GSA s dynamic online journal, Geosphere, posts articles online regularly. Locations and topics studied this month include the Moine thrust zone in northwestern Scotland; the Eastern California shear zone; implementation of OpenTopography ; the finite evolution of mole tracks ; the southern central Andes; the work of International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 351; and the Fairweather fault, Alaska, USA.
Allan was born in Birmingham, England, on February 26, 1842, the son of John Allan and Ann Allan. He attended parochial schools and received training as a typesetter in Birmingham. In 1863 he immigrated to the United States, and on June 17, just six weeks after his arrival, enlisted as a private in George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Michigan Cavalry. He was wounded at Shepherdstown on August 24, 1864, and discharged from the army in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1865.
Allan bought a small farm in Prince Edward County, where he studied law by himself. In December 1867 he was admitted to the bar and afterward moved to Farmville. He unsuccessfully applied for a position with the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands and soon became active in the local Republican Party and as a statewide leader of the Union League of Virginia. On October 22, 1867, Allan and James W. D. Bland were elected to represent Appomattox and Prince Edward counties in the constitutiona