Charles D. Hollister; Oceanographer Dispelled Notion of Tranquil Seabed
Charles D. Hollister, an oceanographer whose pioneering studies radically altered scientists’ view of the deep seabed as a tranquil abyss and posed what many experts consider the most promising solution for the disposal of nuclear wastes, died Monday on a hiking trip in Wyoming. He was 63.
An avid mountain climber who had ascended Mt. McKinley and peaks in the Himalayas, Hollister sustained fatal head injuries while clambering over boulders during a hike on a family vacation, according to a statement by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, where Hollister was a senior scientist and vice president.
A member of the fourth generation of a famous California cattle family after whom the San Benito County city of Hollister is named, he was among the first oceanographers to dispel the notion of the deep as a calm, unchanging place.
His research on the movement of sea mud led to his investigation of an application with huge potential for solving one of the most vexing problems of the nuclear age: how to dispose of radioactive waste.
He “made us look at mud on the deep sea floor in a different way,” said Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole institute, and “challenged our thinking” about the role of oceans as a depository for deadly radioactive waste.
Hollister got his first glimpse of what he thought was a storm-tossed seabed in 1962 while a graduate student at Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory outside New York City. He was studying a photograph taken by Lamont geologist Maurice Ewing and could not accept the conventional wisdom that the pictured ripples and mounds had been caused by some earth-shaking geologic event centuries ago. He believed that something more powerful and recent was the cause.
He started to take his own pictures, documenting more of the same ripples, mounds and waves in the same spot Ewing had examined, in the north Atlantic Ocean about 450 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. But it wasn’t until 1979 that he was able to organize, with Office of Naval Research funding, a full-scale research project.
On the first research cruise of the HEBBLE, which stood for High Energy Benthic Boundary Layer Experiment, Hollister and the other investigators found deep sea currents faster than anything even they had imagined. Most deep sea currents creep along at about 5 centimeters per second, but the researchers measured ones going 75 centimeters per second, a force equal to a 60-mph wind on land.
Hollister surmised that these currents were caused by benthic storms, which have been described as the undersea equivalent of a blizzard, but instead of leaving drifts of snow they create ripples of mud in striking patterns.
The Sea as a Place for Radioactive Waste
The discovery held wide implications for military and defense operations as well as for commercial uses. The military has sophisticated listening devices on the ocean bottom, and private entities such as telephone companies lay cables there for transatlantic communications systems, all of which could be disrupted or damaged by deep sea storms.
In the early 1970s, Hollister also began to probe the properties of the mud and clay blanketing the surface of the sea floor. A cocktail party conversation with a chemist from New Mexico’s Sandia National Laboratory got him thinking about how the primeval ooze that coats the bottom of the deep ocean might be ideally suited as a graveyard for poisonous radioactive garbage.
It is thick--”like Godiva chocolate that has been sitting on the back seat of a car in New York during summer”--and he knew from previous studies that it stuck tenaciously to radioactive particles that had drifted to the ocean depths after atmospheric nuclear testing.
Between 1974 and 1986, he and an international team of scientists conducted tests that suggested that waste canisters holding nuclear waste could be safely deposited just 10 meters below the ocean floor because any leakage would be swallowed by the gooey clays for millions of years. Hollister proposed that deeper burial, at 100 meters or more, was feasible and would ensure a greater margin of safety.
“The stuff sticks to the mud and sits there like heavy lead,” Hollister told the Atlantic Monthly in 1996. “Nothing’s going to bring it into the biosphere, unless we figure out how to reverse gravity.”
Hollister estimated that about a quarter of the world’s sea floor was stable enough to serve as a nuclear burial ground. Other leading scientists hailed Hollister’s work and lamented the politics that led to a cutoff of government funding for his research in 1986.
Hollister continued to explore the proposition of seabed disposal in indirect ways, by studying sunken Soviet submarines to see whether the plutonium they carried was leaking and migrating into the food chain or staying put in the sea mud as he had hypothesized it would.
He also was the major force behind the development of a giant piston coring system dubbed the “Super Straw.” In 1973 he was part of a research team that retrieved a 100-foot-long sample of ocean-floor ooze from a site 400 miles east of Cape Kennedy, Fla. It was the longest deep sea piston core ever obtained by oceanographers and documented 65 million years of ocean basin history.
Hollister was born in Santa Barbara on what was one of the largest cattle ranches in the state. The first Hollisters came from England in the 1640s and founded a Connecticut town bearing the family name. They began moving West over the next century, arriving in California in the 1860s, when Col. William W. Hollister drove the first flock of sheep across the continent and later founded the Northern California town Hollister.
The colonel’s Santa Barbara descendant earned a bachelor of science degree from Oregon State University in 1960 and a doctorate in geology from Columbia University in 1967. He worked as an oceanographer for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1961 and later was a researcher at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory.
He joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1967 as an assistant scientist, rising to senior scientist and dean in 1979 and vice president in 1989.
A committed outdoorsman, he hunted and fly-fished as well as climbed mountains. In 1962, he joined a monthlong expedition to scale the southeast side of Mt. McKinley that was featured in Look magazine. He also made the first ascent of Antarctica’s Sentinel Range, climbing five of its six highest peaks and earning the John Oliver La Gorce Medal from the National Geographic Society. He was one of the first Americans to trek in Bhutan.
“Ocean research is a lot like climbing a new route to the top of a mountain,” he once said about his two passions. “Every time you go out to sea, there’s something new. I enjoy that aspect of both--the unpredictability of the mountains and the bottom of the sea.”
Hollister is survived by his wife, Jacqueline of Falmouth, Mass.; daughter Robin J. Hall of Marshfield, Mass.; son David of Seattle; stepson Andrew Suitor of Falmouth; three brothers and two granddaughters.
A memorial service will be held Sunday at 2 p.m. at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Donations can be made to the institution, which is a nonprofit research organization, c/o Development Office, Fenno House, Woods Hole, MA 02543.
