Second Part

0:04:13 In 1971 I became a member of the University staff and shortly after got married and settled into Cambridge with graduate students; working on all aspects of plate tectonics but gradually getting less and less enthusiastic because it worked too well; wondered if I would be a person who had one good idea and lived off it for the rest of life; decided to try to understand the mechanism that keeps the plates moving but very hard to get relevant observations as obscured by the action of the plates; with Nigel Weiss, an astrophysicist, built computer models of the behavior of fluids below the plates; took five years and was very successful; in oceans and atmospheres the flow motions have momentum but the flow in the mantle is so sticky has none; fluid mechanics people had not paid much attention to this; we looked at flows, cellular convection, and whether you could see this on earth; then we calculated the surface influence of these things, the gravity field of the earth is principally controlled by the motions in the mantle, using data from satellites etc. so we could see the circulation; this was one of two things I did at that time which made me think I could have a life beyond plate tectonics; the other was the success of our work on the continents; at that time we were working in Iran looking at earthquakes; we got a really good understanding of how the continents moved and a little later of completely new phenomena which only appear in continents and not in oceans, the development of sedimentary basins; elected to the Royal Society in 1976 and by that stage was assistant director of research, the equivalent of a lecturer; continued to work with colleagues in the States and elsewhere

7:02:15 Next really big thing came from work on the continents; they differ from ocean plates where there is a sharp boundary between plates and the mantle wells up in between, as the deformation is distributed over huge areas so Iran is being shortened and the Aegean is being stretched; we still don't understand why this should be; not just on one fault but lots of earthquakes distributed over a large region; if you stretch the  continent over a large area it makes the cold part (the plates on top, the convecting mantle underneath has more or less constant temperature almost down to the core) even thinner and increase the temperature gradient because you do it quickly; what then happens is earthquake, the mantle wells up into the hole underneath and it is hot; after stretching stops it cools and as it does so it contracts and the surface sinks; this is the explanation of things like the North Sea; deep in the bottom there are block faults where there were earthquakes; that motion stopped and for the last 100m years or so the North Sea has sunk; all the sediments were deposited in shallow water and are now at depths of 4km and it is those shallow water sediments that produced the oil because they are now buried so deeply they got hot again and the organic carbon breaks down and produces oil; wrote paper on this in the late 1970's  based on what we had found in the Aegean, not the North Sea; at that time not interested in sedimentary basins but in continental deformation; this paper explained all the details that the oil companies knew from drilling these basins; totally accepted by the oil companies and became know as the McKenzie Model of Sedimentary Basins though it would be better to describe it at the Stretching Model; on the basis of this paper became well known and gave me confidence that I could do other things by thinking straight and being careful intellectually

12:19:10 Didn't benefit from this at that time but it gave the oil companies the material necessary to do calculations; probably benefited the oil companies by $5-10bn savings by using these ideas; like all of science the understanding is separate from the commercial stuff; soon after this I started a company here in Cambridge to try and actually benefit commercially, but that was hopeless because the oil companies wanted to give you their data and for you to produce a report rather than try to teach them to think and do the work themselves; one of the people I worked with at the time was Andrew Mackenzie who was at that time a graduate student at Bristol; he was working on how the organic-rich sediments actually broke down to produce oil; we thought we could test the stretching models by using the physical chemistry of these reactions; we wrote a long paper on how this understanding could be exploited to look at the migration and generation of oil; that paper had an enormous impact despite difficulty in getting it published as people couldn't understand it; published in the 'Geological Magazine' and won the prize for the best paper in organic geochemistry for that year; Andrew then went into BP and ultimately became John Browne's right hand man; John Browne wanted to start some research institutes in universities, one in Europe, North America, and the Far East, as he believed they could tap into what was already known and understood by the academic community when problems arose; Andrew came to see me with the idea of starting such an institute in Cambridge; he and I put together a program, this was about ten year's ago, set out on one side of A4 for the BP board and the University for an endowment of £25m; it went straight through both without any modifications so the institute was set up in Cambridge University was happy because BP didn't want any commercial control on what was done and wanted to fund people who had university appointments and held them in departments; BP spent about a week of management time on this which was considered exorbitantly

expensive; the institute was set up and within two years BP reckoned they had got a return on their entire investment; I set up the institute but had not intention of being its director; did it partly because I was interested in closer links with BP and foolish to turn down the opportunity of setting up an institute with money and no strings; no blueprint for this sort of thing so an intellectual exercise; built the building over two years and then hired Andy Woods to be the head of it and professor; I am on the management committee which meets once a year; BP then put me on their Technology Advisory Council which I've been on for 6-7 years which is extremely interesting and it is a group, some academics, but many with a similar background; we report directly to the board and can look at any aspect of the entire company and make comments

