Geologist and explorer Bruce Luyendyk has authored a book about his first inspiring and harrowing expedition to Antarctica. Trained as a marine scientist, Luyendyk expanded his interests over four decades into the geology of California, New Zealand, and the southern continent. As he explains, he evolved from studying the bottom of the ocean to the bottom of the World.
Bruce Luyendyk is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. On his first expedition to West Antarctica in 1989, Luyendyk and his geology team found evidence that a large submarine plateau, a fragment from the Gondwana breakup, comprises a sunken continent beneath New Zealand. Luyendyk named this eighth continent Zealandia. This expedition, the first of his nine visits to Antarctica, is the subject of his book Mighty Bad Land, now available for preorder on Amazon (release date May 30, 2023).
In 2016, the US Board on Geographic Names honored the author by naming a summit in Antarctica, Mount Luyendyk. Luyendyk is a graduate of San Diego State University and the University of California, San Diego. His prior research in marine geophysics included exploring deep-sea black smokers, i.e., hydrothermal vents, using the deep submersible Alvin off western Mexico. For this, he and colleagues shared the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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