Dr. Lynn Sykes has been involved in the identification of underground nuclear testing and the long battle to obtain a total ban on nuclear testing for the past fifty-five years. In 1986 the Federation of American Scientists presented Sykes and two colleagues with its Public Service Award for “Leadership in Applying Seismology to the Banning of Nuclear Tests, Creative in Utilizing Their Science, Effective in Educating Their Nation, Fearless and Tenacious in Struggles within the Bureaucracy.” He also received the John Wesley Powell Award from the U.S. Geological Survey for work on U.S. earthquakes in 1991.
Sykes became a member of the Staff of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in 1965, remaining there until 2005 when he retired as a professor emeritus. After graduating with bachelors and masters degrees in geology from MIT in 1960, he earned his Ph.D. in seismology at Columbia University in 1965. He became a faculty member in 1968 and then the Higgins Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
In 1974, as a leading seismologist, Dr. Sykes was invited to become a member of the U.S. delegation that traveled to the Soviet Union to negotiate the Threshold Test Ban Treaty. He testified before the U.S. Congress numerous times as an expert on nuclear-test verification, a subject with large scientific and public policy components.
Sykes, along with Walter Pitman of Lamont and Jason Morgan of Princeton, showed unequivocally that the Earth’s outermost layers consist of nearly rigid plates that move over the surface. Referred to as plate tectonics, it revolutionized the study of the Earth’s crust, providing an understanding of the formation of mountain ranges, the drifting of the continents, volcanoes, earthquakes, ocean basins, mid-oceanic ridges, deep sea trenches, the evolution of climate, and the distribution of natural resources. Sykes’ research illustrated the importance of great faults that intersect mid-ocean ridges in accommodating plate motion and on underthrusting of plates at subduction zones. Dr. Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist and President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, called the discovery of plate tectonics “one of the top ten scientific accomplishments of the second half of the 20th century.” The three scientists were awarded the prestigious Vetlesen Prize in 2000.
Sykes is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and of the American Geophysical Union, which honored him with its Macelwane and Bucher awards. He also received the Seismological Society of America’s most prestigious H. F. Reid medal. While officially retired, he continues his research on earthquakes and nuclear explosions and has been hard at work writing this book and one on plate tectonics and great earthquakes.