Volume 35, Special Issue 1992

A Tribute to
Henry Stommel

Most human history has not afforded men much chance to pursue

their curiosity, except as a hobby of the rich or within the refuge of a

monastery. We can count ourselves fortunate to live in a society

and at a time when we are actually paid to explore the universe.

Henry Stommel, 1974

Vicky Cullen
Editor

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Foreword

For most of the past 50 years, Henry
Melson Stommel was the most influen-
tial figure in oceanography. Through his
simple brilliance, his personal magnetism,
and his great zest for life, he inspired
legions of oceanographers.

How can you pay tribute to a man who
made room in his heart and life for so
many colleagues and friends? What made
Hank Stommel such a remarkable human
being? This volume has given some of us
an opportunity to describe aspects of our
relationships with Hank. Each of us has an
image of who Hank was, how he worked,
how he engaged us. There will be a tenden-
cy to solidify this into the real Hank
Stommel. When this used to happen, the
image never got a chance to jell Hank
would come along and blow the precon-
ceptions sky high. He can't do that any-
more, so we can only keep the reality by
attempting to record the breadth of his
vision and the depth of his passion.

What made Hank a truly remarkable
person was his vast interest in the phenom-
enal world. His contributions to the science
of oceanography are monumental and have
been described and reviewed many times,
most recently by George Veronis in the
Journal of Marine Research [50(1992):i-viii].
Excerpts from that article follow the Table
of Contents. As George notes, Hank's influ-
ence on the oceanographic community was
also great he brought people together in
the interest of learning something about
the world, whether specifically oceano-
graphic, scientific, or about growing prize-
winning zinnias, about tractors, trains,
human nature, and human foibles. The
common binding factors were his humor,
humility, generosity, and prodigious
curiosity.

Hank was a complex man with tremen-
dous personal courage and a keen sense of

the pain of human existence. He steered
away from confrontation and conflict, try-
ing to defuse situations through humor,
although he
was not
afraid to be
honest and
straightfor-
ward. He
deplored
the political
shenani-
gans, back-
room deals,
and accu-
mulation of
personal
power that

Hank Stommel

have become a part of the academic estab-
lishment. As much as possible, Hank
worked to keep the attention on the scien-
tific questions, raising the discussion from
the personal level.

The 60 contributions to this volume
provide the genuine flavor of the man and
illustrate the ways in which he infected us
all with his humor and care. We have also
chosen to include unpublished pieces of
Hank's writing about science, as well as
some of his contributions to the Falmouth,
Massachusetts, newspaper The Enterprise,
under his nom de plume, Starbuck.

We have included everything that was
submitted for this issue, whether specifical-
ly solicited or not. To those who would
have liked to contribute and who were not
asked directly, we can only apologize sin-
cerely for this oversight. We tried to cover
the bases. <

Jim Luyten and Nelson Hogg
Guest Editors

James Luyten and Nelson Hogg are Senior Scientists
in the Physical Oceanography Department of the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

cience of the
Seven Seas

by Henry Stommel

Page8

Page 67

Page 105

* Page 52

Table of Contents

Foreword 1

Henry Melson Stommel by George Veronis 4

Biography from Science of the Seven Seas 8

< Reminiscences <

Arnold Arons 9

Wilton (Tony) Sturges 10

Jeffries Wyman 11

"On Honorifics" by Starbuck 12

George Veronis 13

Joseph Pedlosky 14

Henry Charnock 15

Kirk Bryan 16

John Knauss 16

Warren Wooster 18

Arthur (Rocky) Miller 19

"When Science Failed" by Starbuck 20

"Gambling Frenzy" by Starbuck 21

John Swallow 22

Bruce Warren 23

Redwood Wright 24

Walter Munk 24

1958 Letter to Deep Sea Research 25

Allan Robinson 28

Tribute to Walter Munk 29

AlanFaller 30

"Trial by Gutenberg" by Starbuck 31

Edward Spiegel 34

WillemMalkus 35

Lou Howard 35

James Crease 37

Sloat Hodgson 37

"My Friend John Moore" by Starbuck 38

NickFofonoff 40

Robert Walden 40

Robert Knox 41

Curtis Collins .....42

Arthur Voorhis 43

Letters Henry Stommel Wrote to His Children 44

Bob Beardsley ...48

D. James Baker 48

George Seaver 50

Why We Are Oceanographers 51

Barbara Gaffron 64

Peter Niiler 64

Valen/ Lee 65

The Albatross Award (Article from The Enterprise) 66

"Not Afraid of Life" by Starbuck 68

Robert Heinmiller 69

"We're Over the Ridge!" by Starbuck 70

Willinm Schmitz 71

Harnj Bryden 71

Joseph Reid 72

W.S. (Wally) Broecker 73

Peter Rhines 73

F.C. (Fritz) Fuglister 74

Valentine Worthington 76

Cecelia Fuglister 76

Shirley Webb 77

The Ocean and William Leighton Jordan, Esq 80

Carl Wuusch 92

Myrl Hendershot t 93

David Halpern 95

Bob Munns 95

James Luyten (The Pencil Is Mightier than the Computer) ....96

"Close Encounter" by Starbuck 97

William Young 98

Robert Weller 100

Jean Claude Gascard 101

William Simmons 102

Walter Zenk 106

Nelson Hogg 107

Charles (Chip) Cox 108

Bernard Saint-Guily 108

"High-Iron" by Starbuck 109

Michele Fieux 110

"Counting Our Blessings" by Starbuck Ill

James Luyten (Annealing) 112

Philip Richardsoji 113

John Van Leer 114

Dennis Moore 115

Gabe Csanady 115

The Woods Hole Marine Exhibit 116

Roberto Frassetto 122

Oleg Mamaev 124

Rui Xin Huang 126

"The Viper's Jaws" by Starbuck 127

National Medal of Science Nomination by Harmon Craig... 128

Curriculum Vitae for Henry Stommel 131

Cover photo by Holly Smith Pedlosky

* Page 94

Page 55

* Page 35

* Page 1 29

Henry Melson Stommel

September 27, 1920-January 17, 1992

by George Veronis

Excerpted with permission from

Journal of Marine Research, Volume 50, 1992

When Hank
arrived at the

Woods Hole
Oceanographic
Institution in
1944 there was
little reason to

suppose that

anything
momentous had

taken place.

Henry Stommel's heart stopped beating shortly after midnight
on Friday, January 17, 1992, four days after he had undergone
surgery for liver cancer at Deaconess Hospital in Brookline,
Massachusetts. His death brought to an end the career of a man who,
for 45 years, was the most significant scientific contributor to the devel-
opment of oceanography and who brought a rare degree of harmony
and collegiality to the field.

When Hank arrived at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
(WHOI) in 1944 there was little reason to suppose that anything momen-
tous had taken place. As an undergraduate at Yale he had been advised
by a counselor that, since he evidently had no talent for science, he
should take up law. In 1944 he was a second-year graduate student in
astronomy at Yale and a conscientious objector to war. The job at Woods
Hole was a way of serving his country without going to the battlefield.

The Yale astronomy department from which he had come was
strongly focused on celestial mechanics, and Hank had developed an
interest in the marine environment through his study of celestial navi-
gation, one of the courses that he taught. He had read a lot about the
ocean and decided to prepare a synthesis that he dedicated to the stu-
dents in the Navy program in which he had been teaching. It was a trait
that was to stay with him throughout his life; he would be heard. Over
a three- week period he wrote a 208-page book, Science of the Seven Seas,
which was published by Cornell Maritime Press in 1945. In later years
he was somewhat embarrassed about that qualitative survey, but it sold
more copies than all of his other books combined.

Toward the end of the war he moved in with a group of WHOI bach-
elors who occupied the former Episcopal rectory in Woods Hole.
His clowning around during those bachelor years was legend, and so
was his intense study of all aspects of oceanography. He liked people
and he loved life and the wonders of nature. In the years that followed
he took part in many Oceanographic cruises where he could enjoy the
social and professional camaraderie of his colleagues in a setting devoid
of the distractions of modern life. Life at the rectory served as an intro-
duction to life at sea.

Hank's professional development during those early years resulted
in an intriguing mix of publications. Some of them, summarizing what
he had learned, amounted to a kind of report card. They were part of
what he would later refer to as his "commentarial ambition." Others,
reporting measurements and observations, documented his growing
familiarity and involvement with the world of nature. But it was the
third category that revealed his originality and true genius.

One of his first articles, in 1947,
dealt with the computation of the
dynamic height anomaly, a topic
that was anything but arcane. He
proposed using the observed T-S
[temperature-salinity] correlation in
certain regions to estimate the miss-
ing salinity when only temperature
had been measured, and thereby to
determine an approximation to the
dynamic height anomaly. What
makes that study conspicuous is not
the careful evaluation of the feasibil-
ity of the method but the issue that
he addressed. Even in his first year
of published research papers he was
already thinking about how to make
up for the inadequacy of oceanic
observations that has always
plagued physical oceanography.

Two years later he considered
a steady convection cell with
upward flow in the middle and
downward flow at the sides and

An early photo of Henry Stommel

asked whether particles heavier than water could remain in suspension.
He proved that as long as the terminal velocity of the particles is smaller
than the maximum fluid velocity there would be a closed region contain-
ing suspended particles. Since 1949 people in many different fields have
come to the same conclusion. Though he felt that the result would be
applicable to cloud physics and to a suspension of particles or organisms
in the sea, it was the study of the physical process that intrigued him.
Of course, it was the westward intensification paper that put the
name Stommel permanently into the dictionary of ocean circulation. In
1955, when he was invited by Jule Charney to visit the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, he and I worked on a problem together,
and I asked him whether the westward propagation of Rossby waves
suggested the idea to him. He said that there was no connection and
told me the following story.

Early in 1947 Ray Montgomery mentioned to him a question that
had been posed by Columbus Iselin, who was then director of
WHOI. Why was the Gulf Stream a narrow current pressed against the
western side of the Atlantic when neither the thermal driving nor the
wind had any such asymmetry? Hank set up a theoretical model to
treat the problem and found that he had to solve a boundary value
problem involving an elliptic partial-differential equation. He had
derived another such equation for a tidal problem and had learned
that R.V. Southwell had just published a book on relaxation methods
for the numerical solution of elliptic equations. So he decided to learn
the relaxation method by applying it to the circulation model. This
was before electronic computers were developed; relaxation by hand
involved many months of tedious computations using a mechanical

It was the

westward

intensification

paper that put

the name

Stommel

permanently

into the

dictionary

of ocean

circulation.

Stommel's
scientific

inquiries are
enough to

place him on

the list of

scientific

immortals, but

what really

set him

apart was

his style.

calculator. Since the wind stress in his model had east-west symmetry,
his initial guess for the circulation had the same symmetry. But in
reducing the residuals he found that the circulation immediately started
to shift toward one with a stronger current on the western side. After
some experimentation he discovered that the westward shift was
caused by the beta term (the variation of the Coriolis parameter with
latitude). So instead of continuing with the relaxation method, he for-
mulated a simpler model, one that contained the beta term but could be
solved analytically. The publication of that analysis in the 1948
Transactions of the American Geophysical Union marked the beginning of
modeling of large-scale ocean circulation.

Hank said that that experience taught him the value of developing
models that isolated the essential physics in the simplest mathe-
matical context. As the years wore on, he became so proficient at that
and developed such a powerful intuition that in starting a discussion he
would leap past all of what he considered unessential preliminaries and
start with the analysis of his "simple" model. Not infrequently the lis-
tener would just hang on, hoping that as Hank neared the end, the orig-
inal question might become apparent.

In looking back on his career he felt that his most rewarding obser-
vational effort was the MEDOC [MEditerranean Deep Ocean
Convection] cruise in January 1969, when he took part in an attempt to
document the formation of bottom water in the northwestern
Mediterranean. Sources of bottom water must be present in all circula-
tions involving overturning, and since they are episodic, direct observa-
tion of them is 95 percent luck even if one is in the right place. Hank
had no desire to go on a winter cruise to the Greenland Sea, a source of
bottom water for his abyssal circulation model, but he thought that win-
ter observations in the Mediterranean might be tolerable. After a period
of apprehensive waiting in miserable seas, the MEDOC group got its
chance when the mistral wind started blowing. Within a few days the
surface waters had cooled enough to overturn and measurements dur-
ing that period provided complete documentation of the event.

Although his main interests were directed toward theory and obser-
vations relating to large-scale circulation, Hank knew that a firm
understanding of physical mechanisms was a necessary prerequisite.
He analyzed a large number of nonlinear oscillators over the years in an
attempt to understand the different forms of circulation that the ocean
might occupy. He initiated studies in double diffusion, first with
Arnold Arons and Duncan Blanchard (the salt fountain) and then with
Stewart Turner (stable salt stratification). For much of his career he
sought to find out whether the circulation could be described in terms
of point vortices, and in the past few years he and Nelson Hogg
explored the representation of heat flux in terms of point baroclinic vor-
tices. How to determine the absolute velocity field in the ocean was a
topic to which he returned many times until he finally hit upon the idea
of the beta spiral with Fritz Schott.

The acquisition of a personal computer in the early 1980s enabled
him to expand the scope of his studies of simple models. With it he col-
laborated often with Jim Luyten and more recently with Xin Huang on
a variety of simple dynamical models and box models to address con-

ceptual issues pertinent to circulation and climate. He based an intro-
ductory course about ocean circulation on a set of programs that he
wrote for his book, A View of the Sea, published in 1989.

Stommel's scientific inquiries are enough to place him on the list of
scientific immortals, but what really set him apart was his style. Better
than anyone else that I have met he understood the human condition
and the value of humor in coping with life. A conversation or collabora-
tion with him would be interrupted by his frequent peals of laughter
brought on by a funny incident or by the joy of discovery when some-
thing worked out. What amused him the most were human foibles, his
own as well as those of others. Though he had more reason than most
to feel self-important, he shunned pretention; any display of vanity
would start him chuckling and even howling with laughter if he knew
that he would not hurt another's feelings.

From the beginning of his career he displayed an uncanny ability to
bring people together. After he and Elizabeth (Chickie) Brown were
married in 1950, they frequently entertained visiting oceanographers as
well as Hank's colleagues from WHOI and friends from the local com-
munity. Columbus Iselin, the director of WHOI, lived on Martha's
Vineyard and had little unofficial contact with visitors. Hank and
Chickie filled that void even though it must have been a heavy financial
burden (in early 1950 his annual salary was still only $3,000). As Hank's
fame grew, more and more visitors came to WHOI to see him and
stayed for dinner. I have the feeling that nearly every physical oceanog-
rapher in the world must have eaten one of Chickie's dinners.

