AOGS Axford Medal Award Recipient
2017 - 2018
Professor Paul Tapponnier
The Asia and Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS) is honored to present the2018 Axford Medal to Professor Paul Tapponnier, Nanyang Technological University,
for his ground breaking contributions to “Continental collision tectonics andHimalayan earthquake faulting”, and for providing unprecedented leadership indeveloping the field of active tectonics.
Professor Tapponnier is one of the foremost scientists of his generation inContinental Neo-Tectonics. He was the first to recognise the full potential of satellite
imagery to study faulting and tectonic processes on a large-scale. His mapping, using
the very first Landsat images, of large active strike-slip faults in and around Tibet,
implied that they accommodated significant shortening between India and Asia. Thisrevolutionised the understanding of collision tectonics. It contributed to provide amechanical framework for deformation across most of eastern Asian. That
fundamental discovery was later confirmed by fieldwork and supported by innovative
analogue modelling.
Paul Tapponnier graduated from the Ecole des Mines de Paris, and started hisresearch career at the University of Montpellier and at MIT, wherefrom he publishedhis first influential papers in the mid-seventies. That early work suggested that India
had pushed eastern and northern China eastwards, along several left-lateral faults.
Such east-directed extrusion had also led to extension along the Shansi and Baikal rift.
That research, in collaboration with P. Molnar, had worldwide impact.
In 1979, P. Tapponnier joined the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris where
he created the Laboratory of “Tectonics, mechanics of the Lithosphere”, a school
within which he trained nearly 30 PhD students, many of which now brilliant
academics in France and abroad. The group contributed to fundamental discoveries ina range of Tertiary tectonic problems, by combining in depth field studies withlaboratory experiments. Plasticine models, whose results are now shown in manyhigh-school/graduate text-books, suggested a broader extent of the Indian collisioneffects, including the westwards expulsion of Sunda and openings of the South China
and Andaman sees. This triggered field studies that showed that the Ailao Shan-Red
River shear zone had been an Oligo-Miocene plate-boundary between Sunda andSouth China, with one of the largest strike-slip displacements known (700 km).
Concurrently, a new seafloor spreading reconstruction of magnetic anomalies acrossthe South China Sea, confirmed the intimate link between that spreading and slip
along the Red River fault, in plate-tectonics’ fashion. Such combined onshore/offshore
research yielded a comprehensive model of Southeast Asia’s Tertiary Tectonics.
P. Tapponnier and colleagues’ 20 years-long collaboration with Chinese
geologists and geophysicists across Tibet led to first-order quantification of presentday, high altitude normal faulting perpendicular to the Himalayas, and to thehypothesis of a stepwise northward growth of the plateau since the early days of thecollision. They were also among the first to extensively use cosmogenic isotopes todate, and correlate with climate change back to 180 ka, faulted geomorphic markers,which helped develop the field of Morpho-Tectonics, and extend deformation rates
measurements to time-scales older than the Holocene.
Outside East Asia, P. Tapponnier and his students/colleagues contributed toclarify rift propagation between Arabia and Africa, earthquake return times andTsunami sourcing along the Yammouneh fault and the offshore Mt. Lebanon Thrust,and active normal faulting within the Caribbean Arc, consistent with extensional blockrotations along a convergent plate boundary.
In 2009, P.Tapponnier moved to Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University,where he actively contributed to develop the Tectonic Group within the newly created
Earth Observatory of Singapore, now one of the best academic centres worldwide inearthquake research. In the past decade there, he and his PostDocs found the hitherto
unrecognized surface ruptures of the great, 1934 and 1950 Himalayan earthquakes, atthe front of the Siwaliks in Nepal and of the Abor-Mishmi hills in Assam, respectively.
Building on the approach he had kept developing to study the active earth, he also led
the way in using ever higher resolution imagery, up to present-day terrestrial andairborne LiDAR surveys, in order to quantify superficial fault offsets of only a few
centimetres.
Professor Tapponnier is a fascinating geologist in the field and in the lab, with anencyclopaedic knowledge, fed by months-long expeditions to different parts of theworld. I was fortunate to work with him on seismic data acquired after the 2004
Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, for which he provided key insights, based on hisexperience in studying Megathrust on land. Well before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake,
he contributed to recognize the importance of “Popup” thrusting at the front ofaccretionary prisms in generating large tsunamis.
His contributions have been acknowledged by various awards and honours,
including: Alfred Wegener Medal, European Union of Geosciences, 1985; Fellow ofAmerican Geophysical Union, 1994; Friendship Medal, China, 1998; Lyell Medal,
Geological Society of London, 2001; Foreign Member of the US Academy of Sciences,
2005; Member of the French Academy of Sciences, 2005.
Given his pioneering, continuing research across Asia, the 2018 AOGS Axford
Medal is a particularly well deserved distinction.
Professor Satish Singh (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris)