rocks with natural samples led him to the conclusion that flowing
solutions must be very important in causing dissolution of quartz
grains at point contacts. However, his experimental efforts to
duplicate the process, now known as pressure solution, were largely
unsuccessful. Maxwell suspected geologic timescales were an essential
factor, and thus, he engineered a program to systematically compare
samples from deep wells across Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma
-- in essence an analysis of many natural experiments. This project,
published in 1964, led to the conclusion that maintenance of
original porosity was favored in sandstones by low thermal gradients,
young age, stagnant formation waters, absence of minerals other
than quartz, and probably excess pore fluid pressures. These
papers were widely read as the petroleum industry drilled ever
deeper in the search for oil.
The mechanisms by which deformation causes minerals to become
oriented in rocks is of interest to all structural geologists.
One of the earliest attempts to experimentally generate a fabric
in sandstone was published in 1956 by Maxwell and a Princeton
student, Iris Borg. Maxwell’s 1960 paper on the origin
of slaty and fracture cleavage in the Delaware Gap area of New
Jersey received much attention. This report on the Martinsburg
slate contained a detailed map, cross sections, and a set of
carefully drawn diagrams illustrating the evidence he saw for
the formation of slaty cleavage while the rock was still water-rich
and weakly consolidated. This paper, required reading of all
students interested in the origin of slaty cleavage, carefully
documents relationships observable in outcrops. To this day,
field trips routinely stop to see and debate Maxwell’s
evidence that the rapid application of tectonic stress induced
pore fluid pressures approaching lithostatic values, which in
turn caused the injection of sandstone dikelets parallel with
the cleavage.
During the summers, a program of field research was designed
to elucidate the record of gravity tectonics and soft-sediment
deformation. Maxwell was attracted to the Apennines of northern
Italy where remarkable turbidite and gravity-slide deposits show
all gradations into the chaotic deposits known as olistostromes.
These deposits are associated with ophiolites. Two influential
reports on these exceptional field relationships were published
in 1959 followed by a major 1963 paper complete with several
maps and many stereonets.
Maxwell was chairman of the department at Princeton University
while several of his colleagues and students were instrumental
in the development of plate tectonic theory. He contributed to
the revolution with an early 1968 paper entitled “Continental
drift on a dynamic Earth” that was aimed at young scientists
because it was published by Sigma Xi in American Scientist.
Maxwell discussed ophiolites in his papers concerning Italy.
Ophiolite suites are associations of rock whose structural order
was long debated because faulting shuffles the relationships.
Maxwell, with much experience in Italy and some in New Caledonia,
was one of the first American geologists to recognize that the
sequence ranged from ultramafic rock (peridotite) at the base,
to gabbro and diorite in the middle, to diabase dikes capped
with basaltic volcanic rocks, commonly pillow flows depositionally
overlain by radiolarian chert and flysch-type sediments. His
pioneering insights, presented at meetings and lectured upon
in classes, led to a brief 1969 discussion paper that led indirectly
to the widespread acceptance of this association by American
geologists. He emphasized the European perspective that this
rock assemblage formed in deep water, becoming uplifted and juxtaposed
with flysch deposits during orogenesis. Within a year, many workers
described ophiolite complexes as slabs of ocean crust uplifted
by plate tectonic processes at subduction zones. However, in
the matter of ophiolite formation, Maxwell differed from many
of his colleagues. He agreed they formed by diapiric upwelling
and partial melting of mantle material, but he believed that
many ophiolites formed within the interior of rising orogenic
belts. These concepts were developed in a 1970 book chapter and
in the proceedings of a 1973 symposium held in Moscow.
In the petroleum industry, many doubted the validity of the
new theory of plate tectonics. For the American Association of
Petroleum Geologists, Maxwell contributed a 1974 paper to a volume
assessing the validity of plate tectonics. Maxwell argued that
the theory accounts for many aspects of ocean floor geology,
but he emphasized that the causes of deformation of the interior
of continents is especially problematic. In this paper, Maxwell
listed seventeen features of the ocean basins and eighteen aspects
of the continental deformation that plate tectonic theory seemingly
did not readily explain. The topics on his lists spurred many
research endeavors.
Maxwell joined the Department of Geological Sciences at The
University of Texas at Austin in 1970 and immediately expanded
his field program in western California -- an area containing
all of his favorite geologic features: mélanges, flysch,
blueschists, and ophiolites. This work led to the subject of
his address as president of the Geological Society of America
and to what is probably his best known and most widely read contribution.
