Dr. Terence J. Hughes
Department of Earth Sciences/Climate Change Institute/University of Maine
Orono, ME 04469-5790, USA
1 April 2006

1972-1975
In this period, I published four ISCAP bulletins (ISCAP: Ice Stream Cooperative Antarctic Project) that proposed a comprehensive research program designed to answer the question, “Is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disintegrating?” This question was based on my observation in 1970 that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet had a concave surface. That was topsy-turvy according to conventional steady-state glaciological theory, which requires a convex surface, as is observed on the ice sheets in East Antarctica and Greenland. I concluded that fast currents of ice called ice streams were producing the concave surface by downdrawing interior ice, resulting in gravitational collapse of the ice sheet. The scientific content of three ISCAP bulletins was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (1973), and Reviews of Geophysics and Space Physics (1975 and 1977). These bulletins provided an early impetus for NSF to undertake comprehensive glaciological studies of West Antarctic ice streams, first as the Siple Coast Project of the 1980s and then as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Initiative (WAIS) that is ongoing.

In 1973, I attended the Second International Conference on Permafrost, held in Yakutsk, Siberia. There I presented a paper holding that much of the arctic permafrost in Siberia and Canada originated as the debris-charged basal layer of Quaternary ice sheets. This was published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1973. Since then, studies at various sites have confirmed this origin. Conventional wisdom is that permafrost formed from the top down after the ice sheets were gone, which is often the case. But when it formed from the bottom up as basal debris-charged glacial ice, that’s topsy-turvy.

In 1974, a Symposium on Andean and Antarctica Volcanological Problems published field studies from my first Antarctic research proposal funded by NSF, a study of ice flow and calving dynamics into a crater produced by the 12 August 1970 volcanic eruption on Deception Island. This began a long collaboration with Henry Brecher in Antarctica and Greenland. It also began my theoretical research on the mechanisms for calving of ice slabs from ice walls and tabular icebergs from ice shelves that has continued for three decades. It was the first such study in a new branch of glaciology that is now expanding rapidly because, in recent years, massive calving events have occurred all along the Antarctic Peninsula (south of Deception Island), and all along the Ross Sea, Amundsen Sea, and Weddell Sea flanks of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I think this accelerated calving may be an "early warning system" heralding further collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But that’s topsy-turvy if so many calving events were a coincidence.

I spent the last six months of 1974 at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, as a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow in the Advanced Study Program. This came about because I had been part of a committee that established an Atmospheric Science Program at The Ohio State University that made OSU faculty eligible for this appointment. I was the first to apply, and was accepted. There I wrote my third ISCAP bulletin. Bev Barr married me in June, so it was also our honeymoon.

In 1975, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (Palaeo-3) published what is still my paper getting the most requests for reprints by far: “The case for creation of the North Pacific Ocean during the Mesozoic Era.” It postulated a migrating tetrahedral pattern of mantle convection that split cordilleran North America from East Asia during the late Paleozoic, transported it across the North Pacific during the Mesozoic, and welded it onto cratonic North America during the Cenozoic. That same year, geologists published papers showing that cordilleran North America is a collection of allochthonous terranes having no relation to East Asia. My most popular idea was topsy-turvy and dead-on-arrival. However, it got me on the Palaeo-3 editorial board for 23 years, and an invitation from the Institute of Physics in Bristol to write a book on the tectonic history of the Pacific basin.

My idea for the tectonic history was to present two competing hypothesis for the Pacific basin, the newly emerging plate tectonics and an earlier hypothesis by S. Warren Carey that Earth was expanding. Early observations were compatible with both views as was my migrating tetrahedral pattern of mantle convection, which I had developed in two papers published in Tectonophysics in 1973. I invited Sam Carey to the University of Maine to give a lecture, The Expanding Earth, on 23 April 1984. By then plate tectonics had “won” and, not wanting a second dead-on-arrival publication, I finished the book and kept it for historical interest only, with a copy to Sam Carey. He died in 2002, at age 90.