Perry Byerly

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Perry Byerly, Jr. (May 28, 1897 – September 26, 1978) was an American geophysicist and seismologist. He became the first professor of seismology at the University of California, Berkeley, and was named emeritus in 1965. By the late 1960s he was considered one of the country’s leading seismologists.

Born in Clarinda, Iowa, Byerly moved to California in 1905 for health reasons. He finished high school in Redlands and earned an undergraduate degree in physics at UC Berkeley in 1921, then a PhD in physics in 1924 with a thesis on energy dispersion in transverse elastic waves in the Earth. After a year teaching at the University of Nevada, Reno, he joined Berkeley as a geology instructor and became director of the university’s seismic station. He rose to associate professor in 1927 and spent his career at Berkeley until 1965. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 to study mathematical geophysics in Cambridge, working with Harold Jeffreys and Beno Gutenberg.

Byerly’s personal life included three marriages: to Ardis Gehring (1925–1929), with whom he had a son, Perry Edward; to Elsie Gillmor (1932–1940); and to Lillian Nuckolls (1941–1978). His first wife Ardis died in 1929.

In 1942 Byerly published a textbook, Seismology. During World War II, the U.S. Navy consulted him after the Port Chicago disaster (1944); using seismometers, he helped determine the sequence and timing of the explosions, a method that aided later work on detecting nuclear tests. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1946 and served as chair of Berkeley’s Department of Geology from 1946 to 1954.

Byerly held several honors, including a second Guggenheim fellowship in 1952, the Condon lecturer in Oregon (1952), the Smith-Mundt lecturer at the University of Mexico (1954), and a Fulbright lectureship at Cambridge (1960–1961). He became an emeritus professor at Berkeley in 1965 and received an honorary LL.D. from UC Berkeley in 1966. The Berkeley seismographic station was named in his honor, and Mount Byerly in Antarctica was named after him.

In his research, Byerly studied the Earth’s structure, especially near California, the focal mechanisms of earthquakes, and the seismograph itself. He showed there is a root under the southern Sierra Nevada that slows seismic waves, developed methods to determine earthquake forces from initial wave motion, and investigated travel times of earthquakes such as the 1926 Montana quake. He also explored how much elastic energy is released when faults break.

Perry Byerly died in Oakland, California, at age 81. He left a lasting legacy as a pioneer in seismology and a leader in expanding seismic research at Berkeley.