David Headley Green AM FAA FRS (29 February 1936 – 6 September 2024) was an Australian geologist and experimental petrologist who studied Earth's mantle, and the formation of magmas.
He was director of the Australian National University research school of earth sciences from 1994 to 2001, and received many senior medals and awards for his work.
He then began work as a geologist with the Australian Bureau of Mineral Resources, mapping and studying sequences of igneous rocks in north Queensland and Papua New Guinea from 1957 to 1959.
There, he completed a PhD in 1962 with a study of the ultramafic rocks of the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, under the supervision of petrologist C.E.
[3] Green was an experimental petrologist, and investigated the behaviour of rocks and minerals at high pressures and temperatures in the laboratory.
For much of his early career he worked closely with geophysicist and geochemist Ted Ringwood, also at ANU, and they wrote a series of influential papers on the origins of basaltic magmas,[8] on the transformation of rocks from basalt to gabbro to eclogite, and on the nature of the upper mantle.