| Citation | Robert White is among the world's leading marine geophysicists. He is a highly numerate geologist. His work on the continental margin of the Gulf of Oman made it a type-example. He developed two-ship refraction techniques to detail the crustal structure of fracture zones in the deep oceans. With students he made heat-flow observations across the Cape Verde hot-spot and he determined the seismic velocity structure across the volcanic margin of Rockall Plateau, finding evidence of crustal underplating. He proposed that volcanic margins develop where upper mantle temperatures are raised over a convective plume (a hot-spot) and he has thereby been able to explain the distribution of volcanic margins and of plateau basalts world-wide. Recently he has made two-ship reflection profiles that reveal structures in the deep-ocean crust. |