Entertaining Hank's colleagues while raising three children could
not have been easy for a wife who was trying to establish her own iden-
tity through writing and music. In spite of the demands on her time,
Chickie became the organist of the local Episcopal church and helped to
develop the close contacts with the local residents that the two of them
maintained over the years. In 1980 the Stommels coauthored Volcano
Weather, the Stonj of 1816, the Year Without a Summer. Chickie did most of
the historical research and Hank provided the scientific interpretation.

I believe that the cohesion and collegiality that Hank brought to
oceanography are
unmatched in any
other field. He col-
laborated with an
astonishing number
of colleagues, partic-
ularly younger ones.
He would often seek
out someone who
was clearly strug-
gling with an idea
and help him with a
detailed calculation
to carry the idea fur-
ther. His generosity
in sharing his own
original thoughts

Chickie and Hank Stommel

His

generosity

in sharing

his own

original

thoughts

was a
constant
source of
wonder.

Science of the Seven Seas

Henry Stommel's first publication in
oceanography was called Science of the
Seven Seas. It wasn't his favorite publication
he is said to have tried to burn all the
copies! but he did list it in his curriculum
vitae. The 208-page book was published in
1945 by Cornell Maritime Press, New York.
The book jacket offered the following sketch
of the author:

"Henry Stommel is our youngest author. 1
was born/ he writes, 'on Sept. 27, 1920, in
Wilmington, Delaware. Brought up in

Freeport, New York, I spent much of my time in small boats and tinkering

around with scientific gadgets, microscopes and aquatic bugs, chemical

experiments.

T went to Yale University, joined the Corinthian Yacht Club there, gradu-
ated in 1942 after majoring in physics. Upon graduation I was appointed an

assistant in the Physics Department and then promoted to Instructor of

Navigation and Nautical Astronomy.

Besides physics and navigation, I also i^

taught undergraduate mathematics as

the occasion demanded. In 1943 I was

appointed Fellow of Pierson College.
Tierson College was one of four

Navy V-12 colleges at Yale. It was my

good fortune to become very well

acquainted with the Navy trainees in

our college. I suppose I still could pick

all 400 of them out by first name. I

found them very much interested in

the science of the seas, and so I

thought it might be worthwhile to set

down some facts about the oceans in

book form.

In October 1944, the National

Defense Research Council requested

that I take up some research work for

them, at which task I am now

employed.

T am sorry this biography is

so small, but I really haven't lived

much yet/" <*

cien

Seven Seas

by Henry Stommel

Fellow of Pierson College, Yale University

8

was a constant source of wonder. Stature or position mattered little to
him. He would look past the quirks of personalities and focus on the
development of a concept. No matter what their personal differences
were, his collaborators shared one characteristic dedication to
research. That was all that he looked for, and it was enough for him to
bring people together. I remember looking at the remarkable assort-
ment of individuals at a large party at his house and realizing that we
would never have come together in a social setting were it not for the
close friendship that each of us felt for this one man. *

Arnold Arons

University of Washington (retired)

One fascinating aspect of working closely with Hank was watching
his almost ferocious tenacity in attacking a problem. When we got
stuck, he would never give up. The next day, or even a week or a
month later, he would come back with a new angle, a new version of a
boundary condition, a new physical insight, and initiate a revised
attack. It was clear that he was rolling the subject over and over in his
mind all hours of the day. This tenacity was, of course, informed by his
incredible intuition and his skill in coupling this intuition to the sim-
plest but most penetrating mathematical formalism. I never saw him
give up until at least some plausible dent had been made. After the
dent, he sometimes lost interest in the problem (this was only in con-
nection with relatively minor problems; he never lost interest in the
major ones), and then it was virtually impossible to get him to return to
it. One could raise the issue for further discussion; he would listen
kindly and provide gentle encouragement or show you what was non-
sensical, but he would not himself return to it full blast.

Once somewhere around 1955 or 1956, Hank undertook to consult
me about a personal problem that turned out to be nagging him. He
was frequently being addressed as Dr. Stommel, and he was embar-
rassed because he was not a "real" doctor. His question was: Should he
go back to graduate school and get a doctorate? My immediate explo-
sive reaction was "Under whom?" He wasn't sure, but possibly Rossby
or someone like that. I finally said something like this: "Hank, within a
few years you will have more doctor's degrees than you will know
what to do with. If you were to go back to graduate school, you would
be wasting precious time filling all sorts of now meaningless require-
ments, and worst of all, you would be subject to being examined by
people whom you should be examining. Please stop even thinking
about such a move." He probably consulted others besides me; I don't
know, but I imagine others would have said the same thing.
Fortunately, I never heard any such moonshine again. His sense of
security became firm with rapidly growing recognition. *

One

fascinating

aspect of

working closely

with Hank was

watching his

almost ferocious

tenacity in

attacking

a problem.

Using the Compton
generator, Hank

Stommel

demonstrates the

Coriolis force for a

junior high school

class in 1991.

Wilton (Tony) Sturges
Florida State University

The main reason I adored Stommel so much was that he helped me
understand that it is OK to have fun. Almost all the authority fig-
ures I can remember, whether deans, directors, professors, or parents,
gave me the impression that work was serious business. Stommel
seemed to think that doing science should be great good fun, and it
rubbed off on me, to my enormous benefit.

In the late 60s, he was putting together the program that would be
called "Pre-MODE." I remember a meeting at WHOI where Richard
Scarlet and I were talking at coffee break; Henry joined us, and asked
whether we had seen his steam whistle. When we said no, he insisted
that we come over to his house that afternoon to see his wondrous toy.
We were very junior and he had already achieved prominent status by

then, so we would
have gone to see a
bucket of plain water.
He showed us, in
great detail, his whis-
tle from a real loco-
motive, connected to
a large air tank in the
barn. The "steam"
came from a small air
compressor, which
took ages to work up
a good head of pres-
sure, so we went into
the house for a cup of
coffee while the
pump went to work.
He had rigged a red
light to come on when the pressure built up.

Eventually the light came on and it was time to play. With great
delight, Henry let 'er rip. Scarlet and I were astonished; the blast must
have made people jump as far away as the Bourne Bridge. It echoed
back and forth for some seconds. He made a comment to the effect that
the neighbors weren't too keen on the thing. I don't think Chickie vol-
unteered any comment about it.

Another time, I was walking down the hall in the WHOI Clark
Laboratory, having just arrived for some meeting, and Henry passed
me, pushing what seemed to be a large pile of garden hose mounted on
top of a bar stool. He asked, "Tony! have you seen my Coriolis demon-
stration?" Knowing full well that I hadn't, he proceeded to tell me how
it worked, explaining that it was designed to show schoolchildren

10

about the slope across the Gulf Stream. He turned the handle, making
the spool of garden hose turn around, and as he was talking he walked
around the stool, turning the whole contraption around with him.
There was a vertical glass tube attached to the side, to act as a pressure
gauge. It was a sort of Rube Goldberg, rub-your-stomach-and-pat-
your-head kind of demo, and it did look pretty gosh-awful, but as he
talked, and walked, and turned, damned if the water level in the tube
didn't start to go up, just like he said. Nearly 3 feet. If he had been
some crackpot who walked in off the street, it would have been awful-
ly embarrassing, but Stommel was able to pull it off. He was obviously
having a great good time, and demonstrating the effect of the rotation
of the earth at the same time. He realized that it looked a little silly, of
course, and he was laughing all the while, with a twinkle in his eyes
like a schoolboy getting away with a grand prank.

I see that playfulness, that joy, so rarely. It gives me hope that per-
haps I can have some of it in my life. My own father was such a good
man; yet he was a prime example of what it means to work hard. I
don't think he had much fun, particularly in his job, and I watched
him slowly run down as he got older. Had it not been for Stommel I
might not have recognized what was wrong. I suspect that there are
rough equivalents in other fields; in the movie Top Gun, Maverick's
expression was "It's time to buzz the tower." Stommel showed me
how to buzz the tower, and how to do it right. <

Jeffries Wyman
Paris, France

My friendship with Henry Stommel was one of the warmest and
longest of my life. It goes back to the days of the war when we
were both working, he full time and I as a consultant, at WHOI. It took
me to many new places and introduced me to many new ideas that
have greatly broadened my perspective.

We were both occupied with problems centering about sonar and,
more generally, submarine detection; but soon we changed direction to
the study of the Navy's use of smoke screens. The latter involved the
exchange of matter and energy between the air and the surface in two
tropical oceans. It involved much travel. This introduced me to many
new physical concepts, such as convection and eddy diffusion, and
Lord Rayleigh's analysis of instability.

At that time I was living on Naushon Island, near Woods Hole, and
I commuted every day by kayak, which gave me a breath of fresh air.
Stommel would often come over for visits on weekends and it was then
that I learned to appreciate him and his special sense of humor,
expressed in the miniature railway he built in the large vegetable gar-
den behind his house in Falmouth. I can see him now sitting in the dri-
ver's seat of the small locomotive, but, alas, the driver is gone. <

Stommel

showed me

how to

buzz the

tower, and

how to
do it right.

11

On Honorif ics

by Starbuck

HALF A LIFETIME AGO, when I still felt flattered at being
addressed as professor, I happened to be invited to a friend's house
in Coconut Grove. I stopped on the way at a neighborhood liquor store
to purchase a present of a Greek aperitif for his wife. The owner was
busily checking some invoices on a newly arrived shipment, and I com-
plimented him on the variety of his wares. He explained that he was a
professor of beverages at the University of Miami an academic career
the possibilities of which I had somehow never considered.

Time was that the only doctor in town was a physician. Very occasion-
ally one might encounter an eminent divine sporting a D.D., but a non-
medical doctor was something of a rarity. Woods Hole was, of course, an
exception. Then, as part of our national response to Sputnik in 1957, there
was a vast expansion of our graduate schools. A Ph.D. became necessary
for entrance into a career of government-sponsored research.

Today there are probably more Ph.D/s in Falmouth than there were
B.A.'s two generations ago. At a recent hearing it was asserted that one
housing development is exclusively inhabited by them.

Sometimes it leads to confusion. Years ago I was staying at the home
of one of my oldest friends and mentors, author of a distinguished trea-
tise on physiology. He has done fundamental research on hemoglobin.
Before he turned 80 his days were filled with adventure: a pack trip
through the mountain passes of Kurdistan, or a solitary perambulation
through the jungles of New Guinea with two paroled cannibals for
guides. For several years he paddled a kayak back and forth between
Woods Hole and Stone House on Naushon every night during the win-
ter. Today he lives and works in Rome. He is a Boston patrician of the
old school and, I think, the wisest man I know.

It was after dinner, and we were sitting in the parlor of his house in
Chestnut Hill, next door to the Cabots. He had recently lost his wife, and
conversation seemed to do him some good. The telephone rang faintly
in the hall, and we could hear the maid going to answer it. "Yes, this is
Doctor ../s residence." A pause, and then in her thick brogue:
"Oh no, Mam he's one of them doctors that never does anybody

any good." *

The Enterprise

March 8, 1985

12

George Veronis

Yale University

When Hank Stommel arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey, for a three-month stay in the spring of
1955, he and I had both been working on time-dependent motions in the
ocean, I on geostrophic adjustment and he on the influence of the beta-
effect on wave motions. We began collaborating on a study of waves in a
two-layer ocean. We were grappling with the asymptotics of a sixth-
degree dispersion relation when Gordon Groves, who was then at
Scripps, visited and gave a seminar in which he talked about the normal-
mode treatment of physical systems. That procedure was just what we
needed to reduce our sixth-order system to two uncoupled third-order
systems, an enormous simplification that enabled us to describe the two-
layer linear response in terms of barotropic and baroclinic modes.

We both worked hard on the analysis and the write-up, and then, in
his typically generous fashion, Hank listed me as first author. The
paper, "The action of variable wind-stresses on a stratified ocean," was
published in the Journal of Marine Research in 1956. 1 was sufficiently
young and vain to agree to the order of names, particularly since our
acronym for the paper was AVS, which we jokingly referred to as "A
Veronis-Stommel" paper. Some time after the paper appeared, I real-
ized that it was I who had joined Hank on that work, and that the order
of the names should have been reversed. Furthermore, Hank pointed
out to me that we had neglected to acknowledge the help from Gordon
Groves, who had introduced us to normal modes.

No issue in the realm of academics is as thorny as that of priority of
ideas and proper credits. Most of us find it easy to talk ourselves into
feeling that we have prior claim. I was lucky to have encountered the
problem for the first time with someone as understanding and gener-
ous as Hank, who avoided controversy by listing the other person first.
But I figured that it would be better to avoid the entire issue by an
objective procedure, and in publications with other people I have
adopted the practice of listing names of coauthors in alphabetical order.
Very few people have objected to that, perhaps because my name
almost invariably comes last.

When I became editor of the Journal of Marine Research, I asked
Hank whether he thought that I could suggest alphabetical listing of
coauthors for all papers in JMR. His response was, "I thought you
wanted to avoid controversy." t*

We both

worked hard on

the analysis

and the

write-up, and

then, in his

typically

generous

fashion, Hank

listed me as

first author.

13

Joseph Pedlosky

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

There were

always
invitations to

draw closer
and to take up
the adventure

with him
if you

were ready

for the ride.

My keenest recollections are of Hank bursting through the door of
my office with some excited gleam in his eye announcing, "Look
at this, you might find this interesting, don't you think?" or "What do
you make of this?" These were always invitations to draw closer and to
take up the adventure with him if you were ready for the ride.

If you ever had the pleasure of working with Hank on some scien-
tific problem, you realized quite quickly that doing Science together
was one of Hank's principal ways of getting close to other people.

I had met Hank in the early 1960s, but it wasn't until I got to WHOI
in 1979 that there was much of a chance to work together, and even
then it took more time than I am happy to think about before we really
got together on something good. We started to work on the thermocline
problem with Jim Luyten. Jim and Hank had already begun some
numerical studies of the ventilated thermocline, and I was able to find a
verifying analytical solution that together with Hank and Jim's original
calculations really got us going.

A good deal of the fun then was in the childhood games of playing
together Hank's notes slipped under the door awaiting me in the
morning, each note dated with the time of night when the thought
occurred, or the telephone calls that started in mid sentence with no
identification ("Daddy, I think it's Hank.") and began with a "You
knooow..." or "Aaall right...." Even more exciting was his relentless
pressure to get the problem clear, understand how it really worked,
bring it all into the open, and finally say, as he did when we had fin-
ished, "No one will ever think about the thermocline the same way
again." This wasn't a boast, but his own test of how to know when a
problem was at least temporarily finished.

