Oceanographer at Home When Out to Sea
A ready smile crumples Walter Munk’s lined face as he holds out his hand in greeting. At 70, one of the grand old men of oceanography remains ever the gracious host--pointing out the elegant amphitheater sculpted from the hillside below his La Jolla home, asking his guest to join him in an afternoon drink, explaining how he came by his “desk,” a sweeping table salvaged from author Zane Grey’s sunken yacht.
But the fun-loving spirit that has leavened his half-century at Scripps Institution of Oceanography lies buried in nervousness. Here, far from the rolling deck of a research vessel, Walter Munk is at home but at sea.
Amused, his wife Judith urges Munk to relax for the photographer, who wants to capture the man widely regarded as one of the two or three most influential oceanographers in the world.
“You make acoustic signatures and I can’t relax,” Munk grouses in his best scientist’s jargon. He asks the young man to leave.
Confidence Well Earned
Such a display of anything less than supreme confidence is indeed a rarity, say Munk’s friends and colleagues. But, then, there’s plenty to be confident about.
Munk helped develop ways of forecasting waves that put Allied troops onto the beaches of North Africa and Normandy in World War II.
He took what one collaborator describes as “astronomers’ noise” about planetary changes and developed explanations of how the Earth’s axis shifts and its rotation changes during and after Ice Ages.
He showed how storms near Antarctica bring La Jolla’s summer surfers the periodic trains of waves that they love.
He explained the natural phenomena behind Venice floods in 1966, making it possible for Italian officials to correct the problem.
And, even as he formally retired from UC San Diego on Thursday, he was dreaming of how a new way of taking ocean temperatures by listening to underwater sounds might give the best measure yet of how the Greenhouse Effect is warming our planet.
His colleagues say this latest idea seems more of a pipe dream, Munk notes with a laugh. If it proves correct, though, it won’t be the first time Munk has had the last laugh in a scientific debate.
“One of Walter’s great talents has been his ability to identify important topics, regarded by others as intractable, where progress can be made. Each time he demonstrates this, the criticism of the rest of us slowly turns to admiration,” wrote Christopher Garrett, now of Canada’s Dalhousie University and a former post-graduate researcher at Scripps, in 1982.
Munk himself looks back with amusement and no false modesty on an oceanographic career that started on a whim in the late 1930s. Having been sent from his native Austria to New York to learn the family banking business, he hated the city so much that he resolved to get as far as possible away from it. Thus began a trip to the California Institute of Technology, where he was graduated in 1939 with a degree in physics.
But the summer of 1939 held a summer job at Scripps--sought because a girlfriend vacationed in La Jolla--and Munk became a doctoral student at Scripps in 1940. “For some time I constituted the Scripps student body,” Munk says.
From a collection of about 15 people in those early days, Scripps has grown into one of the preeminent ocean research centers in the world, with more than 300 faculty and researchers, 170 students and a $50-million research budget.
“We’re both pioneers in oceanography,” notes Roger Revelle, director emeritus of Scripps. “And in those days there wasn’t much known about it, so you could work in a lot of different fields and not feel like an amateur. You were an amateur, but you didn’t feel like it.”
Worked for Navy
World War II brought Munk, Revelle and others at Scripps into working for the U.S. Navy at San Diego’s Point Loma, figuring out the solutions to the problems of amphibious warfare. As the U.S. commitment to oceanography expanded after the war, Munk became a prime beneficiary.
His work on waves, tides and other ocean phenomena since then has been largely financed by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. (Indeed, the Navy endowed the academic chair he will continue to occupy at Scripps despite his official retirement from the university payroll.)
The Navy was interested in practical problems. And Munk brought an approach that fit theory in with practicalities nicely.
“He’s not a conventional theoretical oceanographer,” said Carl Wunsch, a professor of oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a recent Munk collaborator. “He’s done some very important theory, but it’s always been connected to very specific kinds of observations, many of which he made himself. That kind of skill is actually very rare.”
His blue eyes twinkling, Munk says the real reason for using his imagination to come up with novel research ideas is that he doesn’t like to read. Take his current work on a system for using sound to do 3-D mapping of ocean water temperatures and currents, called ocean acoustic tomography.
“This tomography was wonderful. There was not a single publication on that issue, and I didn’t have to read anything,” Munk said. “I have generally taken some field . . . and then stayed with it long enough that it makes a difference. And I’ve done that about four or five times in my life.”
But just theory isn’t enough, he said.
“In our case we set moorings,” he said. “That’s a dirty, long, hard and even sometimes dangerous job. And I think it’s the thing that makes oceanography so much fun, that mixture--it’s an entirely different world from the analysis and the theory. And I think you don’t do a good job unless you really in some way are involved in the whole thing.”
Indeed, there is a danger that as scientists expand their ability to build ocean simulations on computers they will forget about what the ocean is really like, he said.
“You find people giving talks saying this is what happened, and then you say just a minute. Are you talking about what happened in your computer outputs or are you talking about what happened in actual ocean measurements? Well, it turns out often nowadays that it was a model put on the computer. That’s perfectly all right--but it’s not the same thing.”
