Edward A. Irving

Education Irving was born on 25 May 1925 and raised in Colne in the Pennine Hills of east Lancashire, England. recently designed by Patrick Blackett, to analyze the magnetic directions imparted to rocks by their iron minerals. He found large discrepancies between the directions of the present magnetic field direction and those recorded in Precambrian rock in the highlands of Scotland. He surmised the only explanation could be that Scotland had shifted relative to the geomagnetic pole. Irving also determined that India had moved northward by 6000 km and rotated by more than . These results confirmed the predictions Alfred Wegener had put forth in his theory of continental drift in 1912.

In 1954, Irving attempted to obtain a PhD for his graduate work. Unfortunately the field was so new that his doctoral examiners were not familiar enough with the subject matter to recognize his research achievements. They refused to give him the degree. Not having a PhD did not stop him from obtaining a position as a research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Career For the next ten years Irving studied Australia's ancient latitudes and published around 30 papers. He was able to demonstrate the continent's southward movement since the Permian period. In 1965, he submitted some of his papers to Cambridge and obtained a ScD, the highest earned degree at the time.

Selected works Irving published a total of 205 papers, the Walter H. Bucher Medal by the American Geophysical Union (1979), the J. Tuzo Wilson Medal by the Canadian Geophysical Union (1984), the Arthur L. Day Medal by the Geological Society of America (1997), and the Wollaston Medal by the Geological Society of London (2005). He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) in 1973 and of the Royal Society of London (FRS) in 1979. In 1998 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 2003 invited to be a Member of the Order of Canada. He received an honorary degree from the University of Victoria in 1999.