Jerry P. Eaton

Jerry P. Eaton was an American seismologist and volcanologist who served as director of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory from, and as scientist-in-charge from. He was born in 1926, on a farm in California's Central Valley near Fresno. He died of cancer in 2004, aged 77, at his home in Los Altos, California.

Education

Eaton has received two degrees from University of California, Berkeley; a 1949 B.A. in physics, and a 1953 Ph.D. in geophysics.

Eaton began at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory in 1953, after completing his Ph.D. During his time there, he was responsible for installing equipment to measure tremors from Kīlauea. The equipment he designed and installed were 5 to 10 times more sensitive than the seismographs already in use, and thus picked up more earthquakes for study. He is also credited with writing the first computer program to pinpoint locations of earthquakes.
After his term as scientist-in-charge, he left the Observatory for the Geological Survey Crustal Studies Branch and went on to develop an earthquake monitoring system for the Rocky Mountain-Great Plains region. He served as president of the Seismological Society of America from.
In 1960, he published a paper in the journal Science titled "How Volcanoes Grow", which was later described in SFGATE as "a classic and the most authoritative paper on the subject".