George A. Thompson

George A. Thompson was an American geologist and geophysicist who lived from 1919 to 2017 and spent his career at Stanford University, chairing its geophysics department from 1967 to 1986 and its geology department from 1979 to 1982, and serving as dean of the School of Earth Sciences from 1987 to 1989. With Manik Talwani in 1964 he related gravity data to the thin crust underlying the western United States, and in the 1980s he investigated deep crustal and upper mantle structure, showing how layered mafic and ultramafic rocks produce discontinuous seismic reflections at the Moho. He served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1997 and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received the Penrose Medal in 2008.