Peter John Wyllie facts for kids
Peter John Wyllie, born in London, England, on February 8, 1930, is a famous British scientist. He is a petrologist, which means he studies rocks and how they form deep inside the Earth.
He taught geology at the California Institute of Technology from 1983 until he retired in 1999. Before that, he worked at several other universities. These included the University of St Andrews in Scotland, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Leeds, and the University of Chicago.
Professor Wyllie is well-known for helping us understand magmatism. This is the process where hot, melted rock (called magma) moves around inside the Earth. He did many experiments to study how magma and gases behave under extreme heat and pressure.
In the 1970s, he wrote two important textbooks. These books, The Dynamic Earth (1971) and The Way the Earth Works (1976), explained new ideas. They combined his work on magma with the exciting discoveries about plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the theory that Earth's outer layer is made of large moving plates.
He also helped write about earth sciences for the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was the President of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) from 1995 to 1999. This is a big international group for Earth scientists.
Awards and Honours
Peter John Wyllie has received many important awards for his work:
- 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
