Robert Coe was awarded the 2016 John Adam Fleming Medal at the AGU Fall Meeting Honors Ceremony, held on 14 December 2016 in San Francisco, Calif. The medal is for “original research and technical leadership in geomagnetism, atmospheric electricity, aeronomy, space physics, and/or related sciences.”  

Robert Coe is a ­­­world-­­­renowned scientist who has made significant contributions to several broad areas of geomagnetism and paleomagnetism. His scientific accomplishments have illuminated the research of many who work in areas ranging from geomagnetism and paleomagnetism to volcanology, geochemistry and petrology, and tectonophysics.

Coe is one of the pioneers in paleointensity determination. In the 1960–1970s Coe singularly developed a means of more accurately measuring the intensity of the ancient field recorded in rocks. This method, which bears his name, is now the gold standard of all paleointensity methods. Along the way he has produced many of the most reliable paleointensity values that we have. His most cited Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) papers are still the bedrock references for anyone attempting to do the paleointensity work.

Coe has made significant contributions to the understanding of geomagnetic secular variation, including magnetic field reversals. Coe was one of the first paleomagnetists to use and realize the potential of geodynamo models as a tool to better understand observations of geomagnetic field behavior. He has teamed up with other ­­world-­class scientists, such as Gary Glatzmaier and Peter Olsen, to combine paleomagnetic results with dynamo theory. For example, he and his colleagues have shown that the reversal rate of the geomagnetic field can be significantly affected by lateral changes in the heat flux through the ­­core-­mantle boundary.

Coe has also made seminal contributions to the studies of tectonics. He and his students have carried out paleomagnetic projects in various tectonic settings, over scales ranging from small fault blocks to cratons. These works have led to new ideas about how ­­large-­scale continental collisions occur.

In the area of service, Coe’s record is every bit as exemplary as it is in research and teaching. He has served as editor for JGR and the Journal of Geomagnetism and Geoelectricity, as president of AGU’s Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism section, and as a member of numerous national and international science panels and advisory boards.

Coe’s unwavering generosity in sharing his time, knowledge, and other resources extends to both colleagues and students. He has set a standard of integrity and professional commitment that is well respected in our community. In recognition of his outstanding contributions to the development of paleointensity methodology and scientific achievements in tectonophysics and geodynamo research, Coe is thoroughly deserving of the John Adam Fleming Medal.

—Rixiang Zhu, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Many thanks to AGU for this honor, to my students and many colleagues around the world for their friendship and collaboration, and to my wife and children for their support and inspiration. Looking back 60 years to when I first entered college, I realize that I’ve been very fortunate. I had no idea I would become a scientist, only that I was searching for understanding and meaning deeper than myself. After a year’s sampling of general education requirements, I was drawn toward the demonstrable truth found in the natural sciences. Eventually my love of the outdoors, mountaineering, and long discussions with my roommate about geologic time led to geophysics. I was privileged to have some truly inspiring teachers and mentors, including William Lipscomb in chemistry and Francis Birch in geophysics as an undergraduate and John Verhoogen, Allan Cox, and Mervyn Paterson as a doctoral student and postdoc. Given license to choose whatever interested me for my thesis, I hit on the ­­little-­studied problem of deciphering the ancient magnetic field intensity hidden in the paleomagnetism of rocks. I managed to make significant progress, but even more satisfying has been to witness the huge strides made since by many younger colleagues. After a formative postdoctoral year in Australia, I again met with great fortune by being offered a job at the new University of California campus in Santa Cruz. With it came the opportunity to help start a department of Earth sciences from scratch in an amazingly beautiful setting, in a culture that emphasized equally the instruction of undergraduate and graduate students, and with complete free rein to pursue my intellectual interests. I made some rewarding excursions into deformation experiments and phase changes in minerals, but once again the many varied aspects of paleomagnetism eventually captured most of my attention, with its combination of fieldwork, lab measurements, and theory. For my entire career, and now into retirement, I’ve been able to investigate the paleointensity, secular variation, excursions, and reversals of the geomagnetic field and tectonics and magnetostratigraphy in regions around the world including North America, Alaska, China, Siberia, and Papua New Guinea. What an incredible privilege it has been to be given the freedom to search for truth and beauty in the natural world, wherever my curiosity led me. Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. —Keats, 1819 —Robert Coe, Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, University of California, Santa Cruz

Robert S. Coe received the 2007 William Gilbert Award at the 2007 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes outstanding and unselfish work in magnetism of Earth materials and of the Earth and planets.  

