Citation | Distinguished for his many contributions to our present understanding of continental deformation. His early work in the Zagros mountains showed that all the earthquakes occurred in the upper half of the crust, and were not related to subduction. He suggested that the faults involved were normal faults being reactivated as thrusts. This process has now been recognised as one of the major mechanisms of crustal thickening that produces mountains. In a brilliant study after the Corinth earthquakes in 1981, he showed that the faults involved were planar, not listric, to a depth of 8 km, and recognised the relationship between geomorphology and faulting that has allowed active faults to be mapped in many continental regions, even when they have not moved in earthquakes. This work has had a major influence on petroleum geology. More recently he has used geomorphology in New Zealand and Nevada to study how fault geometry changes as the faults slip, and the relationship between faulting and rotations about vertical axes. Jackson is a superb lecturer, and gave a most successful series of Christmas lectures to schoolchildren at the Royal Institution. |