The Francis Birch Lecture is an annual lecture constituting the highest honor in tectonophysics from the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The lecture is named in honor of Francis Birch, famous as a pioneer of solid Earth geophysics. The Birch Lecture, inaugurated in 1992, is presented at the AGU autumn meeting by a recipient whose research has significantly contributed to tectonophysics "through observations, experiments, the development of analytical methods or modeling."[1] The Birch Lecture forms part of the AGU's Bowie Lecture Series, established in 1989. The AGU's highest honor is the William Bowie Medal, named in honor of William Bowie — the AGU's first president[2] with an international reputation in geodesy, geophysics, and engineering.[3]
The AGU invites the Birch Lecturer and does not accept nominations for the Birch Lectureship.[2]
| Name | Institution | Year | Lecture Title | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thomas A. Herring | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 1992 | Space Geodetic Studies of the Earth's Interior | |
| James R. Rice | Harvard University | 1993 | Problems in Earthquake Source Mechanics | |
| no lecture | 1994 | |||
| Harry W. Green II | University of California, Davis | 1995 | The mechanisms of Deep Earthquakes | |
| Ross S. Stein | United States Geological Survey, Menlo Park | 1996 | Stress Triggering of Earthquakes, or Playing Prediction with Less than Half a Deck | |
| Donald W. Forsyth | Brown University | 1997 | Melting and Mantle Flow Beneath Mid-Ocean Ridges: Constraints from the Seismological Component of the MELT Experiment | |
| Richard G. Gordon | Northwestern University | 1998 | The Plate Tectonic Approximation: Plate Nonrigidity and Diffuse Plate Boundaries | |
| Paul Tapponnier | Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris | 1999 | Localisation and Propagation of Lithospheric Shear Zones Behaviour of the Continental Mantle During Collision, and Growth of the Tibet Plateau | |
| no lecture | 2000 | |||
| Louise H. Kellogg | University of California, Davis | 2001 | Structure and Dynamics An Earth Odyssey | |
| Gerald Schubert | UCLA | 2002 | A Geophysicist's Journey to the Center of the Earth | |
| W. Roger Buck | Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) | 2003 | Splitting, Stretching and Spreading of Lithosphere | |
| Shun-Ichiro Karato | Yale University | 2004 | Where on Earth is the Ocean? | |
| Leigh Royden | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 2005 | Uplift and Evolution of the Eastern Tibetan Plateau | |
| Claude P. Jaupart | Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris | 2006 | The Deep Roots of Continents | |
| Jean-Philippe Avouac | California Institute of Technology | 2007 | Mountain Ranges and the Deformation of Continents | |
| Suzanne M. Carbotte | Columbia University | 2008 | Focusing in on Mid-Ocean Ridge Segmentation | |
| Jerry X. Mitrovica | Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University | 2009 | A Eulogy for Eustasy | |
| Wang-Ping Chen | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | 2010 | Global Tectonics Ties Quakes, Rocks, and Volatiles in the Mantle Transition Zone | |
| Michael Manga | University of California, Berkeley | 2011 | Hydrological Response to Earthquakes (and was the LUSI Mud Volcano Eruption in Indonesia Caused by an Earthquake?) | |
| Richard H. Sibson | Otago University | 2012 | Inside a Crustal Earthquake — Signals from Field Geology | |
| Roland Bürgmann | University of California, Berkeley | 2013 | M9 Megathrust Earthquake Cycles | |
| David Bercovici | Yale University | 2014 | On the Origin of Plate Tectonics | |
| Kelin Wang | Pacific Geoscience Center, Geological Survey of Canada | 2015 | Subduction Faults as We See Them in the 21st Century | |
| Maya Tolstoy | Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory | 2016 | Taking the Pulse of Mid-Ocean Ridges | |
| Greg Hirth | Brown University | 2017 | Lithospheric Strength and Stress State: Persistent Challenges and New Directions in Geodynamics | |
| Carolina R. Lithgow-Bertelloni | UCLA | 2018 | The inevitable control of Earth's deep interior on the surface | |
| Claudio Faccenna | Roma Tre University / University of Texas at Austin | 2019 | Shaping the Mediterranean from the inside out | |
| Christie D. Rowe | McGill University | 2020 | Walking the seismogenic zone: A field geology perspective on earthquakes | |
| Taras Gerya | ETH Zürich | 2021 | New geodynamic processes and phenomena discovered with numerical modeling: examples and recipes | |
| Demian M. Saffer | University of Texas Institute for Geophysics | 2022 | Fluids, Friction, and the Offshore Subduction Megathrust | |
| Philippe Agard | Sorbonne Université | 2023 |