Stanley Keith Runcorn

Stanley Keith Runcorn was an English geophysicist, born in 1922 in Southport, Lancashire, and died in 1995 in San Diego, California. In the late 1940s and 1950s he helped establish the field of paleomagnetism, the study of the fossil magnetism preserved in ancient rocks, and his analyses of the apparent wander of Earth's magnetic pole recorded in European rocks provided key early evidence supporting continental drift. He led the physics department at King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, later part of the University of Newcastle, and remained active in planetary magnetism research into his later career at the University of Alaska.