Kenneth O. Emery; Marine Geologist and Author

Kenneth Orris “K.O.” Emery, a marine geologist and prolific author whose books included “The Sea Off Southern California,” has died. He was 83. Emery, who taught at USC for 16 years, died Sunday in Milton, Mass.

Since 1962, he had been associated with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., and was the retired dean of its graduate program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He was an international scholar with a long history of studying the Pacific Ocean as well as the Atlantic. He was on the U.S. Geological Team based in Los Angeles from 1946 to 1960 and studied Bikini Atoll before the atomic bomb test there.

While teaching at USC from 1945 to 1962, Emery did research in the Gulf of California. He also served two years as oceanographer at the Navy Ordnance Test Center in Pasadena.

Born in Swift Current, Canada, Emery grew up in Texas and studied engineering at North Texas Agricultural College. He earned geology degrees at the University of Illinois and did his doctoral research on the California continental margins while based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

During World War II, Emery worked with the Division of War Research at UC San Diego, producing maps of sediment types that were important for acoustic submarine warfare.

A specialist in continental margins on the East Coast as well as the West Coast, Emery published 290 articles or monographs and 15 books. Among those books were “The Destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah and Jericho,” about his research in the Dead Sea, and “The Morphology of the Rocky Members of the Solar System,” based on satellite observations.

As a resident of Oyster Pond in Falmouth, Mass., Emery grew an orchard, maintained an apiary and explored the pond by rowboat. His wanderings and a question he couldn’t answer about the depth of the pond produced his popular 1969 book, “A Coastal Pond Studied by Oceanographic Methods.”

A widower, Emery is survived by two daughters, Barbara K. Wish and Charlet E. Shave; two brothers, Almon and Harold; and one granddaughter.

The family has asked that memorial contributions be made to the K.O. Emery Scholarship Fund, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Fenno House MS No. 40, Woods Hole, MA 02543.