When we had completed the ventilated thermocline paper, before it
was even published, a circulated draft of the paper was sharply criti-
cized in the gray literature. I remember one Sunday morning getting
another Stommelian call that came at a late hour for Hank, but an early
hour for me. It began. . .(click) "Did you read X's article in Ocean
Modelling? No? Well, you had better read it. I'll bring it right over." Two
minutes later, Hank is at the kitchen door and I'm still in pajamas.

"Come in, come in."

"Oh, no no no, can't stay, can't stay but see if you can deal with
this give me a call."

Nerves turned to relief when the soft spot of X's article was found.
What amazed me was the relief Hank also felt. It was the first time I had
seen him apprehensive about his own work.

Hank would ruminate about the other reasons he did Science. Work
was a way to drive off what he called the "background melancholy"
produced by a clear, steady vision of mortality. Work held that off and
directed his imagination away from the dark places. He didn't like to
dwell on the dark places, but he appreciated them and wouldn't hide
them. His passion for Joseph Conrad and especially for Heart of

14

Darkness and Victory was a glimpse into this dark side. Winning at
roulette on the Titanic was the way we had talked about it together.

He responded once to the joke about the rabbi who paid off his cash
debt to a dead man with a personal check placed in the coffin with,
"That man understood the darkness more than any of the others."

Hank loved his life and the gift of consciousness of both life and the
universe. After his first big illness he talked at length about the gift.
"Just think, instead I could have been just an apple," he said. "I might
never have realized I was alive."

On his 70th birthday his colleagues in our department in Woods
Hole gave Hank an accordian. He had played it a little in the past and
he would, he allowed, be eager to take it up again. When his indigna-
tion that year over the financial undersupport of the WHOI/MBL
library became too much for him, he suggested that he and I, both duf-
fers on our instruments, take our accordian and clarinet at tourist time
down to Water Street in front of the MBL director's office and play,
with an open cigar box on the curb, to raise money for the library. With
any luck at all we might even be arrested for panhandling without a
license. "Wouldn't that look just fine in The Enterprise?" he chortled.

Well, he died before we got to do it. I suppose I could do it alone
now. But like a whole lot of other things, it wouldn't be as much fun
without him. *

Henry Charnock

The University (Southampton, England)

Henry Stommel had not worked for long at WHOI before he took a
leave of absence (unpaid) and sailed on the Queen Man/ (cabin
class, no less) to work for a few months at Imperial College in London.

He brought a mimeographed copy of his westward-intensification
paper; we found it rather simple, not then appreciating that most of his
ideas seemed rather simple, after he had had
them. He gave a seminar describing how
patches of anomalously cold water had been
found south of the Gulf Stream; we did not
appreciate that as much as it deserved either.

But we did encourage him to visit Lewis
Fry Richardson at his house by Loch Long in
Scotland, where on January 6, 1948, they made
some observations of two-particle diffusion of
particles on the sea surface. It was one of the
few of Henry's scientific enterprises in which
he was not the prime mover. A three-page
paper was promptly written and published
and has become well known for its opening
words "We have observed the relative

motion of floating pieces of parsnip...." but is also remarkable for its
gallery of references Defant, Einstein, Kendall, Richardson, Schmidt,

Henry Stommel

sketched Lewis Fry

Richardson observing

floating pieces of
parsnip from Blairmore

Pier, using an
instrument made by
Richardson in his base-
ment. Stommel later
wrote that "it required
keeping one eye on the
parsnips, another on
the compass, another
on the level and the
other on the distance
scale." (Henry Charnock
says, "I can imagine

the mischievous
twinkle in his eye when

he wrote that

'on shipboard it would

require gimbals.'")

15

These

experiments

were often

performed

during coffee

hour, and

typically with

hilariously

disastrous

results.

Taylor, and Weiner. Von Weisaeker and Heisenberg had their names
added in proof!

Henry's visit led to a continuing cooperation between the WHOI
Department of Physical Oceanography, Imperial College, and the then
National Institute of Oceanography. More important for some of us, it
led to enduring friendships with Henry and his family. <

Kirk Bryan

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton University

My friendship with Hank goes back to two very formative years I
spent in Woods Hole in the late 1950s. At that time there was a
small, eclectic group on the top floor of the Bigelow Building working
on geophysical fluid dynamics (though the words had not been coined
yet) and meteorology. Coffee regulars among the meteorologists were
Joanne Simpson, Joe Levine, and Andy Bunker. We were sometimes
joined by Al Woodcock and Duncan Blanchard, and other coffee regu-
lars were Willem Malkus, Mary Thayer, George Veronis, Al Faller, and
Margaret Chaffee. Stommers personality was the glue that held the
diverse group together. You knew when he stepped into the room that
he was going to come up with something interesting and amusing.

He kept the third floor of the Bigelow Building in constant turmoil
with his ideas for experiments. These experiments were often per-
formed during coffee hour, and typically with hilariously disastrous
results. Some of these experiments led to more serious studies, and
eventually were reported in respected scientific journals. Others, even
more spectacular, went nowhere. I can still remember the puzzled look
of an administrator who stopped by during coffee hour. There were a
half-a-dozen people fascinated by a little tornado of dyed water in an 8-
foot Plexiglas cylinder. The relevance to WHOI's research programs
must have seemed very remote.

Stommel's office was an amazing clutter of paper and old instru-
ments. Among the curiosities was an old, hand-operated printing press,
which Hank allowed us to experiment with for printing notices for the
joint MIT-WHOI seminars. The printing press reinforced my association
of Hank with Benjamin Franklin, kindred natural philosophers with the
same mellow sense of humor. t

John Knauss

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Henry Stommel's scientific contributions are well documented; his
contributions to the fraternity of oceanographers are less so. I give
two examples with which I was closely allied.

* * *

The International Indian Ocean Expedition was endorsed by the
Scientific Committee on Oceanographic Research as a follow-on to the

16

ISSUE NO.

International Geophysical Year (1957 to 1958). Henry was skeptical. The
plan, such as it was, was not well thought through. What little planning
that existed was top down. Those who were expected to do the work
had not been consulted. He expressed these thoughts in subtle form
through five issues of The Indian Ocean Bubble, an anonymous newslet-
ter published in 1959 and 1960, whose publisher, editor, and chief con-
tributor was known to all.

But the planning did eventually get done by those of us who were to
do the work, and in later years (the International Indian Ocean Expe-
dition lasted until 1965) Henry became an enthusiastic participant. His
entry into the Indian Ocean was along the equator. I had the Scripps ves-
sel, Argo, for two cruises of three months each in 1962 and 1963 to look
for an equatorial undercurrent under the differing monsoon conditions,
and Henry thought it would be an excellent opportunity for some of his
theoretical colleagues to see how the other half lived. I was agreeable as
long as all were prepared to work, so in July of 1962 Jule Charney
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Henry Stommel arrived in
Mombasa for the sec-
ond leg of the first
cruise, and some eight
months later Allan
Robinson (Harvard
University) came for
the first leg of the sec-
ond cruise. Each
brought graduate stu-
dents, including Elliot Schulman and Bob Blandford.

These were good cruises, although the results later proved very diffi-
cult to sort out. There were few equipment breakdowns. The weather was
mostly good. We made a brief stop in the Seychelles. There were equator
crossings and ceremonies. But mostly it was long days of work: Nansen
bottle casts, reading thermometers, running oxygens, putting in buoys,
recording current-meter records, etc. I still cherish a remark of Jule
Charney as he stumbled out of the wheelhouse one night after spending
two hours taking radar ranges every five minutes of a sometimes difficult-
to-read, anchored buoy: "John, I had no idea you had to work so hard for
a couple of data points." Henry Stommel's goal had been achieved.

My second example is from the same period. Vladimir Kort, the
USSR's most senior physical oceanographer and director of what is now
the Shirshov Institute, wanted a multiship international survey of the
world ocean. Henry was not impressed. He thought we needed more
focused, problem-solving research rather than one general survey at this
time. Fair enough, but he also had what seemed to me to be the rather
naive idea that we should go to Moscow and have a heart-to-heart talk
with our Soviet colleagues, few of whom we had yet met, to sort out our
differences. Somehow arrangements were made, and in October of 1962
John Swallow (National Institute of Oceanography, UK), Joe Reid
(Scripps Institution of Oceanography), Henry, and I trooped off to
Moscow to take on Kort and his survey proponents. I believe we were
the first US oceanographers to visit the Soviet Union since World War II.

The Indian Ocean
Bubble was published
by an "anonymous" edi-
tor to comment on the
organization of the
International Indian
Ocean Expedition.

2C5AN JDUBBLE

17

"Just how

individual

scientists and

institutions are

going to

participate in

this Expedition

without being

swindled is

difficult for

me to see."

-Indian Ocean Bubble

Kort was of the old school. He knew what he wanted, but he was a
gracious host, and he heard us out. More importantly, he invited his
younger colleagues, not only from his institute but from others, to take
part in the discussions, and it soon became clear that a number dis-
agreed with their boss. We never convinced Kort.

There was no international world ocean survey, but the systematic
surveys of the Soviet Union continued. What did result from that first
trip was a number of professional relationships, friendships, and scien-
tific exchanges that culminated in POLYMODE some years later. Once
more, Henry Stommel had made a significant contribution to the frater-
nity of oceanographers. *

Warren Wooster

University of Washington

My closest association with Hank occurred aboard Argo in August
1964 during what he called the "Anglo-Californian Expedition."
This was part of the International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE), and
we worked on a phenomenon of particular interest, the reversing
Somali Current, at the season when its poleward flow was most
strongly developed.

Hank was ambivalent about the IIOE. On one hand, it was a prime
example of the sort of top-down science planning that aroused his vis-
ceral opposition hence his launching of The Indian Ocean Bubble in
which, while maintaining his "gently pejorative tone" as editor, as con-
tributor he commented, "Just how individual scientists and institu-
tions are going to participate in this Expedition without being swin-
dled is difficult for me to see."

On the other hand, as suggested by his unpublished 1954 note
("Why do our ideas about the ocean circulation have such a peculiarly
dream-like quality?"), he was fascinated by the opportunity to test
plausible hypotheses, for example, concerning the peculiar circulation
in the western Arabian Sea. While some had proposed that the Indian
Ocean be surveyed with stations regularly spaced on a rectilinear grid,
Hank recognized that not only would many scientists be repelled by
this approach, but that the pursuit of interesting questions was more
likely to both attract participants and result in significant findings.

I had just returned to Scripps after a few years in Paris with the
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, where I was, in a way
(as coordinator of the IIOE), one of the top-down villains. Hank was for-
giving enough to invite me to sail with him on Argo on what was in
many ways a delightful cruise, especially because of Hank's company.
One can, however, remember less delightful elements for example, the
continuing nightmare of trying to make oceanographic stations in the

18

face of a 6-to-7 knot current with lots of shear and wire angles approach-
ing 90 degrees. Hank and I split the watches mine was The Queen's
Own while his was The Black Watch. We shared the chief scientist's cabin
as well as a large basket of Kenyan beer, purchased in Mombasa and
nursed through the cruise so that on the last evening, as we approached
Mauritius, there could be a bottle at each place in the mess hall. In those
days, Scripps ships were generally dry while those of Woods Hole were
generally not (or so we were taught at Scripps). Scientific parties are not
always enthusiastic about their chief scientists, especially at the end of a
strenuous cruise and ship's company can be even more critical but
that night, we were highly regarded by all hands. *

Arthur (Rocky) Miller

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (retired)

* *

In 1946, in my first days at the Institution, I had to find a place to live
while I was in Woods Hole. There were a number of young investiga-
tors working on various projects, and in order to house them the
Institution had hired the rectory of the Church of The Messiah, which
was a large, old house located where the present rectory now stands.
There were many rooms and a large kitchen as well as a living room
with a pump organ. In the basement someone had punched a hole in
one of the walls and set up an electric train and tracks. Among the eligi-
ble bachelors there were Henry Stommel, Andrew Bunker, Claude
Ronne, and three or four others.

Previous to my arrival, a number of Texans had lived there, and I
think they were responsible for painting the kitchen black. At any rate,
there was fine camaraderie among all the residents, and there was a lot
of shoptalk between them as well as partying and all kinds of pleas-
antries. I remember one time when Hank spent a whole hour at the
organ doing what we see Victor Borge do when he lampoons an opera
performance. Hank also did a whole church service with sermon,
singing, and organ playing. He was a fun performer.

He was not above playing pranks on the rest of the house. Once,
almost everyone was out of the rectory attending some party and the
house was dark. Hank went down to the basement and put a light bulb
in a fuse socket. When the fellows returned from the party, of course,
someone turned on a light switch. Nothing out of the ordinary hap-
pened until other lights were turned on. Each time a light went on, the
house got progressively dimmer and dimmer, until it was impossible to
do anything but grope around in the dark.

The rectory was a fine introduction to the good humor and fellow-
ship of working at the Oceanographic. <

Scientific

parties are

not always

enthusiastic

about chief

scientists,
but that

night, we
were highly
regarded by

all hands.

19

When Science Failed

by Starbuck

ON FRIDAYS AT FIVE O'CLOCK Columbus Iselin used to leap aboard the
Risk to retreat to his farm at Tashmoo, leaving distinguished visitors to
fend for themselves. They frequently ended up at the rectory for room and
board. The Antarctic oceanographer Sir George Deacon was eating spaghetti in
our kitchen on the Saturday that we discovered that the gas that gurgled up
from the drain in the sink, when the plumbing upstairs was used, could be
ignited in a clear blue flame.

Fearful of a subterranean explosion, we decided to remedy the matter and
systematically probed the yard with drill rod to no avail. The resources of science
were brought into play. Allyn Vine loaned us an old mine detector, but we didn't
seem to be able to make it work. Johnny Holmes devised an electrical potential
method, in which a perilously high voltage was applied to the sewer pipe where
it left the cellar. A map of the voltage field out back would, theoretically, lead us
to the offending pipe or cesspool cover. Somehow it didn't work either.

The desperate measure of digging down to the pipe where it was known to
leave the cellar and trying to follow it came to an end when, after twenty feet, it
appeared to go straight down. The methods of exact science having failed, we
turned to the occult.

