JOHN SUPPE CONTINUES

TAIWAN-PRINCETON CONNECTION

by Bill Bonini for Princeton Geosciences alumni newsletter

John Suppe, Blair Professor of Geology, has recently resigned after 36 years on the Geosciences faculty to take a special position as Distinguished Chair Research Professor at the National Taiwan University in Taipei.

The citation for the Wilbur Cross Medal received by Suppe from Yale this Fall said, "He is author or editor of five books, including the highly successful textbook, Principles of Structural Geology. He is considered the world leader in the study of fundamental forces that act to deform the upper portion of the Earth's crust, concentrating on the role of large earthquakes and the development of new techniques for imaging active faults. He was the first to recognize the large-scale structure of the modern collision zone on the island of Taiwan, one of the most rapidly changing landscapes in the world. Taiwan was unknown to much of the geologic community until Suppe started publishing on the tectonic evolution of the area in the 1980s. That region is now one of the most intensely studied mountain belts in the world." He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995, and Yale professor Mark Brandon says, "John is one of the most influential and respected geologists in the world."

Suppe at the base of a 6600m peak in the Kunlunshan Mountains, 90 km west of Kashgaar, China, August 2001.

The National Taiwan University (NTU) was recently ranked as the top Chinese university in a world ranking of universities. The hiring of Suppe is part of an aggressive effort in the Far East, especially Taiwan, Singapore and China, to enhance the worldwide stature of their universities. (See "Making it Big in Taiwan," Nature vol. 446, p. 695-697, 5 April 2007). Suppe is building a research group focused on problems of deformation of the crust at various scales. In recent years, Taiwan has become an important international research focus in active tectonics. This is particularly so after the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake, which was perhaps the best-instrumented large crustal earthquake in history. Geologists and geophysicists from the USA, France, the UK and Japan are especially active in Taiwan.

This move of Suppe to Taiwan represents a continuation of a long association between Taiwan and Princeton. Within a few years of arriving in Princeton, he began working on various aspects of the ongoing arc-continent collision in Taiwan. In 1978-79 he spent a sabbatical year in Taiwan supported by the Guggenheim Foundation. During that year Suppe first applied critical-taper wedge mechanics to the western Taiwan thrust belt in collaboration with Dan Davis '78, whose work later became the citation classic of Davis, Suppe & Dahlen, published in JGR in 1983. During that same sabbatical Suppe developed the well-known fault-bend folding theory, inspired by Taiwan data. Most recently, he has been working on the weak-fault problem using a new form of critical-taper wedge mechanics with data from Taiwan (see December 2007 issue of Geology).

Suppe in 1978 in Taiwan, not realizing that he is standing at the epicenter of the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake.

A number of Princeton undergraduates and graduate students have done theses concerning Taiwan tectonics, including PhD students Jay Namson *82, Michael Covey *84, Beckey Dorsey *89, Terrence Barr *90, Ching-Hua Lo *90, Sara Carena *03, and Li-Fan Yue *07. This research was not supervised only by Suppe, but by faculty members Tony Dahlen, faculty, 1970-07; Franklin Van Houten *41 faculty, 1946-84; Tullis Onstott *81; Robert Stallard, faculty, 1981-88; and Neil Lundberg, faculty, 1984-90. The Princeton Department had a grand field trip to Taiwan in the mid-1980s, during which some of the students are rumored to have engaged in mud wrestling in an active mud volcano.

John Suppe was twice visiting professor in the Geosciences Department of the National Taiwan University (1978-79, 1983-84). Three other professors of the NTU Department are Princetonians: Ching-Hua Lo *90, also the NTU Dean of Science and the one responsible for enticing Suppe to move to Taipei; Shu-Huei Hung, postdoc 1998-2001; and Li-Hung Lin *03. Another Princetonian in Taiwan is Li Zhao *95, a seismologist at the Academia Sinica.

Suppe will continue to spend a few months a year in Princeton, so the long association continues. He invites Princetonians to stop by when they are in the Far East. The Board of Trustees in its most recent meeting named him Blair Professor of Geology Emeritus because of his long service to Princeton, but he is in no way retired.