The 1974 paper “Anatomy of an Orogen” concerns the
origin of the northern Coast Ranges of California and the rock
record of subduction. This paper, a benchmark for California
and subduction zone geology, was rooted in his own fieldwork
and the mapping of 15-minute quadrangles by six graduate students.
This paper showed that the Franciscan accretionary prism can
be subdivided into eighteen mapable units, five of which were
mélanges distinguished by the numbers and types of included
blocks. New insights were presented regarding the structural
evolution of the Franciscan accretionary prism and its relationship
to the overlying Coast Range Ophiolite and Great Valley forearc
basin deposits. A companion paper, also published in 1974, “Early
western margin of the United States” placed the Franciscan
complex and associated terranes into their regional plate tectonic
context. Most of the K-Ar geochronology obtained for the student
studies in the great California mapping transect were compiled
in a major 1984 paper with Fred McDowell as lead author.
Starting in the mid-1970s, Maxwell was an active participant
in the U.S. Geodynamics Committee. From 1979-1983, he chaired
this committee, which spurred thematic technical sessions at
national meetings and nucleated workshops centered on identifying
future research directions. He coordinated an auspicious program
of constructing maps and cross sections across the western and
southern margin of the North American continent. The program
was a great success with twenty geologic transects published
as the Geological Society of America Map and Chart Series (MC-28).
Maxwell constructed one for the northern Coast Ranges of California,
which was published in 1981, and he co-authored with all of his
Texas students who had worked in California. A notable aspect
of the project was that the transects were prepared at a similar
scale and level of detail. Many faculty teaching tectonics courses
hung them in the hallways of their geoscience departments.
Maxwell received considerable attention with a 1985 paper provocatively
titled “What is the lithosphere?” This report summarized
the varying thermomechanical definitions proposed for the lithosphere
since the advent of plate tectonics. This paper was expanded
for publication in Physics Today and translated into
Japanese for publication in their widely read Physical Science
Magazine. A contribution published in 1987 gave Maxwell’s
perspective on how the U.S. geoscience community changed its
overall thinking about Earth behavior from a largely passive
view to the exceptionally dynamic perspective of today.
Maxwell’s deep interest in the association of ophiolites
and mélanges was the subject of his last papers, which
incorporated some of his own field observations. These 1982 and
1984 papers, with Pinar Yilmaz as lead author, concerned the
classic ophiolite and mélange occurrences of Turkey. With
a 1986 paper dedicated to one of his Italian colleagues, he returned
one more time to discuss these rock assemblages in his beloved
Apeninnes of Italy.
John Maxwell’s scientific output was large, but it was
dwarfed by the production of his graduate students and the countless
others he inspired with kind words of encouragement. At Princeton
University, he supervised the completion of twenty-seven dissertations
and three masters theses. At UT, the totals were eleven dissertations
and three masters theses. Many in the Princeton group became
leaders in academia while those at UT tended towards industry
careers. Most of John’s students are not formally linked
to him in the literature because he rarely let his name be placed
in the publications arising from their graduate student research.
Maxwell’s effectiveness as a teacher is best described
by one of his former graduate students, the distinguished Professor
Eldridge Moores: "John Maxwell was revered by his students,
who found him to be an enthusiastic lecturer, a supportive advisor,
and one who never tried to push his ideas onto his students.
His cheerful, infectious humor and his hearty laugh brightened
many a classroom and defused many awkward situations." Perhaps
John would view his greatest contribution to the geosciences
was the fact that he played some role in the education of an
extraordinary group of graduate students. His list of Princeton
advisees includes: Moores, Verrall, Gabriel Dengo, Raymond Price,
Donald Wise, Marvin Kauffman, Ronald Oxburgh, Alan Smith, Creighton
Burk, Walter Alvarez, Robert Twiss, William Travers, and Casey
Moore. His list of Texas advisees includes Yilmaz, Paul Gucwa,
Michael Jordan, Jay Raney, John Kleist, Dan Worrall, and Mark
Helper.
In
appreciation of the scholarships that he received as a student,
in 2001 John and Marian established an undergraduate scholarship
in the Department of Geological Sciences at UT Austin. John and
Marian Maxwell will forever play a role in helping educate students
about the planet they live on.
Major Publications
Maxwell, J. C., 1948, Geology of Tobago, British West Indies:
Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 49, p. 801-854.
Maxwell, J. C., 1949, Some occurrences of chromite in New Caledonia:
Economic Geology, v. 44, p. 525-544.