A visiting biologist, Dr. Hillary Moore, had often aroused our skepticism
with stories of water divining in the west of England. He offered to solve our
problem. As we walked toward the rectory past Little Harbor, Hillary broke off
a willow branch from a tree in Frank Ryder's yard. This brought Frank out of
the house, where a ladies' tea party was in progress. They all followed us to the
rectory's backyard, where Hillary paced up and down delicately balancing his
willow fork. As we turned on all the faucets and flushed the toilets to stimulate
the power of running water, the purer scientists Art Klebba and Andy Bunker
retreated upstairs with a bottle of Scotch. When Hillary finally felt the proper
twitch, the twig was pointing directly at the center of the concrete garage floor.
We expostulated, but old Mrs. Moore spoke up with "I'm sure my son's cor-
rect." Then George Clarke's mother discovered, with her cane, an iron cover in
the driveway, but it turned out to be an empty rain cistern. The resources of sci-
ence, both profane and occult, had been exhausted. Even the keen eyes of old
ladies had been deceived.

George Griffin, one of the vestrymen, was also water commissioner. He rep-
resented therefore the combined power of both Church and State. When he
heard of our plight, one of his men with a water-main detector came to the
scene. He found the lid in no time flat, behind the garage. We eagerly dug
down and, with a bar, cracked it open. There was an immense rush of escaping
gas, and our troubles with the netherworld were over. *

The Enterprise
March 11, 1985

20

Gambling Frenzy

by Starbuck

WHAT MUST HAVE BEEN the single greatest night of gambling in Woods
Hole history occurred at the Episcopal Rectory nearly forty years ago.
Hundreds of millions of dollars changed hands before midnight and this was
in the days before there was even a thought of a state-sanctioned lottery. The
minister himself was not directly involved. He was living several houses
removed and had rented the old rectory to some Woods Hole bachelors.

Up to the particular night involved, gambling at the rectory had been con-
fined to the modest weekly poker game with Jeff Allen, Bill Schroeder, Art
Klebba and a few guests. But on the great night itself the house was crowded,
mostly around the roulette wheel in the parlor. There were card games in the
second-floor bedrooms and a very serious session of 21 on the third floor. A
bank adjoined the bathroom. It was stocked with bills of various denomina-
tions, from one to a hundred dollars. A few bills with higher denominations
were held by the bank in reserve, and of course the old gelatine hectograph,
green ink and extra paper stood ready should more currency be required.

Upon arrival each invitee was issued some of this cash, free, and steered
toward the gambling tables. Anticipating that there might be a shortage of low
denominations, the bank offered larger ones for small ones at the rate of 10 to 9.
Timid souls spent the evening collecting one dollar bills and exchanging them
for ten dollar bills a steady if modest profit.

The pace at roulette was brisk. Dave Barnes, the croupier, insisted upon carry-
ing a thousand dollar bill for emergencies in his back pocket. Gil Oakley captain
of the Atlantis, deftly filched it, placed it on a single number, won, and the infla-
tion was on. Rapidly the bets increased; the bank printed bigger bills; the passion
of greed mounted, and by one o'clock stakes of millions of dollars were on the
table. The faithful few at the 21 table upstairs, including, as I remember, Andy
Bunker and Phil Shafer, were playing for a hundred million dollars a hand.

Altogether it was a remarkable evening, perhaps uncomfortably a little too
much like real life. The fever of winning, the smell of money, the lure of quick
profit, a certain mad recklessness permeated the air. If a toy printing device can
evoke such frenzies, think what the U.S. Treasury's Bureau of Engraving is
doing to us all. ***

The Enterprise
March 1, 1985

21

Henry was

endlessly

helpful in

solving the

problems of

working with a

small research

vessel away

from its

home base.

John Swallow

Institute of Oceanographic Sciences Deacon Laboratory (retired)

> *> <*

Like many people connected with the oceanographic world I enjoyed
the privilege of working with Henry on some of the projects that he
inspired. Often on visits to Woods Hole I had the chance to listen to him
talk and to enjoy his and Chickie's generous hospitality at home.

Most of my contact with Henry was by correspondence. He was a
great letter writer, if sometimes a reluctant traveler. He would say,
"Look, I could write you a thousand letters or make a hundred tele-
phone calls for the price of a transatlantic air fare."

Soon after I began making the first batch of neutrally buoyant floats,
at the end of 1954, he began writing to me about his idea that there
might be a deep countercurrent under the Gulf Stream. In a little more
than two years, we thought we had found it. That soon led to a 15-
month project measuring deep currents from R/ V Aries, based at
Bermuda. It really was Henry's project: He wrote the proposal, got the
funds to support it, took part in the seagoing work, and was endlessly
helpful in solving the problems of working with a small research vessel
away from its home base.

That project raised more questions than it answered. But Henry had
plenty of other ideas. He got interested in the Indian Ocean in the early
1960s, and we were both involved in surveying the Somali Current in
the southwest monsoon of 1964. That was followed by an exploration of
how deep water is formed in the northwest Mediterranean, then the
Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment in the early 1970s, and finally a return
to the variable currents of the equatorial Indian Ocean in the late 1970s.

The last time I saw Henry was in 1983, when he came to London to
be made a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. I retired in that year,
but Henry's correspondence did not stop; if anything it increased, not
always about "work" but usually connected with the sea somehow. He
wrote to me sometime last year asking about Admiral Boscawen's expe-
dition to India in 1748. He had come across a report saying that Bosca-
wen had lost 3,000 men from eating poisonous fish near Rodriguez-
was it true? As it happened, I had got interested in that expedition for
another reason: One of the recommended sailing ship routes from
South Africa to India is still called the "Boscawen passage." I wondered
why he chose that route, which would seem hazardous if one's longi-
tude were doubtful, as it might well have been in 1748. Regrettably, I
didn't find the answer to either question in time to write to Henry. In
fact, I still don't know, though I'm still interested.

Both Mary and I miss his letters very much. <

22

Bruce Warren

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

* *

In 1941 Albert Defant proposed his reference surface for computing
absolute geostrophic currents in the Atlantic Ocean. It had no basis in
physics, but it was used in a number of investigations in part for lack
of much else, in part by reason of authority of publication. It charmed
Hank. When he visited Defant at his home in Innsbruck, Hank asked
him how he had thought up the construction. Defant dismissed it with
a wave, calling it, as Hank understood him to say, a kosmischer Schwnnk
(cosmic prank).

Hank relished the phrase. His first diagram illustrating his revolu-
tionary ideas about interior flows and western-boundary currents in the
deep ocean circulation was published in the famous Letter to the
Editors of Deep-Sen Research in 1958. Although this figure has been
reproduced many times, it incorrectly represents the theory in high lati-
tudes by turning the interior streamlines westward there. One after-
noon Hank was in such a relaxed, expansive mood that I thought he
might not be offended if I asked him what he had had in mind when he
drew the streamlines that way. Only halfway into my question, he guf-
fawed, and said, "Oh, that was a bungled kosmischer Schwnnkl"

After Hank died, Fritz Schott told me that probably what Defant
had really said to Hank was kosmischer Scliwung (spirit, play, verve). It
had been a favorite term of his, as in recommending to anyone trying to
contour a small number of data points that he get a kosmischer Schuning
in his hand.

Whatever Defant said, Hank loved pranks, and he carried them off
with verve. At the time when Buddhist monks were incinerating them-
selves in Saigon by way of objecting to the Diem government, Hank
brought around a printed "news bulletin" that read something like:
"Another Walsh Cottage Mathematician has burned himself to death on
Water Street in protest against the harsh, dictatorial policies of
President Poo Foo. When asked for comment, Poo Foo said, I'm run-
ning a democracy here, and I don't want any interference.'" Hank
wouldn't let this out of his hands, for fear that Paul Fye might see it.

A prank of a different sort was The Indian Ocean Bubble, a very infor-
mal newsletter whose five issues were published in 1959 and 1960. The
Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research was then planning the
International Indian Ocean Expedition, without paying a great deal of
attention to possible seagoing participants, and its discussions tended
toward showing the flag(s), international cooperation, "socio-econom-
ic" puffery, and the like. The Bubble sought through editorials and corre-
spondence to chide these folks, to stimulate interest in exploring specif-
ic oceanographic phenomena, and in devising practical means for doing
so. Even years afterwards Hank was reluctant to admit being the editor,
although the typography and literary style were clearly his, and the
mischievous twinkle as he evaded questioning was a giveaway. The
Bubble remains fun to read, but its success was modest, limited perhaps
to fostering reconnaissance of the Somali Current and the Equatorial
Undercurrent. In concluding the series, the editor explained: "The editor

Hank

loved pranks,

and he

carried

them off

with verve.

23

has maintained a gently pejorative tone throughout the brief lifetime of
this journal it would have become a clergyman. But when one criti-
cizes too often it tends to take on a petulant ring. Since your editor has
essentially a sunny disposition, he has elected to retire from the field-
secure in his cloak of anonymity some day, perhaps, to appear again
in a dramatic way (as a Black Knight?) to do battle with Sin."

Would that he could.

Redwood Wright

Woods Hole, Massachusetts

He made me

realize that
sound intuition

and honest,
careful

acquisition

and analysis of

data are

essential in
any worthwhile

enterprise.

Like others, I have warm memories of Hank's playful sense of the
ridiculous and his ready willingness to share with a colleague or
student his knowledge, insight, and understanding. But I remember
best his personal kindness and compassion when I sorely needed both.

Hank was a member of my thesis committee and had expressed
admiration for my dissertation. Nevertheless, when we drove to the
University of Rhode Island together for my thesis defense, I was ner-
vous, and he knew it. I don't remember details of our conversation, but
it was pleasant and nonscientific to keep my nerves in hand.

Coming back was far different. I had passed, but barely, and had
come pretty well unglued in the process, despite the gentle questioning
of the committee. Hank knew I was devastated. In the nicest possible
way, he reminded me that we can't all be world-class fluid dynamicists,
and that significant contributions can be made by a conscientious
observer. He identified several such individuals who had helped build
the foundations of physical oceanography and were still working to
open up new areas of understanding. He made me realize that sound
intuition and honest, careful acquisition and analysis of data are essen-
tial in any worthwhile enterprise. He helped restore my spirits, and my
perspective. And ever since, in crises not necessarily professional, I
have drawn strength and confidence from those wise words of Henry
Stommel. *t

Walter H. Munk
Scripps Institution of Oceanography

* *

Hank has had a greater influence on physical oceanography than
any other person of my generation. I met him in 1946 at the New
York Academy of Sciences at a symposium on convection, sponsored, I
believe, by Carl-Gustav Rossby. Hank had just started his talk when all
the lights went out. He was stopped for about two seconds. Then he
said, "We can do this just as well in the dark," and so he did. This paper
is the first in the list of Stommel publications collected in Evolution of
Physical Oceanography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981).

Continued on page 27

24

Reprinted from Deep-Sea Research Vol. 5, pp. 80 to 82,
1958, with permission from Pergamon Press Ltd.,
Headington Hill Hall, Oxford OX3 OBW, UK.

LETTER TO THE EDITORS

The abyssal circulation

(Received 18 February, 1958)

IN my survey of the theories of ocean currents (Deep-Sea Res., 1957, 4, 149-184) several schematic
interpretations of ocean circulatory patterns are presented. In this letter I wish to show how, using
the same principles, it is possible to sketch in broad outline the flow pattern for the abyssal circulation
of the world ocean.

It seems likely that the low temperature of deep waters in the world ocean is maintained in the
face of downward diffusion of heat from the warm surface layers by a very slow upward component
of velocity in the deep water. An adequate theory of the thermocline would, presumably, deduce
this upward velocity as a function of surface heating, turbulence parameters, etc. We might regard
the thermocline as a " pumping mechanism " which slowly draws up deep water and hence actually
determines the rate of flow of the abyssal circulation. An estimate of the maximum upward com-
ponent of velocity under the thermocline, w max , is given in terms of the depth of the thermocline,
Zj, by the equation.

Mi
maw

L ,2
f2 Z t

This equation is obtained from a very primitive model* of convection on a beta-plane and contains
neither the turbulence parameter nor the artificial basic stability explicity. Both enter implicitly, of

4)

O

Q.

I

1

I

NORTH ATLANTC AND

^ SOUTH ATLANTIC ABOVE
i

i

3OOO-40OOm

N

Z F-
Q <t>

< I 'S-

5 Q ^

-

5

K S

O <

* ^

"V

\

-i

-

i

1 1

|

3456

O 2 , ml/I

Fig. 1.

course, through the very structure of the model ; both are basically objectionable, are introduced
to circumvent our lack of physical knowledge about turbulence and our inability to handle the non-

HENRY STOMMEL and GEORGE VERONIS (1957) Tellus 9, 401-407, to which the reader is referred
for definitions of quantities : the above relation being derived by substituting Gz t \ into equation
(20).

25

Letters to the Editors

linearity of the energy equation respectively. Consequently our conclusions are limited, at best,
to order of magnitude considerations. If we take as representative oceanic averages

jS = 2 x 10- 13 cm- 1 sec- 1
g = 10 3 cm see" 2
K = 2 x 10~ 4 "C- 1

OQ = 1(TC

/= ICHsec- 1
/ = 5 x 10- 9 cm-'
: t = 2-10 4 cm

we find that H-jnax is of the order of 3 x 10~ 5 cm sec" 1 . Since the area of the ocean at 2000m is about
3 x 10 14 m 2 , the total upward flux of water across the 2,000 m level over the entire world ocean is
of the order 90 X 10 6 m 3 sec" 1 , about twice the maximum estimated by analysis of hydrographic
data. The slow upward flow over most of the ocean must be compensated for somewhere by down-
ward flowing sources of deep water. I envisage these deep-water sources as occurring in very limited
areas of weak gravitational stability where the thermocline " springs a leak." The location of these
sources is apparently very sensitive to climatic factors ; we determine it by consideration of the
distribution of dissolved oxygen in the ocean below 3,000m (Fig. 1). Evidently the two sources
are in the North Atlantic, and in the Weddell Sea (heavy black circles in Fig. 2); there is no source

Fig. 2.

in the Arctic regions of the Pacific Ocean. The simple beta-plane convective model also assures us
thac the wind has no effect on the water below 2,000 m. Therefore, we have a distributed " sink "
more or less over the entire ocean below 2,000 m acting on the water below ; and two point " sources."
To complete the picture of the thermal circulation in the ocean we must connect the distributed sink

26

Letters to the Editors

to the sources in a way consistent with the dynamics of the fluid on a beta-plane or rotating sphere.

