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Samuel Warren Carey - Commemorative memoir

Emeritus Professor
Samuel Warren Carey passed away on 20 March 2002 at age 90.
He was born at Campbelltown, New South Wales on 1st
November 1911, and attended school at the Canterbury Boys
High School. Carey’s father was a printer, who became a public
lecturer when he arrived in Australia. His mother’s people were
early Australian settlers. The Carey home was a farm near
Campbelltown and as a boy, little Samuel walked nearly seven
miles to School and back each day, an activity that prepared him
for work in harsh climatic and environmental conditions. Sam
Carey’s large family included two sisters and four brothers, one
of whom died in World War II.
At the University of Sydney, in 1929, Carey enrolled in chemistry,
physics, and mathematics and only as a fourth subject –
geology. However, he was soon reoriented towards geology as
his main subject by Sir Edgeworth David, an Antarctic explorer.
This preference developed from his liking for fieldwork in geology,
combined with lab work. He was strongly inclined towards
sports (hockey, sailing, rugby, marksmanship, canoeing) and
physical activities (cave exploration, rock climbing, hiking, jungle
expeditions, parachuting).
He graduated in Geology from the University of Sydney earning
a Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours in 1933, Master
of Science in 1934, and Doctor of Science in 1939. At university
he founded the Student’s Geological Society in 1931 and was its
first president.
He has been a pioneer in geology all his life. He was fortunate
to participate as a protagonist for two and possibly three revolutions
in the Earth sciences. He challenged the concept of continents
in fixed positions from the outset and from 1946 to 1956 he
taught a version of intercontinental movement with subduction in
deep ocean trenches. This came to be called ‘plate tectonics’
some twenty years later but at the time when no one believed in
any form of intercontinental movement, Carey’s version was also
called ‘continental drift’ by default.
Carey developed a new way to interpret orogens. He did not
ascribe the building of mountain chains to compression – as is
commonly accepted by the geological community involved in contraction
or pulsation tectonics. Carey ascribed it to isostatic instability
where rising mantle beneath deep sediment filled trenches
causes diapiric uplift. The observed folding was explained as the
consequent downward gravitational sliding of uplifted strata.
This mountain building concept is still considered valid today
and it constitutes part of a more diversified classification of
mountain evolution that has been developed by Cliff Ollier.
Carey proposed abandonment of the subduction
concept, and put forward step by step the
concept of Earth expansion. Carey – using
the orocline concept – generalised his views on movement
between continents, demonstrating that the continents could fit
together better if the Earth was smaller in size.