"Origins of Northeast Russia, Paleomagnetism, Geology and Tectonics" (a.k.a. The Parfenov Sessions)
The American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, December 13-17, 2004
San Francisco, CA
Presentations
The Contributions of Leonid M. Parfenov to the Tectonics of Eastern Russia
Andrei Prokopiev, Kaz Fujita, and David Stone
Leonid M. Parfenov (1937-2002) was the leading force behind the interpretation of northeast Russia in the context of plate tectonics. Originally interested in Precambrian geology, he conducted his early field work in southern Siberia in the 1960s. He was exposed to plate tectonics at Liverpool University in 1970 and published the first mobilistic reconstructions of the Precambrian in Russia in 1973. Starting in 1971, he began to systematically conduct field work and accumulate geologic data on what is now considered the accretionary collage of northeast Russia. With colleague Boris A. Natal'in, he published a series of papers on the tectonic evolution of eastern Russia starting in 1977, with a doctoral dissertation on "Comparative Tectonics and Evolution History of Mesozoides of Northeast Asia" in 1983. His work became known in the west with his publication in 1978 in the Journal of Physics of the Earth on "Geodynamics of the North-Eastern Asia in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Time and the Nature of Volcanic Belt" in which the volcanic belts of eastern Russia were interpreted in the context of subduction zones. From the mid-1980s to his death, he concentrated on understanding the evolution of the fold belts of eastern Yakutia. Parfenov immediately became a proponent of terrane analysis as it evolved in the early 1980s and was the primary mover in developing the terrane map of northeast Russia in the late 1990s. In 1990, he developed joint programs with the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Michigan State University, and later with Stanford University and the U.S. Geological Survey, opening eastern Russia to western scientists. His life's work was synthesized in a monograph entitled "Tectonics, Geodynamics, and metallogenesis of the Territory of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia)" published in Russian in 2001 and currently being prepared in English translation. As a result of his efforts we now have a basic understanding of the plate tectonic evolution of northeast Russia as a region of Phanerozoic rifting, terrane development, and collision.
