Taught at Scripps : H. William Menard Dies; Expert on Ocean Floor
H. William Menard, a scientific pioneer who earned a worldwide reputation for determining that the earth’s ocean floors are dynamic areas of churning geologic activity, died Sunday after a brief illness at age 65.
Menard was a longtime professor of geology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and was director of the United States Geological Survey from 1978 to 1981, where he directed the nation’s scientific response to the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980. Last month he received the highest honor of the American Geophysical Union, the largest international society for earth scientists with more than 17,000 members in 100 countries.
“Bill Menard was among the country’s top scientists and was consulted often for advice on matters affecting every level, from the university to international affairs,” William A. Nierenberg, Scripps’ director, said Monday.
Menard led or participated in 25 deep-sea expeditions in the Pacific Ocean after World War II. The expeditions changed the world’s thinking about the sea floor as a featureless plain that had remained almost unchanged for billions of years.
On the first expedition, in 1950, Menard and his colleagues from Scripps and the U.S. Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego discovered the Mid-Pacific Mountains, a 12,000-foot-high range that extends for 2,000 miles from the Hawaiian Islands to Wake Island. The same trip also uncovered a giant undersea cliff, which was named the Mendocino Escarpment. It extends for almost 2,000 miles from the West Coast.
On later expeditions, Menard discovered that a series of long fault zones exist parallel to the Mendocino Escarpment at intervals of several hundred miles throughout the northeast Pacific. Similar zones, now commonly known as transform faults, exist the entire length of the mid-ocean ridges that occur throughout the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans.
Menard’s discoveries have served as the foundations for theories of sea-floor spreading and plate tectonics to explain the structure and history of the earth. Because of Menard’s work, science now understands that ocean depths everywhere have a complex topography no older than 200 million years.
During his expeditions, Menard became one of the first scientists to use the Aqua-lung for undersea mapping, making more than 1,000 dives using the once-revolutionary device. Menard also made the first detailed survey of nickel and copper ores in manganese nodules on the deep-sea floor during research for the International Geophysical Year in 1957. He also developed techniques for estimating the quantities of oil and gas under the sea floor.
Menard was born in Fresno and grew up in Los Angeles, where he was a high school classmate of Mayor Tom Bradley. He received a bachelor of science degree from the California Institute of Technology and then served during World War II as an intelligence officer on the staff of Adm. John McCain during South Pacific combat.
Menard received a doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1949 and joined the Naval Electronics Laboratory (now the Naval Oceans Systems Center) in 1950. He was appointed a Scripps associate professor in 1955. Scripps and the Navy sponsor numerous joint programs, among them ocean-mapping expeditions.
Menard, in addition to his position with the U.S. Geological Survey, also was a technical adviser in the Office of Science and Technology under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 and 1966. He was appointed to the USGS directorship by President Jimmy Carter.
Menard is survived by his wife, Gifford; three children, Andrew of New York City, Elizabeth of Encinitas and Dorothy Crist of Silver Spring, Md.; and three grandchildren.
A memorial service as yet unscheduled will be held at Scripps. The family suggests donations to the San Diego Hospice.
