Peter Clift

Biography

Peter Clift is a British marine geologist and geophysicist specializing in the geology of Asia and the western Pacific. He is currently the Charles T. McCord Professor of Petroleum Geology at Louisiana State University, which he joined in 2012. Clift took his bachelor's degree at the University of Oxford, where he was a student at Worcester College. He completed his Ph.D. on the geology of southern Greece in 1990 at University of Edinburgh. In 2014 he was awarded a Doctor of Science by the University of Oxford.Peter Clift grew up in Ware, Hertfordshire where he attended St. Edmund's College. His father, Donald W. Clift, also a native of Ware, worked for BP, including in Beijing, China for five years. His mother Margaret T. Clift (née Feighan) is from Cullyhanna, Northern Ireland. In 1994 Clift married Chryseis Fox in Bryan, Texas. Chryseis was born in New York City but grew up in Texas, and lived for several years in Miami. She works in book design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Research Interest

Research in the sedimentary and tectonic evolution of active and collisional plate margins. Current fields of specific interest include land-ocean interactions in the marginal seas of Asia, especially the Arabian Sea and the South China Sea. I am also working on associated syn-orogenic sedimentation in the Himalaya and am developing single grain geochemical techniques to link clastic provenance studies with thermochronologic methods in order to reconstruct in detail orogenic erosion histories. I am interested in the links between climatic and tectonic evolution in Asia. I also have research interests in arc magmatism and tectonic evolution, especially in the western Pacific, as well as accreted arc sections in the Irish Caledonides, Indus Suture Zone of India and in the Talkeetna Arc of Alaska. I am working on the importance of mass flux through active margins to the origin of the continental crust and the tectonics of arc-continent collision.