[1] He produced important early work showing that tectonic plates heave, tilt, and fall in addition to drifting across the surface of the planet.
He is known for his work on modeling past and predicting future uneven rises and falls in sea level due to the interactions between melting ice caps, local gravitational forces, and plate tectonics, which yield what some might find to be counterintuitive results.
In 2000 he was a recipient of a Rutherford Memorial Medal from the Royal Society of Canada.
In 2015 he earned the Arthur L. Day Medal from the Geological Society of America.
He also earned the Kirk Bryan Award for the article, "Sea-level history during the Last Interglacial complex on San Nicolas Island, California: implications for glacial isostatic adjustment processes, paleozoogeography and tectonics".