Sir Edward Crisp Bullard FRS[1] (21 September 1907 – 3 April 1980) was a British geophysicist who is considered, along with Maurice Ewing, to have founded the discipline of marine geophysics.
[1][6] He studied under Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory of University of Cambridge and in the 1930s he received his PhD degree as a nuclear physicist.
Bullard found poor career prospects for nuclear physicists during the Great Slump, so in 1931 he switched fields to take a job as demonstrator in the department of geodesy and geophysics at Cambridge.
[8] During World War II, he was an experimental officer at HMS Vernon of the Admiralty Mining Establishment with Francis Crick, Thomas Gaskell and Robert Boyd,[9] working on the development of degaussing techniques to protect shipping from magnetic mines.
[10] In 1965, he was awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, of which he was a member,[11] for his significant investigations of the earth from its surface to its core.
This depth corresponds to about halfway between the shoreline and the ocean basins and represents the true edge of the continents.
With this discovery he helped further the idea of a supercontinent that an earlier geophysicist, Alfred Wegener, had suggested calling Pangaea.