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On the Trail of Professor Nick Rast,
Continued......
From our meeting in Patten Maine our friendship and collaboration in research and publication matured over the intervening years. The first project on which Nick and I collaborated was also the First International Penrose Conference of The Geological Society of America that was held at the Keddy Motel in St. John, New Brunswick in the summer of 1975. Marshall Kay in 1967 had previously organized The Gander Conference, an “International Conference on Stratigraphy and Structure Bearing on the Origin of the North Atlantic Ocean.” Papers presented at that Conference in Newfoundland are contained in the 1100 pages of “North Atlantic—Geology and Continental Drift.” A special feature of that gathering was the several day Trans-Newfoundland Field Trip led by Hank Williams. Another, was that I got to meet many of Nicks friends and colleagues, including former students from Britain, Ireland and the continent
This photo, taken on a field trip at the Hank Williams Conference in 1996, features those who were participants in the First Trans-Newfoundland Trip nearly 30 years before. From left to right they are Professors Tony Harris, University of Liverpool, Dr. Bill Poole, Geological Survey of Canada, Jim Skehan, S.J., Hank Williams, Memorial University; John Dewey, recently of Oxford University, now a faculty member at the University of California at Davis; and Stewart McKerrow, Oxford University.
As it turned out when Nick and I planned the New Brunswick Penrose Conference, entitled “Paleozoic Margins of Paleo-American and EurAfrican Plates” about half of the participants were from Ireland, the British Isles and Europe. It is important to remember that the 1960s had been an exhilarating period in which a solid scientific basis for plate tectonics had been established. However, it was far from being universally accepted and was met with much skepticism at the time. With the publication of papers by Dewey and Bird in 1970 and others plate tectonics emerged, like amphibians in mid-Paleozoic time, from the oceans and took initial and, in many quarters, tentative steps in being applied to the continents. However, plate tectonics got into high gear in the 1980’s and beyond.
Twenty-six years after one of his many landmark papers on plate tectonic principles, John Dewey is demonstrating for Hank Williams at the Williams Field Conference how compressive plate collisions really happened. Declan DePaor with some amusement, if not skepticism, looks on from a distance.
Professor John Sutton, a senior geologist who carried out distinguished research in the Highlands of Scotland and elsewhere, with Professor Rast during participation in our 1975 Penrose Conference. John Sutton was present in 1960 when I gave my first paper on Mantled Gneiss domes of Vermont at the International Geological Congress in Copenhagen, After my presentation I was shaking in my boots when the great John Sutton got up to ask me a question.
So Nick Rast appeared on the North American scene in 1972 where he came to play an an increasingly important role in importing newly rediscovered methods of structural geology and their application to regional geology and the evolving story of plate tectonics as related to continental tectonics. Within a short tme in the 1970’s and 1980’s Nick played a significant and wide ranging role in Canada and also in the United States not only in research but as a member of influential committes and working groups.
In 1979 Nick and Andrew Rast discuss and celebrate the joys of fatherhood and childhood on the sands of New River Beach, coastal New Brunswick. Take note of Andrew’s impish smile, the same expression he wore on another occasion in Newport, R.I., when he was three years old. I discovered him emptying the remains of martini glasses after his elders had sat down to dinner. I said, “Andrew, what are you drinking? “ With the same delightful, impish grin, he replied, “Gin.”
