Dr. John E. “Jed” Damuth

John E. “Jed” Damuth received a Ph.D. in marine geology from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory (now Lamont-Doherty Earth Obs.).  He then joined the staff of Lamont-Doherty where he conducted sea-going (12 research cruises) and land-based basic research in marine geology and geophysics on a world-wide basis.  His research emphasized the study of deep-water clastic systems and depositional processes (especially deep-sea fans, mass-transport deposits, and contourites), and their control by glacio-eustatic sea-level changes.  He was among the first to utilize high-resolution (3.5-12 kHz echograms) seismic records to define sea-floor sedimentary processes and developed a seismic facies classification that is still widely used.  In 1982 he led a research cruise that utilized the GLORIA long-range side-scan sonar to survey and map the distributary channel system of Amazon Deep-Sea Fan.  This survey discovered that deep-sea fans can have very highly meandering distributary channels, a discovery that has had a major impact on academic studies of turbidity-current processes and deep-sea fan development, and, more recently, on hydrocarbon exploration by industry.  In 1983 he joined Mobil Research and Development Corp., where he conducted both research and technical service projects involving seismic sequence and facies analysis of deep-water depositional systems.  His seismic study of the Niger Delta continental margin was among the first to show the tripartite structural provinces (extension, translation, and compression) of this margin and attribute them to large-scale gravity tectonics. He also described the occurrence of large-scale deep-sea fans and channels; buried analogs of these features are now major exploration targets in this region.  Since retiring from Mobil in 1993, he has been an Adjunct Professor and a Faculty Associate-Researcher in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Texas at Arlington. He has continued to conduct research on the morphology and depositional processes of deep-sea deposits and their bed forms; development of submarine fans and related features; climate control of deep-sea sediment deposition; seismic facies analysis; and geologic evolution of passive margins. He has participated as a sedimentologist in 6 Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) and 1 International Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) research cruises since 1993, which conducted various sedimentological, sequence-stratigraphic, and climate-change research from offshore Antarctica to Greenland.  He was a proponent of ODP Leg 155, which drilled the Amazon Deep-Sea Fan; the first time a modern deep-sea fan was systematically cored to ground truth the seismic facies, growth pattern, and sedimentary processes of a modern fan.  His current major research the past few years has been the Gulf Intraslope Basins Project (GIB), an industry sponsored project which studied depositional processes in the intraslope basins province of the northern Gulf of Mexico, to develop more reliable depositional analogs for hydrocarbon reservoirs (Click here for Overview of GIB Project). He has authored or co-authored more than 55 papers published in refereed journals and more than 75 abstracts of papers presented at national or international meetings (Click here for John Damuth’s complete Vita and Publications List).