The streamlines in Fig. 2 ars sketched following the "modified form of Goldsbrough's method

for the rotating sphere as described in my survey article. Because of the distributed " sink " the

flow below 2,000m is everywhere horizontally convergent, hence the meridional component of

velocity below 2,000 m must everywhere in the interior of the ocean be directed away from the

->

equator (/Sv = fdiv h v) : except at the equator itself where it must vanish. Having fixed the
meridional component and vertical component, the zonal component is determined by the continuity
equation working westward from the eastern coasts. At the western coasts intense boundary currents
are introduced as necessary to connect with the sources. The chief ambiguity is how much water ta
admit through Drake Passage ; the Antarctic Circumpolar Current Transport is fixed however.
Summarizing the features of flow deduced in Fig. 2 : If the two sources each have strength 20
( x 10 6 m 3 /sec), then the western boundary currents are : western North Atlantic, 24 southward ;
western South Indian, 14 northward ; western South Pacific, 30 northward ; western North Pacific,
less than 10, directed toward 30 C N. latitude circle. The zonal transport of the Antarctic Circumpolar
Current (below 2,000 m) is 50 across 55S. latitude circle. In the interior of all oceans at mid-latitudes
below 2,000 m the mean meridional component of velocity is of the order of 0-03 cm sec" 1 . The value
of w max is 1-5 x 10~ 5 cm sec" 1 .

The above presentation is in the nature of a tour-de-force. One cannot pretend that it describes the
the abyssal circulation accurately in detail.

Woods Hole, Mass., U.S.A.

Contribution No. 953 from The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

HENRY STONIMEL

< Walter H. Munk Continued from page 24 *

I had by then read Hank's book Science of the Seven Seas, which he
disowned, but which I rather liked. Evidently Hank at one time thought
of enrolling at Scripps, but was discouraged from doing so because he
believed that Sverclrup thought the book was awful; I am not aware of
any evidence this was so. In fact, when Hank visited Scripps in the sum-
mer of 1949, he was offered a job by Roger Revelle (who had just been
brought back by Sverdrup as Associate Director under Carl Eckart),
Scripps thus becoming one of the long list of places that have tried to
recruit Hank. I don't believe Hank ever took seriously any offer from
farther west than Massachusetts.

Roger's admiration for Hank goes back to this visit. Some years later
Hank was to write Roger a wonderful warm letter which Roger recalled
to me with great pleasure just before his death. (I have searched in vain
for this letter.) In March 1988, Roger wrote Hank shortly after Paul Fye's
death: "One by one the armies fade away. I hope you last for a long time,
and I am going to try to do likewise." On June 10, 1991, Hank wrote
Roger about the planned Revelle visit to Woods Hole from July 14 to 19:
"Let's get together for a pleasant dinner or two at our house when you
are here. We'd love to see you," to which Roger replied on June 21: "One
of the good reasons for visiting Woods Hole is to see the two of you."
Roger died on July 15, and now they are both gone.

The special relationship between Roger and Henry is a curious one,
since Roger accepted authority with ease and took pleasure in organizing
things. Hank, on the other hand, avoided responsibility and anything

27

Henry Stommel

has contributed
more to our
conceptual

understanding

of ocean
circulation

and dynamics
than any

other scientist.

that smacked of organization. But not quite. I remember sitting on the
lawn at the Bermuda Biological Station listening to a discussion of how
to proceed with the Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment (MODE). The
talk was going nowhere until Henry took the chalk and outlined on an
outdoor blackboard which vessel was to go where and when.

During Hank's 1949 visit in La Jolla, he wrote "The Gulf Stream"
for The Scientific Monthly. We climbed Mount San Gorgonio together.
From then on our paths crossed on so many occasions that I cannot
possibly sort them out.

Hank and I collaborated (with Bernard Haurwitz) on a spectral analy-
sis of 10 years of Bermuda offshore temperature data for the Rossln/
Memorial Volume (1959). Hank sent one of his better MIT students, Carl
Wunsch, to work with me during winter of 1965 to 1966. And we both
made sage comments about the future of numerical ocean models
("Where Do We Go From Here?") at a symposium in Durham, New
Hampshire, in 1975. 1 attended Hank's 60th celebration in Woods Hole in
1980, and he attended my 65th in La Jolla in 1982, where he told a hilari-
ous story about a beautiful girl in Venice standing alone under a Tintor-
etto (see opposite page).

I had the pleasure of presenting to Hank the citation for the 1982
Bowie Award. As is the custom, I had submitted the citation to the
American Geophysical Union (AGU) prior to the ceremony, and the
AGU had forwarded a copy to Hank. We sat next to each other on the
podium. When I returned from reading the citation and it was Hank's
turn to respond, he whispered to me that he had not read the citation
ahead of time, as he wanted to be uninfluenced in his remarks.

On the many subjects Hank wrote about, he certainly did not fol-
low any footsteps but his own. If there is a connecting theme in Hank's
broad interests, it is the concept of conservation of potential vorticity.
Robert Stewart (the Canadian) once wrote: "...Stommel is the first per-
son working in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics to really understand vor-
ticity well enough that it became a reliable part of his intuition." And
this intuition has determined the flavor of physical oceanography over
the last few decades.

Although I knew Hank for many years, I do not consider myself as
one of his closest friends. But I admire him tremendously. There was
something magical about his person, and I looked forward to every
occasion of being with him with deep pleasure. <

Allan Robinson

Harvard University

As a young theoretical physicist in the late 1950s, I began to read and
think about ocean dynamics. I first came into contact with Henry
Stommel' s intellect through a preprint of his "A Survey of Ocean
Current Theory." It was immediately apparent that the work and inher-
ent ideas reviewed represented a stimulating, profound, and novel
dynamical basis for ocean circulation studies. Soon thereafter, when I
first met Hank himself, he informed me that it was unlikely that the
field could use a person of my background.

28

An Excerpt from Hank Stommel's Remarks
in Celebration of Walter Munk's 65th Birthday

Walter has been number one for all these years, and whether we want to or not all of
us compare ourselves to him, at one time or another. When I was called to the chair
of oceanography at Harvard, it was only after Walter had declined it.

Of course, I am not the only victim of Walter's preeminence. It has happened to others
before, and will happen to more of us in the future.

Let us imagine the following scene: You have been invited to an ambassadorial reception
in Venice. Arriving in a gondola by torchlight you step into a grand palazzo between the
striped posts at its Watergate. Perhaps you are the guest of honor, and an oceanographer of
great distinction. Perhaps you are Klaus Hasselmann. You make your way amongst the ele-
gant guests, shaking hands, introducing yourself, with assurance and grace. The main salon
is crowded with the elite of the Italian academic world; the crystal chandeliers are ablaze, the
champagne flows. Your eye catches the sight of a beautiful girl standing alone under a
Tintoretto a vision of loveliness. Unconsciously you slowly make your way in her direc-
tion, smiling, and exchanging greetings with old acquaintances all the while. The orchestra
strikes up a waltz by Strauss. You approach her, bow politely, ask her for this dance. As she
extends her hand, her eyes melt and she says: "You're Walter Munk aren't you?" *

-from A Celebration in Geophysics and Oceanography-1 982
Scripps Institution of Oceanography Reference Series 84-5

However, several months later we were deeply involved in a collab-
oration on one of the first theories of the ocean's main thermocline.
Typically, Hank had identified thermocline theory as an essential and
critical element required for an understanding of the thermohaline cir-
culation and was relentlessly pursuing it, although the research issues
then stood at the edge of feasibility. This collaboration initiated a period
of over 30 years of scientific and personal interaction with Henry that I
value most highly.

In my opinion, Henry Stommel has contributed more to our con-
ceptual understanding of ocean circulation and dynamics than any
other scientist. He had the ability and interest to explore phenomena
ranging from microstructure to global scales. He had a unique and
canny skill of focusing on, exposing, and simply modeling essential
processes. As a complete scientist, he still would remain frustrated at
his inability to have deeper and further insights and to develop ideas
more quickly. Hank's mind was extremely active, his energy legend-
ary, and his interests very broad. The breadth of his interests and his
ability to cut to the quick of matters made him a fascinating conversa-
tionalist and a most stimulating friend. Evening discussions of current
affairs, politics, history, aesthetics, and morals, perhaps with Havana
cigars, provided priceless memories.

Hank's personality had its dramatic side, which could range from
the ridiculous to the sublime. While explaining to me at his home about
a book review he was preparing, he invited me to accompany him to the
town dump, where he tossed the volume as his final comment. On the

29

/ remember

Henry Stommel

as a truly

exceptional

human being

and an

extraordinary
scientist.

starting day of an important founding meeting for the Mid-Ocean
Dynamics Experiment in London in 1970, he awakened me very early
in the morning and without explanation we walked to Westminster
Abbey and stood silently at Newton's crypt.

I remember Henry Stommel as a truly exceptional human being
and an extraordinary scientist. *

Editor's Note: Allan Robinson and Henry Stommel co-directed the Mid-Ocean
Dynamics Experiment and and were co-chairmen of the US POLYMODE
Organizing Committee.

Alan J. Faller
University of Maryland (retired)

*> > <*

What an extraordinary time it was in Woods Hole a time when
WHOI was in the forefront of the newly developing field of
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics. And at the nucleus of the group of inde-
pendent scientists in the endeavor, although not always the most con-
spicuous, was Henry Stommel. My tenure at WHOI was from 1954 to
1963, with a year off at the University of Chicago and a year in
Stockholm. Here I will attempt to relate some of my experiences and
impressions of those years that are relevant to this issue of Oceanus. My
recollections may differ slightly from those of others, and I beg your
indulgence in this respect.

Although one may argue for earlier origins (in the works of Bjerknes,
Rossby, and many others), Geophysical Fluid Dynamics began to become
a somewhat organized and sustained discipline when it was recognized in
the early 1950s that the independent laboratory studies of Raymond Hide
at Newcastle (originally studies of the interior of the earth), Fultz and
Long at the University of Chicago (atmospheric simulation), and William
von Arx at WHOI (oceanic simulation) had many common features. Von
Arx's experiments at WHOI had been preceded by rotating tank experi-
ments by Spilhaus in the mid-1 930s and, indeed, I was told (but have no
record) that Henry Stommel had worked with rotating models of the
ocean circulation prior to those of von Arx, in the same lab and perhaps
with the apparatus developed by Spilhaus. Those early rotating tank stud-
ies, including some of my own (through 1960), took place in the basement
of the Bigelow Building, in a northwest corner lab that was shared with
biologists growing phytoplankton and lobsters, across the hall from the
carpenter's shop, and beneath the director's first-floor office.

But the development of GFD began in earnest in the mid-1950s
when Stommel and Malkus spearheaded a joint seminar between
WHOI and MIT called the "Fortnightly Seminar in Thermal
Convection." As a sample of the attendees, regular participants from
MIT included Jule Charney, Norm Phillips, Lou Howard, and others,
with occasional participation from Alar Toomre, Ed Lorenz, and other
meteorologists and mathematicians. Regulars from WHOI in addition
to Stommel and Malkus included George Veronis, Melvin Stern, myself,
Peter Saunders, Joanne Malkus, Eric Kraus, and others, as well as visi-
tors. Allan Robinson came from Harvard, while Bill Reed and others
came from Brown. This seminar eventually expanded with visits to

30

Trial By Gutenberg

by Starbuck

YEARS AGO IN A TIME before the flood of junk mail, when I was a
bachelor living at the Episcopal Rectory in Woods Hole, I decided to
answer all the classified ads in Popular Mechanics magazine. For months
afterwards there was a gratifying deluge of sales material offering all
sorts of bargains. The most persistent of all was the Paw Paw Chemical
Toilet Company which I finally managed to cut off by returning one of
their missives marked "deceased."

I did, however, succumb to the blandishments of the Kelsey Printing
Company, Meriden, Connecticut, whose ad titled "Make Money, Do
Your Own Printing" was so alluring that I ordered their 6 by 10
Excelsior press, several fonts of 8 point Bodoni, a small font of 24 point
Clarendon and enough Old English for a masthead. This truly venerable
firm has used the same enticing advertisement since at least 1876; it can
be seen in the program of the Philadelphia Exposition in the possession
of the Sturgis Library.

At first my job printing activity was confined to calling cards,
Christmas cards and the programs for Mary Fassett's Falmouth Friends
of Music. The latter was the cause of my press's demise, since it exhaust-
ed my supply of upper case "M's" in setting up the list of patrons with
their repetitive Mr. and Mrs.

The most ambitious project using the Excelsior was the weekly pub-
lication of The Woods Hole Adjudicator. It was motivated by differences of
editorial opinion with The Enterprise. The labor of setting up type and
then distributing it by hand was very discouraging and led me to curse
Mr. Gutenberg's invention of moveable type. The profits at 1 cent a copy
were disappointing. After a few issues none seem to survive The
Adjudicator collapsed, bunkrapt, so to speak.

Nearly forty years have passed years of repressed commentarial
ambition. The rollers on the old Excelsior sag with mold. The tub of
printers' ink is hard as a rock. There is a better way. If you can't beat
them, join them. *>

The Enterprise
October 31, 1984

31

...but in

Stommel's

office the

pace was

markedly

accelerated.

Harvard, Brown, and the University of Rhode Island, and the GFD
summer program at WHOI is in part an outgrowth of the collaborations
developed in that seminar series.

The freedom of exchange of views among this group was remark-
able. In particular I call your attention to the number of scientists with
whom Henry Stommel collaborated, as shown in part by his list of 70-
odd joint publications. I suspect that in most cases Stommel was the
prime mover, but of this I cannot be certain. In the paper of Stommel,
Arons, and Faller (1958), however, I can speak with authority, for the
text was written in three sections by the three authors. The beautiful
introduction giving the motivation and philosophy came from Stommel
himself; the detailed analysis and theory was provided by Arnold
Arons; and I was enlisted to develop, analyze, and write about the
experiments, guided by Stommel and Arons.

On the other hand, there were many cases in which Stommel played
a subsidiary but catalytic role, and these are well exemplified in the
story of double diffusion and salt fingers. My narrative may differ in
detail from the recollections of others who were present at the occasion,
but there should be little difference in substance.

In the spring of I960, Stommel had an office on the third floor of
Bigelow that he was sharing with Bert Bolin, visiting from Stockholm. I
believe they were collaborating on box models of the ocean to under-
stand the movement of radioactive wastes and carbon dioxide. Willem
Malkus had a nearby office, my room was a garret shared with Ferris
Webster at one end of the Bigelow attic, and George Veronis was at the
other end. Melvin Stern was on the second floor, close to the offices and
lab of Al Woodcock and Duncan Blanchard. It was a Friday morning
and we were all scheduled to leave that afternoon for a Thermal
Convection seminar at MIT.

I was across the hall from Stommel and Bolin, waiting for the 10
o'clock coffee that we all shared in Andy Bunker's lab, when Melvin
Stern breezed into Stommel's office in an excited state that was unusual
for the pipe-smoking, contemplative Mel. Animated voices drifted
across the hall, Willem Malkus dropped in, the decibel level rose, and I
went across the hall to investigate the excitement of Stern, Stommel,
Bolin, and Malkus. As Stern talked, I quickly grasped that he had quite
independently developed a new theory, that of double-diffusive con-
vection. He had then realized the relation of this presumed natural phe-
nomenon to the "Perpetual Salt Fountain" of Stommel, Arons, and
Blanchard, and had come to get Stommel's opinion.

