Obituary of Kenneth H. Olsen

Kenneth H. Olsen died February 15, 2010 in Lynnwood, WA, after a short illness. He obtained his B.S. at Idaho State College in 1952, and his M.S. at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA in 1954. From 1952 to 1957, he was graduate research assistant at the California Institute of Technology, and Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories in California. From 1957 to 1989, he worked as staff member and group leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, NM. After retirement in 1989, he was Lab Associate for LANL until 1995. He was also a geophysical consultant with GCS International, Lynnwood, WA from 1989 to 2002. In 1983, he spent a year abroad as visiting research fellow at the Applied Seismology Group of the Swedish National Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and senior visiting scientist fellow at the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) in Oslo, Norway. After moving to Lynnwood, WA in 1989, he acted as visiting scholar to the Geophysics Program at the University of Washington in Seattle until 1991. He contributed several articles to various professional journals and was author and editor of the book, “Continental Rifts: Evolution, Structure, Tectonics (Developments in Geotectonics)”, a collection of recent technical data and ideas about the major rift zones of the earth, published in 1995. He is survived by his wife, Barbara Ann (Parson) Olsen, and children Susan L., Steven K., Christopher P., and Richard S. Olsen, and by his grandson Andrew S. Olsen.