His work on dating geomagnetic reversals, with Richard Doell and Brent Dalrymple, made a major contribution to the theory of plate tectonics.
Allan Cox won numerous awards, including the prestigious Vetlesen Prize, and was the president of the American Geophysical Union.
He returned to Berkeley, but had so little interest in chemistry that his grades were too low to avoid being drafted into the United States Army.
His research career in geology began in 1950 when he took a position as a field assistant to Clyde Wahrhaftig studying glaciation in the Alaska Range; the pair later had a long romantic relationship.
[1][2][3] For his graduate research at the University of California, Berkeley, Cox concentrated on rock magnetism with John Verhoogen as his supervisor.
Cox and Doell arranged for the USGS to hire Brent Dalrymple, a graduate from Berkeley with expertise in this method.
[4] Cox died in a bicycle accident, colliding with a large redwood tree after falling off a cliff on Tunitas Creek road, in the mountains Northwest of Stanford University.
[7] In 1970 he was awarded the prestigious Vetlesen Prize, along with G. Brent Dalrymple, Richard Doell and S. Keith Runcorn, for contributions to geology and geophysics.