Dennis V. Kent

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, New York~Adjunct Senior Research Scientist, and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, New Jersey~Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Institute for Scientific Information's top ten most cited geoscientists, 1991- 2001. Author or co-author of more than 300 papers. Noted for work on geologic timescales, paleogeography, and paleoclimatology, using paleomagnetism as his principal tool. Recent papers have dealt with pCO2 perturbations, paleosecular variations, human migrations, inclination error, and true polar wander. In collaboration with Paul Olsen, planned and carried out the drilling of the entire Newark rift basin of New Jersey, producing a complete magnetic stratigraphy of the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic. Magnetic reversals have been dated by astronomical climate cycles, recently corroborated by U-Pb dating in cores from scientific drilling of the the Chinle Formation in Petrified Forest National Park, and the resulting timescale has been used as a standard to correlate and date Triassic strata in Eastern North America and globally.~