Born in Los Angeles in 1948, Silver received a BA in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. He pursued a brief career in music before returning to college for a BA in geology from Berkeley. His appetite for Earth science whetted, Silver accepted a graduate school offer from Tom Jordan at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He completed a thesis on the aspherical seismic velocity structure of the mantle and new methods for quantifying earthquake sources, topics that strongly influenced later work by others. With his PhD in hand, Silver moved in 1982 to the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, his professional home thereafter.
In 1989, Silver and colleagues carried out the first modern portable broadband seismic experiment, targeting the deep structure of the North American continental interior. That experiment led to one of his most important contributions: the development of methods to recover the anisotropy, or directional dependence, of mantle seismic velocity from observations of shear-wave birefringence. Silver was the first to apply shear-wave splitting measurements on the scale of continents and plates, and he was a leader in the use of such observations to constrain three-dimensional patterns of upper-mantle convection and the mechanisms of continental assembly revealed by fossil anisotropy in now-cooled continental mantle roots.
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