Lynn Sykes has spent most of his adult life expanding the understanding and uses of seismology, from the early development of plate movement and tectonics to precise location of earthquakes to the use of this detection to locate underground nuclear testing.

In just six decades, plate tectonics has gone from being considered a vague and false concept to accepted science, and Professor Sykes has been involved with much of this change. He pioneered the identification of seismic gaps — regions that have not erupted in great earthquakes for a long time — and methods to estimate the possibility of quake recurrence. He tested and proved a hypothesis by Tuzo Wilson about transform faulting and, with Jack Oliver and Bryan Isacks, Sykes, pulled together the torrent of new seismological data that ended skepticism about the theory of plate tectonics.