Ron G. Mason

Who is Ron G. Mason?

Ronald George Mason was one of the oceanographers whose pioneering Cold War geomagnetic survey work lead to the discovery of magnetic stripes around the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Mason received his doctorate in geophysics as Imperial College, London, in 1947, where he was appointed to the Chair of Pure Geophysics twenty years later. Ron Mason became head of Imperial College's Geophysics Department in 1977. Mason briefly worked at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, where he was responsible for collecting magnetic data from the ocean crust which later was interpreted as containing field reversals that were used by Canadian geophysicist Lawrence Morley to prove seafloor spreading and plate tectonics. During the 1980s, Mason pioneered extremely accurate measuring techniques of the Earth's crust to further confirm plate tectonic movements.