Drummond Hoyle Matthews

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Matthews, Drummond Hoyle (1931–97) D. H. Matthews was one of the British geophysicists who contributed most significantly to the development of plate tectonic theory and later to the study of the deeper parts of the continental crust. After National Service in the Royal Navy and graduating at Cambridge, he joined the Falklands Islands Dependencies Survey (now the British Antarctic Survey). He was engaged in field work in the Antarctic from 1955 to 1957 and while there became interested in the concept of continental drift. At that time the concept was regarded rather as geological heresy in Europe and North America, but the supporting geological evidence for the idea was more in favour in the southern hemisphere. Matthews returned to Cambridge in 1958 to study basalts dredged from the deep sea-floor of the eastern North Atlantic.

This work was extended in a series of marine geophysics research cruises into the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean. The Indian Ocean yielded data that led him with F. J. Vine in 1963 to explain the magnetic stripes that cover the ocean floor as injections at the mid-oceanic ridges and by the periodic reversals of the Earth's magnetic field. From this developed the paradigm of the impermanence of the ocean floor and the migration of continents, a concept adroitly and rapidly developed by Matthews and his graduate students.

In the 1970s Matthews and D. J. Blundell initiated the British Institutions Reflection Profiling Syndicate (BIRPS) to study deep crustal continental seismology. This highly successful project carried out seismic profiling on and around the British Isles, reaching depths of over 50 miles, and it revealed much of the deep foundations upon which the structures seen on the geological map are founded.

D. L. Dineley