Maxwell, J. C., and Verrall, P., 1953, Expansion and increase
in permeability of carbonate rocks on heating: Transactions,
American Geophysical Union, v. 34, p. 101-106.
Borg, I. Y., and Maxwell, J. C., 1956, Interpretation of fabrics
of experimentally deformed sands: American Journal of Science,
v. 254, p. 71-81.
Maxwell, J. C., 1959, Orogeny, gravity tectonics, and turbidites
in the Monghidoro area, northern Apennine Mountains, Italy: Transactions,
New York Academy of Sciences, v. 21, p. 269-280.
Maxwell, J. C., 1959, Turbidite, tectonic and gravity transport,
northern Apennine Mountains, Italy: American Association of Petroleum
Geologists Bulletin, v. 43, p. 2701-2719.
Maxwell, J. C., 1960, Experiments on compaction and cementation
of sand: Geological Society of America Memoir 79, p. 105-132.
Maxwell, J. C., 1962, Origin of slaty and fracture cleavage
in the Delaware Water Gap area, New Jersey and Pennsylvania: in Petrologic
Studies: A Volume to Honor A. F. Buddington, Geological Society
of America, p. 281-311.
Maxwell, J. C., 1963, Structural geology of the Ottone area,
Piacenza and Genova: Memoire della Societa Geologica Italiana,
v. 4, 23 pp.
Maxwell, J. C., 1964, Influence of depth, temperature, and geological
age on porosity of quartzose sandstone: American Association
of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 48, p. 697-709.
Maxwell, J. C., 1968, Continental drift and a dynamics Earth:
American Scientist, v. 56, p. 35-51.
Maxwell, J. C., 1969, “Alpine” mafic and ultramafic
rocks – The ophiolite suite: Tectonophysics, v. 7, p. 489-494.
Maxwell, J. C., 1970, The Mediterranean, ophiolites and continental
drift: in, H. Johnson, ed., The Megatectonics of Continents
and Oceans: Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey,
p. 167-193.
Maxwell, J. C., 1973, Ophiolites – Old oceanic crust or
internal diapirs: Symposium on “Ophiolites in the Earth’s
Crust,” Moscow, May 31-June 2, 1973, 26 pp.
Maxwell, J. C., 1974, Anatomy of an orogen: Geological Society
of America Bulletin, v. 85, p. 1195-1204.
Maxwell, J. C., 1974, Early western margin of the United States: in Burk,
C. A., and Drake, C. L., eds., The Geology of Continental Margins,
Springer Verlag, p. 831-852.
Maxwell, J. C., 1974, The new global tectonics: An assessment:
American Association of Petroleum Geologists Memoir 23, p. 24-42.
Maxwell, J. C., Etter, S. D., Fritz, D. M., Gucwa, P. R., Jordan,
M. A., Kleist, J. R., Lehman, D. H., Raney, J. A., Worrall, D.
M., 1981, Geologic cross sections, northern California Coast
Ranges to northern Sierra Nevada, and Lake Pillsbury area to
southern Klamath Mountains: Geological Society of America Map
and Chart Series MC-28N.
Yilmaz, P. O., and Maxwell, J. C., 1982, K-Ar investigations
from the Antalaya Complex ophiolites, SW Turkey: Ofioliti, v.
2/2, p. 527-538.
Maxwell, J. C., 1984, What is the lithosphere: EOS, v. 65, p.
321, 324, 325.
Yilmaz, P. O., and Maxwell, J. C., 1984, An example of an obduction
mélange: The Alakir Cay unit, Antalya complex, southwest
Turkey: Geological Society of America Special Paper 198, p. 139-152.
McDowell, F. W., Lehman, D. H., Gucwa, P. R., Fritz, D., and
Maxwell, J. C., 1984, Glaucophane schists and ophiolites of the
northern California Coast Ranges: Isotopic ages and their tectonic
implications: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 95,
p. 1374-1382.
Maxwell, J. C., 1985, What is the lithosphere: Physics Today,
v. 38, no. 9, p. 32-40.
Maxwell, J. C., 1986, Gravity tectonics: Examples from areas
of subduction and obduction: Memoire della Societa Geologica
Italiana, v. 31, p. 13-21.
Maxwell, J. C., 1987, Geology in the U. S. A.: From passive to
dynamic Earth in 50 years: Episodes, v. 10, p. 238-242.
<signed>
William Powers Jr., President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
Sue Alexander Greninger, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared by a special committee consisting of Professors
Earle F. McBride (chair), Mark Cloos, and William R. Muehlberger.
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