Donald Lawson Turcotte (22 April 1932 - 4 February 2025) was an American geophysicist most noted for his work on the boundary layer theory of mantle convection as part of the theory of plate tectonics.
Turcotte trained as an engineer, graduating with a PhD in aeronautics and physics from Caltech in 1958.
Here he met Ron Oxburgh, who had recently arrived in the Department of Geology, and they began a collaboration in which they developed ideas about convective flow in the Earth's mantle, and its links to the newly emerging ideas of plate tectonics.
[5] In 1973, Turcotte moved to the geology department at Cornell where he worked for the next thirty years.
After retiring from Cornell in 2003, Turcotte moved to University of California, Davis.