Munk sees a further danger in that funding agencies may be more likely to finance relatively inexpensive computer model studies than oceanographic expeditions, which can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Some of his fondest memories are of the long expeditions to sea that were characteristic of oceanography’s earliest days. Today, scientists fly to a port, get aboard ship for a couple of weeks and then return to port to fly home. This is more efficient but less colorful, Munk laments.
“I’m glad I saw the end of the real expedition era when I was a student here,” he said. “You were just gone forever. When you came back home, you sort of felt you had spent your life at sea, and you were beginning to see something totally unfamiliar.”
One of his favorite trips was the Capricorn expedition, a federally funded trip in 1952-53 in which Scripps scientists spent several months in the South Pacific to monitor the effects of nuclear explosions on water. Despite having been directly in the path of a radioactive cloud, the crew was a merry one.
Pictures in Scripps’ archives show them crazily dressed for a King Neptune ceremony crossing the Equator, Munk diving unperturbed in a lagoon as a shark assesses him from a distance of a few inches, and scientists releasing a blimp-shaped weather balloon labeled “Eat at Callaghan’s”--the name of the ship’s cook.
“That was wonderful,” he said with a chuckle and affectionate glance toward Judith, a prominent figure in his life as well as in Scripps activities. “I came home and changed wives--I can’t think of a more meaningful change. So I’m very happy that I went out on that.”
Munk also returned to eventually spend 23 years as head of the Scripps branch of the University of California’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, a title he gave up in 1982 in anticipation of his retirement this year.
The ‘60s were expansive years for oceanography and Scripps. “That was a fantastic time,” said Douglas Caldwell, a former Scripps researcher and now dean of oceanography at Oregon State University. “There were Nobel Prize winners coming across the mountains in the 1960s like Okies in the ‘30s.
“It was really a wonderful place to work because of all these people, and also scary because they’re kind of intimidating for a young kid,” Caldwell said.
How did students react to being around pioneer Munk? “When you worked around Walter, everyone was an underling,” Caldwell said.
Indeed, Munk acknowledges that he’s never had more than three graduate students at a time. “Three seems to be the upper limit that I’m capable of handling,” he said.
Even with Munk’s formidable personality on the job and the rising stature of Scripps, there was--and is--a determined Southern California casualness to him and others there.
“He met us at the airport, and my wife took him for a grad student who had been sent down to pick us up,” Caldwell said of their first encounter with Munk. “I always remember that, because my wife had brought two pairs of white gloves for the formal occasions she thought she’d be seeing. And as I recall she ended up swimming in a dress during that trip.”
Although Munk and his wife and two daughters traveled all over the world for short periods for his work, they always returned to their distinctive house above the ocean, in a subdivision started by Scripps researchers. He rejected the inevitable job offers elsewhere--including two from the renowned Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. He explains it simply: “I have absolutely the world’s best job.”
As he moves onto a retirement in which he will continue to do research at Scripps, Munk sees a future for oceanography in which students will have to adopt the kind of generalist’s view of the oceans that was common in the early days.
“It will become more interdisciplinary, which is what it was when I first came in,” he said. “We all knew what was happening in biology and chemistry and geology because we were such a small group of people. And then it became quite specialized.”
Today, the complex problems scientists face are forcing them to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, he said.
“I hope we do a good job at Scripps in taking advantage of that. But I don’t see it happening really,” he said.
Long an influence on defense and ocean science policy nationally, Munk now is mulling a request to use his expertise on a committee that advises NASA on its future.
And he plans to spend his “last chance” at doing something significant for science by trying to figure out how to measure the possible warming of the oceans from the Greenhouse Effect.
His face alight with imagination, Munk talks of tiny, volcanic Heard Island in the southern Indian Ocean.
“It’s so located so that it has a ‘view’ around the world in two directions,” he said. “If you could see along the surface of the Earth you could see Bermuda from Heard.” Looking another direction, one would see the San Francisco Bay Area.
The idea is to position a powerful sound source off Heard Island and then listen to it underwater in both directions. Using ocean acoustic tomography, which Munk and MIT’s Wunsch have pioneered, scientists would measure water temperatures from Bermuda southeastward and around Africa and Australia to the U.S. West Coast. This can be done with sound waves because the higher the water’s temperature, the faster the sound travels.
If the project proves possible--”I might be able to say something meaningful about it in a year”--it would resolve the uncertainties of current debates over the Greenhouse Effect.
“The difficulty with atmospheric data is that most of these long time (temperature) series are done at like Lindbergh Field. And there’s been a change in microclimate there because you’re changing buildings and things like that. You don’t really know whether you’re seeing a global effect,” Munk said.
Again he laughs at himself, calling the idea a “romantic notion” that he isn’t sure would work.
Even Munk’s own assessment of the scientific process mitigates against success: “You have an idea. It’s almost surely wrong. The equipment is almost surely not working the way you think it ought to.”
But it’s the kind of challenge from which Walter Munk has never shied.