You may well ask how one would come to conceive of the double-
diffusive phenomenon in the first place, but this is not hard to under-
stand in the context of the related studies then taking place within our
group. Veronis and Malkus, in particular, were deeply concerned with
theories of the onset of convection in which thermal diffusivity and
kinematic viscosity, differing by an order of magnitude, play leading

32

roles. It is not surprising then that some inquisitive scientist concerned
with oceanography should ask about the additional effect of the rela-
tively low diffusivity of salt when both thermal and salinity gradients
are present. But it is one thing to inquire and quite another to carry
through all of the detailed mathematical manipulations, covering all
possible physical circumstances, to discover the various types of dou-
ble-diffusive phenomena that may occur, as did Melvin Stern.

Based on Stern's concepts and equations, Malkus went to the chalk-
board and in about two minutes produced an estimate of the scale of
the proposed phenomenon: less than 1 centimeter. Stommel suggested
that we do an experiment, whereupon I produced a 1,000-milliliter
graduated cylinder and some potassium permanganate (as both a salt
and a colorful tracer). We prepared a warm solution of the salt, of lesser
specific gravity than the cool tap water that now half filled the gradu-
ate, and we carefully poured the solution on top. Voila! In a few sec-
onds, descending fingers of salty solution appeared as Stern had pre-
dicted, about 5 millimeters in diameter. These estimates and experi-
ments, of course, would have been done by Stern himself in due time,
but in Stommel' s office the pace was markedly accelerated.

Arriving at MIT that afternoon enthusiastic over the new discovery,
we all discussed Stern's theory and its potential with our colleagues at
the seminar. What would be the consequences of thermohaline convec-
tion and salt fingering? In those major ocean basins where the salinity
was higher near the surface, what was holding the salt up against this
new convective phenomenon, etc., etc.?

But that evening during the two-hour return trip to Woods Hole,
we gradually became aware that we had all spoken out of turn. Stern
was visibly upset by the publicity afforded his as-yet unpublished,
unwritten, and, indeed, incomplete theory, and rightly so. When we
fully realized the seriousness of this breach of professional etiquette, it
was suggested that we should all cease and desist from any further
work on the subject or public discussion of the theory until the origina-
tor of the concept and the theory, Melvin Stern, could complete his
work and publish the results. To this we all somewhat shamefacedly
but enthusiastically agreed. All's well than ends well. The rest is history
['The 'Salt Fountain'and Thermohaline Convection," Tellus, I960, pages
172-175]. But our experience suggested some pitfalls in the free inter-
change of ideas that we so cherished.

Upon returning to WHOI in the fall of 1991 as a guest investigator
(after 28 years absence), I was astonished to find the same Henry
Stommel. It was as though nothing had changed. Each Tuesday when I
saw him he invited me into his office to tell me about his new theory of
the temperature-salinity relation in the North Atlantic, or to show me
his Coriolis machine, or to find out what I was doing.

And when he passed away my immediate thought was but here
was a man who should never have died. *t*

And when

he passed

away my

immediate

thought

was but

here was a

man who

should never

have died.

33

<.

1 MlutP

F D

G

Hank Stommel lettered

and decorated this sign

for Walsh Cottage, the

home of the summer

Geophysical Fluid
Dynamics program at

Woods Hole. The
foliage is poison ivy!

Edward Spiegel

Columbia University
*> *t* **

My most respected teacher, G.E. Uhlenbeck, used to say that to
understand a thing in physics you had to feel it with your fingers
and your toes. It was only after I finished my thesis and came to spend
a month in Woods Hole in the summer of 1958 that I really learned
what he meant. This time, my teacher was Henry Stommel.

I was assigned to share an office next to Henry's in the Smith
Building with three other visitors. All of them were senior to me, so I
had to use the windowsill for a desk. My office mates did not seem
unhappy with the arrangement, and neither was I. It was wonderful to
look out on the water while working, and things went well for me there.
One day, Henry came by carrying a large cylindrical container and,
with a hint of a grin, invited me to accompany him down the hall. I fol-
lowed him into the
men's room where he
emptied the contents
of the cylinder into
the toilet and flushed
it. Then he led me
back to my "desk"

where he stood expectantly for a couple of moments. Suddenly, almost
right under us, a lurid green stain appeared at the water surface and
began slowly spreading. Henry took great pleasure in the look of aston-
ishment that came over my face and rewarded me with one of his infec-
tious laughs. For my part, after that I was quite choosy about where I
went swimming.

During that month, Henry spent a lot of time standing over his
drawing board working on a pastel picture of the earth as seen from
space. He had become absorbed with the importance of bottom topog-
raphy for ocean circulation, so he set about making a picture that would
give him a good feel for what the ocean floor is like. I would go into his
office frequently to watch the portrait evolve.

The picture showed the eastern Atlantic basin and the coast of
Europe. Henry left the water out of the Atlantic so that the seafloor
could be seen clearly. To emphasize its contours, he drew the topogra-
phy of the seamounts and even of the mountains visible in southern
Europe with a vertical exaggeration of five. Those were some pretty
spiky mountains, and you could almost feel the roughness of the earth's
surface as you looked at this picture. For an added bit of realism, Henry
had added a large moon hanging over Europe.

A couple of days before I left for my new job in Berkeley, I passed
by Henry's open door and saw him dismantling his topography project.
He said he was done with it. In fact, the process of drawing it with lov-
ing care was all he had needed to get the bottom topography hardwired
into his system. I was startled at the thought that he was going to throw
the picture out and said so. I thought he was a little pleased by my reac-
tion, but as he always seemed pleased with things, I could not be sure.

34

Henry told me I could have the picture if I wanted, so I asked him
to sign it and happily carried off this memento of my summer working
next door to him. I got the picture framed at what was then a big price
for a young instructor. Since then, it has always occupied a place of
honor on our living room wall.

Whenever I look at Henry's creation, I am reminded of some lec-
tures that the painter Ben Shahn gave at Harvard about the meaning of
art. What he was talking about, I think, is how you try to render some-
thing you know, or at least feel, in art, and mainly painting. It was an
articulate, even moving, set of remarks that was published in a book
called The Shape of Content. I have always been interested in the analo-
gous problem of how we can turn the renderings of Nature into some-
thing that we can know or at least feel. But when I look at the picture
Henry gave me all those years ago, I realize that there is not much one
can add to that simple statement about scientific understanding. <

Willem Malkus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

* * *

Hank Stommel applied
his sense of humor to

the design of a logo for
the Geophysical Fluid

Dynamics summer pro-
gram. Note the cold
head and warm tail of
the dragon, depicting
the driving forces for
convective currents.

Hank Stommel designed the dragon seal for the just-
established Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) sum-
mer program in 1960. Although Hank usually was
focused on his current oceanographic challenge, he lent
his invaluable support to the idea that Woods Hole
could be a seasonal center of studies for all fluid
dynamics in rotating systems. His breadth of inter-
est included the interrelated theoretical progress in
meteorology, astrophysical flows, and dynamo
theory. At the end of the 1950s and in the early
1960s, changing emphasis at the Institution led
Hank to report (in a cartoon form) the self-immola-
tion of two visiting GFD professors to protest a
reduced concern for scientific matters. Yet, his poison-
ivy sign, still hanging by the door of Walsh Cottage,
reflected an alternate concern that the scientific debates
were often too acidic. His wit and his wisdom saw the drag-
on through its early years, and Hank will be sorely missed. *

Lou Howard

Florida State University

* * *

While I met Henry Stommel about 1956 and knew him fairly well
thereafter, I never had occasion to collaborate with him on a sci-
entific paper. Perhaps this reflects Hank's clear perception of the really
quite limited role of mathematics in oceanography; what mathematics
was appropriate to most of his studies he could readily supply himself.
Indeed, I have the impression that for him mathematics was somewhat

35

Hank Stommel and
Lou Howard engage in
some close-up rotating-

table work in
the basement of
Walsh Cottage.

like a foreign language that he knew rather well: He didn't really think
in mathematical terms, but could express himself mathematically if he
thought it desirable to fit in with contemporary styles. It is salutary for
mathematicians (like me) to recognize that a penetrating physical
insight such as Stommel had makes it unimportant whether or not the
mathematics is even completely correct a slip in translation does not
necessarily invalidate the original thought.

However, we did have some collaborations, such as our joint effort to
keep the rotating table on the floor (see photograph). Another occurred
aboard Atlantis II on a January trip from Woods Hole to Barbados this
was not the only occasion on which one of my oceanographer friends has
attempted to show me that 2 = is not a realistic description of the sea
surface, but it was a memorable one, in part because of a severe storm
encountered just after leaving Woods Hole. It was on this trip that we
attempted to demonstrate the "perpetual salt fountain," in the oceanic
context envisioned in Stommel and Arons's original theoretical paper.
About a kilometer of plastic tubing with a couple of sash weights on

the bottom end was lowered into
the sea not too far from Barba-
dos. On the top was a float sup-
porting a fountainhead con-
structed (by me mathemati-
cians can be of some use in
oceanography) from a length of
copper pipe with a perforated
penny soldered over one end. To
speed up the starting process,
the tube was initially filled with
fresh water from the ship's sup-
ply. This, of course, produced a
tremendous fountain, the head
difference at the start being some
tens of meters; when the fresh
water had been expelled, the
fountainhead was attached, and
set loose on the surface. This
experiment was not entirely con-
clusive. There was indeed a persistent fountain, but it pulsated with the
period of the surface waves, probably because longitudinal stretching of
the tube was accompanied by a contraction in its diameter with a net
decrease in volume. However, we convinced ourselves that we were
observing not just a wave pump, but also a true salt fountain. In this
case, the "perpetual" salt fountain lasted a couple of hours before the
experiment was terminated.

A more serious experiment planned for this voyage was one of the
early attempts to observe salt fingers in the ocean. A somewhat elaborate
apparatus, constructed at MIT, had an intake probe in front and a large
(and very elegant) aluminum propeller in back. This was to be towed by
the ship at a considerable depth on a cable. The propeller was to drive
a pump that sucked water into the probe to have its salinity measured
electromechanically (thus avoiding the need to supply power for the

36

pump via the cable). As this device was put over the side, the sea surface
again refused to stay at z = 0, and a large wave smashed the propeller, the
probe, and some other delicate parts. This sort of thing is, I suppose, a
normal part of oceanographic observation, but at the time it was pretty
depressing, especially to the graduate student whose apparatus it was.
Hank and I spent that evening in the ship's lab constructing a new pro-
peller out of plywood and other odds and ends we found, and as I recall
stayed up much of the night encouraging the graduate student, who was
the only capable glass blower and the only one who really understood
the instrument, as he repaired the rest of it. It was successfully launched
the next day but of course, there is still considerable doubt about the
real nature of the salt finger process in the ocean. >

James Crease

IOS Deacon Laboratory (UK) and University of Delaware

What is most vivid to me about Hank is probably shared with
everyone else his generosity of spirit. I had come up from the
Aries in Bermuda for a few weeks in summer 1959, 1 guess, and was sit-
ting in on some early GFD lectures and ones by Kraichnan. It was a
pleasant change from going to sea. Hank welcomed me into what at the
time seemed to be his big office, full of people yet with still room for
one more. Arnold Arons was at one desk. I am told now that it wasn't
that big a room it just seemed that way. <

Sloat Hodgson

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (retired)

Henry was a bit of a pyromaniac, along with the rest of his many tal-
ents, and as creative in this field as all others.

One day he sauntered into a lab at the Bermuda Biological Station.
"Did you ever do this?" he asked, whereupon he opened one of the gas
jets on the wall and put a match to it. A raw jet of fire shot 6 or 8 feet
into the room. Henry viewed it with delight before turning it off.

On another day he came into the lab smoking a cigar. His eyes fell
on a nearby bottle of oxygen. "Look," he said, and held the cigar butt
against the bottle's outlet, then turned on the valve. A high-quality
Roman candle could not have produced a better display.

I had a large Bunsen burner in a box to protect it from the wind on the
porch of the lab overlooking Bermuda's Ferry Reach. A length of tubing
led from inside the lab out through a window. The burner was adjusted to
a low flame. I would turn on the valve inside the lab and walk out and
light the burner. It accepted the flame from the match peacefully. One day
I went through the lighting process and got rather more flame than I had
bargained for. In fact I went over backwards as flame erupted from the
box. Henry had opened the valve in the burner fully. Though startled out
of my wits, I was uninjured. But you just couldn't get mad at Henry.

Henry was

a bit of a

pi/romaniac,

along with

the rest of his

many talents,

and as

creative in

this field as

all others.

37

My Friend John Moore

by Starbuck

ONE FOURTH OF JULY, some years ago, I invited the neighbors to a
homemade fireworks display: Giff and Win Ewing, Sue Sisson and
Claude Ronne. John C. Moore came, too, from across the street, although, as
he said afterward, he didn't think he was going to see much.

The pyrotechnical cardboard tubes were nailed to boards and sawhorses in
the old apple orchard all ready to go. When the first fountain bloomed it
spread to the quickmatch on all the other devices, and the entire display
erupted in one simultaneous convulsion of strontium-tinted fire. A dense
magnesium-oxide smoke drifted across Sippewissett Corner. Giff fell over
backwards in his chair. Globules of molten saltpeter ignited the grass. The gar-
den hose was brought into play, and John Moore exclaimed that it was the
best fireworks show he had ever seen.

Descendant of one of the first settlers in Sippewissett, John Moore was
born in 1884. Qualifying as a marine engineer, he was employed first in the
harbor works at Galveston that followed the great flood of 1900 and then on
the two-mile-long west breakwater of the Panama Canal at Limon.

Malaria brought him back to the family homestead to recuperate, but
shortly he found himself working for an insurance company inspecting
factory boilers all over New England. Soon he was back on the Cape again,
this time with the water department, of which he was superintendent from
1927 to 1946. When his brother Ed died he inherited the old family place;
when his wife Laura died in 1961 he moved there.

John was one of the best-known men in town, and one of the best liked.
Although he lived alone, his days were lightened by the visits of many an
elderly lady friend from West Falmouth. Most afternoons there was an auto-
mobile in his driveway. He had an open, friendly, boyish manner, an impish
sense of humor, already apparent in the family photos of the mid 1890's.