27:31:22 Teddy Bullard wanted me to take over from him when he retired in c1971 when I was 29; I didn't want the job and didn't apply but told by Bullard that he would not suggest me as Assistant Director of Research if I didn't apply; I did apply but was thankfully not elected to his post; Xavier Le Pichon was one of the electors and had pressed for me to be appointed but I was thought to be far too young; Jack Jacobs came but was not nearly as well known as I was; tried to be supportive but when I was elected to the Royal Society relations became strained; he refused to support me for promotion to a readership until I really insisted; finally got a readership in the late 1970's; because plate tectonics had had such an impact right across earth sciences meant that the historical divisions between the different bits, geophysics, geology, mineralogy and petrology, which at that stage were three completely separate departments, really made no sense; the first of the three professorships to become vacant was in mineralogy and petrology; it was offered to somebody in the States called Joe Smith who was British by birth, at Chicago; he came over and looked at the place; that department was moribund and in 1978-9 didn't even have any graduate students; it had originally been set up by Tilley who was a real tyrant; Joe Smith turned it down; offered it to Ron Oxbrugh

 who was a lecturer at Oxford who had never worked in mineralogy or petrology and would only have made sense if the departments were put together; he came and talked to me and I said I would support him; Ron accepted the job and we put the three departments together despite Jack's opposition; we had no undergraduate teaching but with tremendous effort got two lectures on plate tectonics into the syllabus by 1978, then went on sabbatical and those two lectures were removed; when we amalgamated then we did have undergraduates and lectures reinstated; quite enjoy teaching but feel I'm getting stale having to lecture on things that only I have research experience on; would like to do new things and recently did so on Tibet

38:43:06 As retirement rules have changed will go on until I am 70; I've had a very strange career to go from being unknown to the person who everybody invites to international conferences at 25 I found really very strange; as a result of that have been given all kinds of prizes and honours which is very nice but seems irrelevant; the large sums of money have made a difference but what I value is being taken seriously by the people who are now actively doing research; the subject has got harder and graduate students are more apprentices than they used to be; now to be taken seriously by young post-doctorates is what I really value and I work with a lot; have always found it extremely easy to work with people both younger and older than myself; have probably had about 30 graduate students and a lot of them have done extremely well; James Jackson who was last year elected to the Royal Society; Philip England who was a post-doctorate student is now head of the department at Oxford, also fellow of the Royal Society

42:42:00 Work has had an influence outside UK as once we started working on the continents, on principle, we always try to work with scientists in those countries on an equal footing and what we particularly like to do is to bring the bright young to Cambridge to do PhD's here on those topics and then hopefully they go back to their countries of origin and have an impact on research there; this did not work in Greece as you cannot get a job in a Greek university unless you have done a PhD with a Greek professor; other sadness was with Iran where we had three graduate students before the revolution who went back full of enthusiasm but found it became impossible to have ordinary middle class existence once the mullahs came to power, so they all left for North America; we are working with Iran but am nervous about the future; James Jackson worked with Iranian and is likely to take over the department next year; another colleague, Keith Priestley, also works with the Iranians but also with Indians and Chinese; we have had various Chinese graduate students who have gone back and we have close connections with; a Mongolian student has also returned and opened up research there to the West

47:50:14 Undercurrent of my life has been the exploitation of the understanding that the physicists have of all kinds of processes in novel areas; that will continue to be a huge area of fundamental research into the future; the area that is rising is molecular biology and that clearly is physics though not yet thought of as such; my advice to anyone would be to start off doing maths and physics as an undergraduate and then to look around other sciences for applications