Kenneth C. Macdonald Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

In recognition of his work he was the first marine geophysicist to be awarded the Cody gold medal and prize for his outstanding work and leadership in the Ocean Sciences as well as election as Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (1995), Fellow of the Geological Society of America (1995) and co-recipient of the Newcomb Cleveland Prize for the most important article published in Science magazine in 1980 for the discovery and analysis of black smoker vents.

He has contributed to the advancement of ocean sciences by serving on the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences (1980–83), the Oceanic Lithosphere Panel for the Advanced Drilling Project (Deep Sea Drilling Project) (1983–85), member of the ALVIN Review Committee (1979–82), founding member of the RIDGE Steering Committee (1987–90), member of the U.S. Geodynamics Committee (of the National Research Council) (1999-2000), Chairman National Undersea Research Panel of the National Undersea Research Program (NOAA) (2002), member of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Corporation, and numerous panels and future planning committees for the National Science Foundation, in particular for NSF Ocean Sciences program.

He was co-chief scientist of the RISE project – a research expedition which discovered superheated “black smoker” hydrothermal vents on the East Pacific Rise in 1979, and was the first to calculate their contribution to global geothermal heat flux. He was also chief scientist and lead diver on the expedition which documented in situ, the recording of magnetic reversals in the volcanic rocks of the deep seafloor, an important aspect of proving seafloor spreading and plate tectonics.

Macdonald grew up in El Cerrito and Richmond, California, and graduated from Harry Ells High School in 1966. He attended UC Berkeley graduating with a B.S. in Engineering in 1970. Funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, graduating from the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography specializing in marine geophysics in 1975. He was awarded a Cecil H. and Ida Green Research Fellowship to work at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics with James Brune in 1975. He joined the research staff at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1976 as Research Geophysicist working with Fred Spiess. In 1979, he joined the faculty of the Department of Geological Sciences at UCSB and the Marine Sciences Institute as an associate professor and research geophysicist.

Kenneth Craig Macdonald is an American oceanographer and marine geophysicist born in San Francisco, California in 1947. As of 2018 he is professor emeritus at the Department of Earth Science and the Marine Sciences Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). His work focuses on the tectonics and geophysics of the global mid-oceanic ridge including its spreading centers and transform faults, two of the three types of plate boundaries central to the theory of plate tectonics. His work has taken him to the north and south Atlantic oceans, the north and south Pacific oceans, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Sea of Cortez, as well as to the deep seafloor on over 50 dives in the research submersible ALVIN. Macdonald has participated in over 40 deep sea expeditions, and was chief- or co-chief scientist on 31 expeditions.