Peter John Wyllie facts for kids
Peter John Wyllie (born 8 February 1930, in London, England) is a famous British scientist who studies rocks. He is known as a petrologist, which means he learns about how rocks form, what they are made of, and how they change over time.
Professor Wyllie spent many years teaching and researching at top universities. He is especially well-known for helping us understand how magma (molten rock deep inside the Earth) behaves. He did many experiments to see how magma forms and moves, especially when it has gases, called volatiles, mixed in.
In the 1970s, Peter Wyllie wrote two very popular textbooks: The Dynamic Earth (1971) and The Way the Earth Works (1976). These books helped explain new ideas about magma and plate tectonics, which is the theory that Earth's outer shell is made of huge moving plates. He also helped write about earth sciences for the Encyclopædia Britannica, a very famous encyclopedia. From 1995 to 1999, he was the President of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG), an important international group that studies Earth.
Awards and Honours
Throughout his career, Peter Wyllie received many important awards and honours for his amazing work in geology:
- Polar Medal, 1954
- National Academy of Sciences, USA, 1981
- Wollaston Medal, Geological Society of London, 1982
- Fellow of the Royal Society, London, 1984
- Roebling Medal, Mineralogical Society of America, 2001