You might find him out in the backyard toolshed, by the wood stove from the
Davisville school, deep in conversation with Charlie White, Clarence Anderson
or Robert Kahler. His house still shows traces of his eccentric experiments in
plumbing and heating arrangements. Some of his old pipe wrenches and home-
made power tools that escaped the auctioneer's hammer are still there.

At 81, John was too frail to survive his colostomy. He was fretful over the
tubes that tied him to his hospital bed and anxious to be home again. And I
could see in his youthful eyes the utter disbelief of that inner boy of 10 that he
was about to die. * The Enterprise

March 29, 1985

38

One night in Bermuda during a storm, the electricity in the area
went off and all was black. But, lo, after a while a single reading lamp
burned brightly. By its light, with great nonchalance, Henry was read-
ing, obviously enjoying our puzzlement. He had gone down to the lab
and hauled back 110 volts worth of dry batteries used in our buoy pro-
ject, and wired them to the lamp.

We went to Bermuda to study surface currents near the island
with free-floating buoys. At timed intervals they reported to the lab
via their radio transmitters. We located them with cross bearings
gained from portable radio direction finders. One day I was sent in a
beaten-up Jeep to Wreck Beach, not far from the US naval station. My
first job was to zero in on a broadcast from the lab. Shortly before, I
had received a package addressed to "Slot Hangsow." This name
amused Henry enormously. At the appointed time I tuned the radio
direction finder into the lab transmitter to get my reference point.
Much to my amazement, floating over the airwaves came a repetitive
phrase in a faked Chinese accent: "Calling Slot Hangsow! Calling Slot
Hangsow! Calling Slot Hangsow!"
Henry had made a tape loop and was
feeding it into the transmitter. All I
could think of was being found by a
member of the US Navy shore patrol
and being put in the brig as a spy with
a dubious explanation for his activity!

Henry had a magical effect on oth-
ers that made people in all walks accept,
like, and respect him. I saw it happen
with cool, smooth, tough Captain
Beaden, skipper of the cable repair ship
Lord Kelvin. (The Captain looked like a
Virginia country squire, had copies of
James Stephen's Crock of Gold and Lewis
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland in his
bookcase, and refused to answer sensi-
tive questions. His steward turned pale
and shook when the captain was dis-
pleased with him.) The cable and wire-
less people in Bermuda gathered
around Henry to discuss problems with
him and gave him every courtesy,
including the use of their property in
Tuckerstown. In Long Island, New
York, the cable people were fascinated
with him. They plunged into an experi-
ment on their transatlantic cable system
that ended in knocking the cable tem-
porarily out of commission. When
Henry apologized, they shrugged it off,
saying "It's only the line from the
Pentagon to Berlin. All they ever use it
for is to send the baseball scores." *

Plan of the Bermuda

Biological Station about

1960. The Stommels

were staying in Upper

Reach cottage during a

hurricane in1953 (see

Nick Fofonoff's

reminiscence).

Lower Reach

\ \\

Middle Reach

39

During the
peak of the
hurricane,

he had walked

in the dark

from his

cottage to

check on us.

Nick Fofonoff

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (retired)

<* <*

One of my recurring memories of Henry Stommel dates back to my
graduate student days while I was at Brown University studying
under Professors George Carrier and Raymond Montgomery. During
the summer of 1953, Henry invited me and another summer student at
WHOI, Gunther Wertheim, to accompany him on an R/ V Atlantis
cruise to Bermuda. He planned to track drifting buoys around Bermuda
by triangulation with radio direction finders. We were to carry out a
hydrographic survey around the island and return to WHOI.

While the ship was docked in St. George's harbor, Gunther and I
rented motorbikes for a tour of Bermuda. We spent a pleasant day
cruising the length of the island, paying no heed to a hurricane warning
issued that morning. Upon returning to St. George we discovered that
the ship had been moved from the dock and was tied to a buoy in the
harbor several hundred meters from shore. By this time the wind was
blowing sufficiently strongly to prevent us reaching the ship by boat.
We departed to seek shelter at the Bermuda Biological Station. Henry
and his wife, Elizabeth, were staying in a nearby cottage.

During the peak of the hurricane that evening, we went from room
to room in the main building checking rooms and windows for damage.
It took two of us to push open some of the doors on the upwind side of
the building because of the air pressure inside. We were surprised to
see Henry appear. He had walked in the dark from his cottage to check
on us. After we reassured him that we were safe and sound, he went
back to his cottage. We were somewhat disturbed that he had ventured
out into the hurricane.

The next morning Henry told us that he had been puzzled by
thumping noises around him as he walked to and from the main build-
ing the previous night. In daylight he was shocked to find out that the
thumps were caused by heavy brick tiles being blown off the building's
roof and hitting the ground with such force as to be heard above the
roar of the wind. The tiles were scattered on and around the path to the
cottage that he had walked the night before.

Now, nearly four decades later as we mourn his passing, I still think
of what might have happened on that frightful night and am thankful. $

Robert Walden

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (retired)

The Henry Stommel I remember was witty, always cheerful, and
ever so keen. Hank's infectious humor and zest for life and work
touched all of us who worked with him.

One particular incident stands out in my memory. We were at the
Bermuda Biological Station in 1954 to measure ocean circulation
around the island. Water-temperature and current-speed measure-
ments were obtained from drifting telemetering buoys, probably one of

40

the first successful uses of radio telemetry of oceanographic data. Many
weeks were spent plotting the buoy positions, rescuing those that were
stranded, preparing and launching new buoys, and monitoring their
transmissions. After long days (and nights) of this schedule, Hank
would invariably boost our morale with his humor and pranks, like the
evening he built a huge slingshot and strung it between two posts at the
lower lab facing Ferry Reach. The first rock projectile soared into the air
and landed near the road on the other side of the reach, much to every-
one's surprise. Needless to say, the slingshot was quickly dismantled.
I have many fond memories of Henry during our associations at sea. *

Robert Knox

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

* *

One summer in graduate school, about 1967 or 1968, 1 spent a few
weeks in Bermuda working with Hank on early S (not C!) TD
measurements of finestructure, making several-day trips to sea on
Columbia's old Sir Horace Lamb. Ashore, we were staying at the
Biological Station, and Hank had brought his son Matthew along.
Matthew was then just shy of legal driving age, and there had been
considerable father-son discussion about renting a motorbike. Matthew
prevailed on the rental issue, but Hank's misgivings were real, so the
condition was that Matthew had to do some satisfactory practice laps
on the Station's entrance road before being allowed on the public roads.
The entrance road was a loop, usually driven in only one direction, and
partly screened from view of the Station by shrubbery. Hank and I sat
down on the Station steps to observe the trials.

Everything went well at first. Matthew would move slowly away,
keeping firmly to the left and observing all rules. As soon as he was
obscured by the shrubs, we could hear a significant increase in RPM, but
as he came back into view his speed was proper, even sedate, and his
control seemed adequate. This process went through several repetitions.
At the end of each lap, Matthew advanced the view that he should now
be let out onto the public roads, while Hank, careful observer that he
was (not to mention careful driver see Fuglister or Veronis in The
Evolution of Physical Oceanography, 1981) required another lap to be cer-
tain that the driving ability was real, not a statistical fluke. I think that
on the final lap Hank was about to trust the statistics and slip Matthew's
leash, but just then one of the Biological Station residents came zooming
up the road, in the opposite and unexpected direction, counter to
Matthew's course. Matthew immediately responded reflexively with
excellent drive-on-the-right instincts, thus shooting directly across the
path of the oncoming student and ending up in the bushes.

As we hurried to the scene, Hank's marvelously expressive face
seemed to be trying to do three things all at once: show concern for his
son (who in fact suffered no serious harm), preserve an appropriately
solemn demeanor in order to bolster his point that perhaps more prac-
tice really was needed, and simply burst out laughing at the Chaplin-
esque scene. Somehow he managed to do all three in a very short space

Hank's

marvelously

expressive

face seemed to

be trying to

do three
things all at

once..

41

of time. I don't recall how much this incident may have set back
Matthew's release onto the Bermuda roads. I remember it for capturing
in a few seconds images of Hank, the kind and concerned human
being a truly gentle man, and of Hank, the possessor of one of the
world's great senses of humor, with a laugh to match. I suspect he may
have touched at least as many lives with these gifts of his spirit as he did
with the unparalleled oceanographic accomplishments of his mind. <

Curtis Collins

Naval Postgraduate School

/ looked
forward to his

proposals,

finding them

fun to read,

and always

learning

something

about ocean

circulation

from them.

Probably the most useful thing that I can contribute is a description
of Hank's dealings with me as a National Science Foundation (NSF)
program manager. Dealing with funding agencies is a necessity for
most academic oceanographers, and Hank had a unique approach, as
he did for most things.

It is strange that I can't remember when I first met Hank. It was
probably at a Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment (MODE) meeting
where more loquacious oceanographers stood out. (The first encounter
that I can remember with Hank was at the Bermuda Biological Station. I
arrived with my wife and two very small children for duty at the
MODE Hot Line Center, only to discover Hank and John Swallow firm-
ly ensconced in the cottage that I understood had been reserved for us.
While we were trying to find alternate quarters, Hank and John quickly
packed and moved to the dormitory, solving my problem in a very gra-
cious manner.) But I do remember my first encounter with a Stommel
proposal. It was 1970 and I had been assigned two weeks of reserve
training duty at the Office of Naval Research (ONR). A (nonphysical)
oceanographer colleague, who was working at NSF, asked my opinion
of a "problem" proposal. He explained that it had no hypothesis, no
work plan, but had been reviewed extremely favorably. Of course, it
was Stommel 7 s proposal.

I don't think that Hank spent a lot of time writing proposals. He
described clearly the problems that he was working on and the
approaches that he was going to try to use, always honestly and usually
optimistically. He picked difficult but important problems and innova-
tive approaches to them. Some of the physics was clear to me. Even after
15 years, I looked forward to his proposals, finding them fun to read,
and always learning something about ocean circulation from them.

Hank had tremendous faith in the judgment of his peers. He pre-
ferred to submit one-year proposals, despite our admonishment that
multiyear proposals were easier to handle. (With understanding super-
visors, we usually could convert his one-year proposal to two years.)

During the time that I was in Washington, it was usual for an
oceanographer to write multiple proposals, one for base support and

42

the other for field work, especially if it was expensive. The record
shows that NSF declined three of Hank's experimental proposals and I
know of one proposal that the ONR declined as well, dealing with
expendable bathythermograph (XBT) development. Unless the princi-
pal investigator has clearly overlooked something, proposal declination
was my least favorite duty, and, of course, Hank would not make criti-
cal technical omissions.

The last proposal that I declined dealt with a North Atlantic hydro-
graphic section one that I am sure that no one else wanted to do, yet
Hank felt was important. I remember clearly the phone conversation:
Hank readily understood how priorities had been set, put in a plug for
Mike McCartney's proposal (for a related section) as being more impor-
tant, and ended by consoling me on my onerous duty of calling with
bad news! *

Arthur Voorhis

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (retired)

Random thoughts came to my mind when asked to reminisce about
Henry Stommel. He was truly amazing, with a bold, creative, and
original mind. I especially enjoyed his sense of humor and can still hear
in my mind's ear his distinctive laugh. Anyone who stopped by his
office in the Clark building was treated to all this and to stimulating
talk on a variety of subjects, including his latest work and projects. One
also usually got to see, as an additional bonus, ongoing work on his
computer video screen.

Although Henry was a kind man and usually suffered fools gladly,
he could get very annoyed. I found this out on the Atlantis II in the win-
ter of 1969/1970 in the Mediterranean Sea, south of France. We were on
a cruise to investigate deep convection and bottom-water formation
caused by those outbreaks of frigid continental air known as mistrals.
The ship had just departed from Gibraltar and we were proceeding
eastward against a heavy sea when I was awakened during the mid-
night-to-four watch by a loud noise from the chief scientist's cabin.
Holding on as best I could, I managed to get over to his room and open
the door.

There stood Henry in his flannel pajamas in semidarkness, desper-
ately trying to keep his balance and surrounded by hundreds of empty
glass sample bottles that had broken loose from their cases and were
cascading back and forth across the floor with each ship's roll.

I am ashamed to say I must have smiled slightly at his predicament
before lending a helping hand. Although very angry, he was able to
keep his temper and said, "I suppose you think this is all very funny."

Oh, Henry, what a wonderful understatement! <*

There stood

Henry in his

flannel

pajamas in
semidarkness,

desperately
trying to keep
his balance..

43

"

.

"

"*', " i <l'*l ,M, W.M" 1 " 11 ".

Mlfe*

L^ ;

&*-.

^Z****^

^

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44

766 Palmer Ave., Falmouth, Mass 02540
Dear Lije:

It was really great fun to speak with yon on the telephone last night, and to know
that we are not really so far apart now as we were when you were in France. At least we
can communicate by mail and telephone a little more easily.

I can sympathize with your predicament over continuing in music as a career.
Most young people go all the way through college without making a firm decision for any
particular kind of vocation. The liberal arts curriculum gives them plenty of leeway, and
they can put off decisions. As you know I vacillated all sorts of ways when an undergradu-
ate at Yale, and even afterwards for two years in graduate school was torn between the
Ministry, Astronomy, and only by chance fell into Oceanography at the age of 24. But
Music is more demanding, I fear, and one has to decide much earlier. It is also rewarding in
that even if you eventually decide not to go into Music professionally, it still remains a
wonderful avocation, and a source of pleasure all your life. My old friend George Morgan
was first a pianist (at Jnlliard) and later became a mathematician (and still later at age
around 36 years became a sociologist). WJmtever you decide, your years of practice, and
your years in France, will always be a great experience and advantage to you. And you do
not have to decide exactly what alternatives you must choose as a profession for quite a few
more years. There are plenty of wonderful things to occupy oneself with in this world, and
you will find out about them during the next few years at college.

Another thing: perhaps USC is too big and impersonal a place for you. I think it
would be for me. A smaller, more intimate place, like Bowdoin, hi pleasant rural surround-
ings on the Maine coast, would have been a happier place for me than Yale, I think. People
like Bruce Warren and Robert Knox went to colleges like that. If you find the urban sprawl
which surrounds you at USC unbearable, you can plan on switching... we can talk about
that when I see you in mid-November.

Someday you should have a heart-to-heart talk with your violin teacher. Maybe he
can judge from your performance so far what kind of violinist you would likely be. As
painful as it is to look at oneself and one's abilities coldly and objectively, it is a healthy and
necessary thing to do. Maybe he will encourage you to go on; or perhaps he won't. But I
cannot judge mi/self, not being a musician.

