PRECAMBRIAN VAN DER VOO: A BRIEF HISTORY

Rob Van der Voo’s career in paleomagnetism spans nearly 6 decades. In that time, Rob has tackled many challenging topics. By the time I started graduate school in the summer of 1988, Rob had already written about ~1/3 of his papers (about 10) on Precambrian rocks. My career began at Michigan with Rob’s encouragement to study the Kisii lavas of western Kenya in an effort to test the Precambrian supercontinent hypothesis forwarded by John D.A. Piper. That project started my own career studying Precambrian plate tectonics. Interestingly, that original foray into Precambrian paleomagnetism is yet to be published. According to google scholar, Rob’s oldest publication on the Precambrian was with French and colleagues in 1977 (Colorado Intrusives). The topics of those ‘early’ papers were based on field studies in Armorica, China and Laurentia. His first dalliance with supercontinents was in 1984 with Chad McCabe and Chris Scotese (Was North American part of an Eocambrian Supercontinent?). In the past 25+ years, Rob has written, or co-authored, another two dozen+ papers focused solely on Precambrian topics. Those papers are wide-ranging and deal with supercontinents, the structure of the Precambrian magnetic field, climates in the Precambrian and geodynamics of the Precambrian. His impact can be partially captured by looking through his citation index. As of August 2015, just over 17% of Rob’s citations are from his papers on the Precambrian including his 3^rd most highly cited paper (1996, Earth Science Reviews Torsvik et al., nearly 700 citations). 25% of his top 20 most cited papers are on Precambrian topics and 6 papers on the Precambrian have more than 100 citations. In this presentation, I review Rob’s contributions to Precambrian paleomagnetism and myriad issues related to the Precambrian and some of our groups recent work on the Precambrian of India.