A. M. Quennell Father of Transform Faults and Poles of Rotation?

In the 1940s and 1950s, A. M. Quennell (1906–1985) was using, in a very practical way, many of the concepts of plate tectonics which were to become so important in the 1960s and 1970s. He spent most of his working life in the Middle East and Africa and made the Dead Sea Rift his special study. In his first major publication on the geology and mineral resources of former Trans‐Jordan in 1951, he came down firmly in favor of the views originally proposed by Lartet [1869] that the Dead Sea Rift is due to shear and the Red Sea to drift, the shear zone being the boundary between the “Palestine block” (Sinai plate) and the “Arabia block” (Arabian plate).