Alan Gilbert Smith FGS (24 February 1937 – 13 August 2017) was an English geologist, stratigrapher, and pioneer of plate tectonic reconstruction.
[3] From 1959 to 1963 he was a graduate student in geology at Princeton University, where he completed a Ph.D. thesis on the Structure and stratigraphy of the northwest Whitefish Range, Lincoln County, Montana[4] under the supervision of John C. Maxwell[5] (1914–2006)[6] and Franklyn B.
[1] His 1965 paper The fit of the continents around the Atlantic, co-authored with Edward Bullard and Jim Everett[13] has historic importance in the establishment of the validity of plate tectonics.
[14][15][16] According to Eldridge M. Moores, Smith's 1971 paper Alpine Deformation and the Oceanic Areas of the Tethys, Mediterranean, and Atlantic[17] was "a major breakthrough in our views of the relationship between sea floor spreading, the then new-plate tectonics, and orogeny.
[19] In 2003 Smith and co-author Kevin T. Pickering, proposed a unifying explanation for Earth's icehouse periods during the past 620 million years.