Like everyone in this room, I suspect, I am very pleased that our section has chosen to honor Rob Coe with the William Gilbert Award for some four decades of scientific achievement, leadership, and good cheer in the field of geomagnetism and paleomagnetism. There is time to mention just a few of the highlights of Rob’s (ongoing!) scientific career. Rob has contributed immensely to the technique, originally developed by the Thelliers, used to infer the strength of the ancient geomagnetic field from the magnetizations of rocks. As one author of the many letters of support put it, Rob’s pioneering papers on the double-heating paleointensity technique “set the direction of the entire field of paleomagnetism and must be counted in the top ten list of paleomagnetic papers ever written.” Rob and an international team of colleagues have studied the Steens Mountain lavas—likely the best volcanic record of a geomagnetic polarity reversal on Earth—to produce a detailed account of intensity variation, directional rebounds, and impulsive field change occurring at (perhaps!) degrees per day sorts of rates. Most recently, Rob and Gary Glatzmaier demonstrated from geodynamo simulations that lateral variations in lower mantle temperature may well give rise to paleomagnetic observables, such as preferred paths for transitional poles or changes in reversal frequency. Rob has made his mark in tectonics problems as well, through paleomagnetic studies of displaced terranes in localities stretching from Papua New Guinea to Alaska, from Kazakhstan to California. His paleomagnetic work in Asia led to, among other things, a model for the accretion of the north and south China blocks to Siberia, published in Nature in 1987 and still widely accepted. In addition to his scientific contributions, Rob has been generous in his service to the Earth sciences community. He has served on numerous national and international committees and panels and been an editor for the JGG and JGR. He was president of the Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism (GP) section at a time when there some uncertainty about the status of small sections such as ours in the Union’s structure. Rob’s strong advocacy at AGU Council meetings helped GP to thrive and remain autonomous.

Along with all of the above, it is Rob’s infectious enjoyment of all things GP, his successful mentoring of young researchers, and his pleasant and accessible nature that make him such a worthy candidate for GP’s Gilbert Award. It is with great pleasure, Rob, that we, the GP section, present to you the 2007 Gilbert Award.

—Scott W. Bogue, Occidental College, Los Angeles, Calif.

Thank you, Scott, and all of my students and many colleagues who have helped make scientific research so interesting and enjoyable. Receiving an award named for William Gilbert is especially meaningful to me, as he is a personal hero and his contributions to fields as disparate as medicine and magnetism epitomize the spirit of broad inquiry that characterizes our GP section. The privilege of working in a science founded on discoveries by scientists such as Gilbert, Gauss, and Néel has been both an inspiring and humbling experience. I was fortunate to encounter great teachers and mentors, such as Francis Birch, whose undergraduate course introduced me to how physics helps us understand Earth; John Verhoogen, whose extraordinary intellect and lucidity inspired me in graduate school and remains an inspiration today; Allan Cox and Richard Doell, who communicated the exhilaration of pure research during the race to develop the geomagnetic polarity timescale; and Mervyn Paterson, who opened my eyes to sophisticated experimental techniques in a completely different area of research. My good fortune continued when I was hired at UC Santa Cruz by Aaron Waters, whose astuteness in laying the foundation of our department fostered the stimulating, collegial environment that has kept me happily in Earth science at Santa Cruz for my entire career. During this time I have enjoyed incredible freedom to explore a wide range of subjects, all curiosity-driven and a couple of them justifiably deemed esoteric. A great pleasure has been witnessing some of these areas, such as paleointensity and Asian tectonics, take off and be carried farther forward by younger colleagues and students than I would have thought possible. I spent most of my undergraduate years learning chemistry and physics, but love of the outdoors and a roommate in geology gradually turned me toward studying the Earth. At first I was most attracted to examining natural processes for their own sake. It took a number of years to become persuaded that we mere mortals could develop a significant understanding of how our planet has operated and the broad sweep of geologic history. This is still what I find most remarkable and fascinating about our science: peering into the past using the rock record, lab and numerical experiments, imagination, and reason to retrieve insights about the Earth from the depths of time. —Robert S. Coe, University of California, Santa Cruz