And above all, don't undervalue your other attributes. You are a very special per-
son, I think, in that you are more humane than most people; you have a deep sensitivity to
other peoples' feelings and needs; you are basically kindly and loving; you want to help
other people and want to be liked by them. These attributes are rather rare and they are
desperately needed in a world torn by strife and greed and blind selfishness and unconcern.
You are fundamentally civilized in personality and have a capacity for empathy with the
needs and weaknesses of others. You could be a fine psychologist, an effective teacher or
social worker, a good minister, a sympathetic physician. ..just to mention a few kinds of
careers where human sensitivity can be made good use of.

Try to take it all in your stride, Buster, and phone us Monday night, Oct. 23, when
I think Mother will be home again. Or before if you want to.

Your loving
Pa

Editor's Note: Elijah Stommel decided to become a physician.

45

766

0254

TuesdflV El i fnn k oin" S ' IL ' L ''" ' ti^Ai no^ lo

^IHO^^.I';;;, I."*- -'! "::;--- iitw '

n [ n v/ *" |CM "*-'*"* ^ fi b^^ f

yarn too- u , m gr oio l

Hank holds "Little Hank,"
Matthew's son.

ing.

cin

Pfl

cm'

use for v

^-3-3-

ing

,M

Hank Stommel clowns with a false
moustache. Elijah is at right.

_>

JT

-^

^~

46

March 26, 1967
Dear Abby,

It is very lucky that the ship is going to stop for a little while
in Wellington, New Zealand just long enough for some of this
mail to be sent out from the ship to you. So I have written some
letters to each of you and to MnMa, just to let you know that I am
thinking of you and love you all very much.

By April 7 , which may be about the time that you get this let-
ter, my trip will actually be half over. There was some wasted time
at the beginning waiting for airplanes and the ship to leave, so that
I will still have more than half of the ship distance to sail; but so
far as time away from home is concerned April 7 is just exactly
half-way. Isn't that fine?

Inside this letter is a map which I tore out of Time magazine. It
shows the part of the world where I now am. I put an ink line to show
where the ship is going to be at different times. That way you can
know where I am. The ship left Melbourne, Australia, on March 10,
and is now (while I write this letter) off New Zealand where I marked
the line. The other places and dates are also marked for yon to follow.
If yon put this up on the wall yon will know how things are going.

We are having a pretty good trip although it is very long and
lonely, and a ship is rather a small place to be cooped up for so
long. But I think the work that we are trying to do is going well
and the other people on the ship are very pleasant.

Just the same I am thinking of yon and Mama and Elijah and
Matthew all the time and also ofBinky and the cats, both of
whom I hope are still well. Do yon have any other new animals
that will surprize me when I get back?

Love
Papa

Hank Stommel with Elijah and Abby

47

Enthusiasm,

humor,

gentleness,

intensity,

involvement,

commitment,

and
fierceness....

Bob Beardsley
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Around 1972, when I was on the faculty of MIT with Henry, a young
graduate student named Brad Butman, now head of the US
Geological Survey (USGS) branch in Woods Hole, asked about some
formal course work in coastal physical oceanography. He had a sum-
mer job helping the USGS study bottom sediments and currents in
Massachusetts Bay and wanted some training in this area. Pierre
Welander (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) was about to visit for a
semester, so Henry organized a reading course on estuarine and coastal
dynamics involving the four of us and Ants Leetmaa (MIT). Out of this
course came Henry's influential paper with Ants on the mean flow in
the Mid-Atlantic Bight, and my own interest in switching fields from
laboratory modeling to study shelf circulation. During this period,
Henry also opened my eyes to the experimental side of oceanography,
especially the need for good field experiments and the excitement and
fun of learning from field measurements.

One vignette from this period is a picnic outing to Lexington where
Henry, Pierre, Dave Niergard, and Erik Mollo-Christensen (all of MIT)
sent up a long string of tethered balloons to see if we could see the
velocity vector rotate with height in the atmospheric Ekman layer. I
don't remember the results, except we had fun trying something new.

Thank you, Henry, for all your kindness and help along the way. *

D. James Baker

Joint Oceanographic Institutions Inc.

* *

Enthusiasm, humor, gentleness, intensity, involvement, commit-
ment, and fierceness are all characteristics I think of when I try to
describe Henry Stommel. I first met Henry during the Indian Ocean
Expedition in 1962. I was new to oceanography, having just completed
my Ph.D. in physics from Cornell, and John Knauss had invited me to
join him as his first postdoc at the University of Rhode Island. Henry
stood out among the leaders of the field that John had invited on one of
the one-month equatorial cruises; it was a fine introduction to oceanog-
raphy and its people. Henry always seemed very friendly, but I remem-
ber best a different face.

I had read Henry's famous 1948 paper on ocean circulation, "The
Westward Intensification of Wind-Driven Ocean Currents," and while we
were taking water samples from Nansen bottles I asked him why he used
the simple proportional-to-velocity dissipation term. He gave me a fierce
look and clearly did not want to discuss it. I was startled, but realized I
must have hit a raw nerve, or maybe was being too brash as a newcomer.

Later I moved to Harvard, and kept my personal contacts with
Henry. We had long discussions about all facets of oceanography and
also shared time at sea. His gentle good humor was always present; I
will not forget his friendly chuckle when he saw something he liked or

48

something that amused him. One evening we were sitting in the library
of Atlantis II on a Gulf Stream cruise having a happy chat about some-
thing or other; I felt comfortable with the talk and the friendly chime of
the ship's bell. I later bought a chiming ship's clock just to recapture
those moments.

Henry was always focused on science as opposed to organization.
MODE (Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment) was clearly an ambivalent
activity for him; it involved new and exciting science, but also required
a certain amount of organization and committee work. He did not like
the organizational activity. However, I remember one sunny day in
Bermuda at the end of a planning session where Henry rolled out a
long it must have been at least 20 or 30 feet sheet that had all the
MODE plans and cruises in a great schedule. He relished that!

Henry's intense involvement with whatever he did was contagious.
He was an enthusiastic participant in discussions about how long-term
global ocean measurements could be carried out. I remember a meeting
in the 1970s in Victoria, British Columbia, on this topic that Henry had
organized as part of a National Academy study. The meeting was in the
Maritime Museum and Henry was in his glory, explaining the history
of various artifacts to us. After the meeting, we agreed what we would
each do. Henry then departed on a trip to Germany. Two or three
weeks later I received a card from him in his best German: "I hope, dear
colleague, that you have completed your work and sent it to me." I was
so impressed that I finished my assignment immediately!

The Victoria meeting was the start of a long-term collaboration with
Henry in the promotion of long-term ocean measurements. Later we
traveled together to another meeting in London on the same topic, arriv-
ing on the usual early-morning plane from Boston. Henry's passion for
railroading was evident that day. He told me he knew of a small store,
somewhere in London, that had just the kind of train he wanted to buy.
We spent several hours on the tube going to different parts of London to
find this shop the large group that started the search dwindled to just
four. I was disappointed when we finally found the right one; it was
small and didn't seem very interesting. But Henry knew this was the
right one he had been corresponding with the owner. The two of them
had a happy conversation while we others politely waited and looked
around. Henry finally finished and suggested that we have tea. It was at
least a good way to stay awake all day on first arrival!

Henry encouraged me throughout the development of the deep-sea
pressure gauge that I was working on at Harvard with Dick Wearn, and
was supportive of the idea that the pressure gauges might be used in the
Drake Passage to monitor transport. When Worth Nowlin (Texas A&M
University) and I put together the first plans for the International
Southern Ocean Study, which we hoped would be accepted as part of
the International Decade of Ocean Exploration, we went to Henry to ask
his advice about how to make this happen. By this time, Henry had
moved back to Woods Hole from MIT. We met at his house, with a
cheery fire in the background and Henry sitting beside the fireplace with
all the air of an 18th-century squire giving his blessing to a new endeav-
or. His support was essential I remember one NSF ocean sciences offi-
cial saying that "whenever Henry comes down here and explains in his

I later

bought a

chiming

ship's clock

just to

recapture

those
moments.

49

Tramp steamer routes
as a way to obtain
cheap, worldwide,
expendable-bathyther-
mograph coverage were

plotted for a proposal
entitled "World Survey of

Mesoscale Eddy
Amplitudes and Scales."

friendly and polite way why whatever he has interest in now is essential
for the progress of ocean science, we simply can't say no!"

I left Harvard in the early 1970s to move to the University of
Washington. I talked to Henry then about research directions and gen-
eral philosophy. He urged me to focus on science and to minimize com-
mittee work, a point he made in a nice way in his talk to the Ocean-
ography Society at Monterey in 1989, where he used the example of
Professor Airy, the Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, who missed the
discovery of a planet because of committee busy work (see Win/ We Are
Oceanogmphers, opposite). Henry was a strong supporter of the
Oceanography Society, and wrote me several letters about what it
might do. He was particularly interested in using the Society to get
small groups of oceanographers together on a regional basis to discuss
science. It was his way to continue to promote discussions on a personal
basis. It's good advice, and I am sure that the Society will follow it. *t

George Seaver

SeaLite Engineering

I first met Henry in 1973. 1 was just finishing graduate school and had
been in the Navy, and Henry thought I could be useful at the Mid-
Ocean Dynamics Experiment office at MIT. Well, soon after I arrived, he
started talking about this "tramp steamer" idea: We would ride passen-
ger freighters across the Southern Hemisphere's oceans and drop an
expendable bathythermograph (XBT) every hour cheap, worldwide
coverage on a mesoscale. I would go on Orient-Oversea's Buenos Aires-

to-Capetown run, he would go
on Royal Interocean's Tonga-to-
Auckland run , Chickie would go
on one, and, I supposed, Lord
Jim* would also take a leg. It was
science on the Patna*, science on
both sides of the dynamic topog-
raphy, and science with a dra-
matic flair. I thought so, any-
way but the Navy didn't when I
presented them with the propos-
al. They thought it was capricious
and not well thought out; I also
came to see it as probably sub-
professional.

It wasn't. I saw it again 16 years later, this time in the 1989 article in
Oceanus entitled "The Slocum Mission" (Vol. 32, No. 4, Winter
1989/1990). It was all there, but now with "tramp drifters." People-
sized science, playful episodes, sudden inspirations, fairness, rescue of
a good idea, and above all innovative science. *J

*References to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim.

50

Why We Are Oceanographers

Henry Stommel presented this talk at the first meeting of

The Oceanography Society in 1989, and it was included in the

first issue of the society's magazine, Oceanography.

It is reprinted here with the society's permission.

WORKING BACKWARD in
time, give or take a few years,
the overlapping lifetimes of
three scientists Einstein, Darwin, and
Maskelyne take us back to an age when
Isaac Newton still breathed. That is a
measure of the speed at which scientific
knowledge has grown.

Depending upon the shifting focus of
public concern, the committee espoused
various causes: defense, food for the
Third World, mining the ocean bottom,
the Law of the Sea, preservation of the
environment, and climate change. And
Congress responded handsomely.

The success of the Committee also

The numbers employed in science stimulated parallel efforts at promotion of
today quite probably exceed 90 percent of oceanography in state governments, in

all the scientists that ever were in all

international scientific unions, and in the

human history. The proportion of living United Nations Educational, Scientific

oceanographers to the all-time total is, I
think, even larger than 90 percent.

This expansion of job opportunities
has its roots in the accelerated research
effort during World War II. Many of my
contemporaries Andrew Bunker, Robert
Reid, Don Pritchard, to mention but a

and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
The universities responded by establish-
ing new departments and schools of
oceanography. And the ocean cinematog-
rapher Jacques Cousteau made the gener-
al public aware of the sea in a compelling-
ly romantic way, with an immediate

o

few came into oceanography because appeal reminiscent of the narratives of the
they had first been introduced to it in mil- great ocean explorers of past centuries,
itary meteorology training programs. The
need for a permanent post-war national
effort in oceanography was first clearly
enunciated by the National Academy of
Sciences' Committee on Oceanography
under the chairmanship of Harrison
Brown in the mid-1950s. Over the years
this Committee, under varying names
and guises, and with varying effective-
ness, established a rationale for expanded
national funding as we now know it. The
heyday of the committee was, I think,
during the years 1955 to 1965 the time
of the two-martini lunch when its mem-
bers included lobbyists from the pet-food
and chemical industries, a retired invest-
ment banker well acquainted with the
Congress, and a sprinkling of charming
promoters, as well as working scientists.

CEANOGRAPHY was made visible
to two generations of students. It
offered a free graduate education. And so
here we all are recipients of the oppor-
tunities opened to us by a few resourceful
promoters with a convincing brief. That is
the first good hard reason that we
became oceanographers, or rather, that
we could become oceanographers. The
world has changed a lot since the day
when Henry Bigelow advised Ray
Montgomery not to enter oceanography
because he did not have a private for-
tune. Those were the days when the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
was known to its rivals from the Marine
Biological Laboratory as the Harvard
Yacht Club, and the Atlantis was encour-

51

aged to travel under sail because diesel
fuel cost $15 a day. So we really have a
great deal to thank those promoters of 20
to 30 years ago for.

From the point of view of an indi-
vidual faced with the decision of whether
to enter upon a career in oceanography,
the issues are more personal: Will it be
congenial, will it be interesting, does it
suit my talents?

Certainly work at sea is congenial. It
is a special social experience. Life on a
small ship means living with people with
backgrounds different from those of acad-
emia, and broadens our human contacts.

Henry Stommel aboard Atlantis //in 1963.

Developing good instruments and getting
good measurements at sea is challenging,
and there are prospects of learning some-
thing new and unexpected. And there are
foreign ports and remote islands to visit.
For many, the regularity, the simplicity, of
life at sea is therapeutic. Oceanographers
like Nansen, who spent years living with
others crowded in small ships in the
Arctic, developed views of human rela-
tions that are different from those we learn
on the freeway. George Deacon began his
oceanographic career with four successive

antarctic cruises, each lasting 18 months.
The Discovery II became a home to him: a
regular station schedule (8 in the morning
and 8 at night), a good drink before din-
ner, and a game of pinochle in the bar
before retiring. You'd learn the social arts
quickly enough. Deacon was one of the
kindest, gentlest, and most persuasive
men I have known. Work at sea rubs off
the sharp edges, and makes us better peo-
ple. The ship becomes a home away from
home. That has changed a little for us at
Woods Hole, now that our ships are "dry."
Oceanography is interesting because
so much is still unknown and there is a
great variety of activity observational
and theoretical in which to submerge
oneself. And if one tires of active research,
there are jobs at management level in
which one can find important, useful
things to do.

DOES IT SUIT my talents? Those of us
who entered oceanography from
more highly developed sciences like
astronomy, physical chemistry, or physics
have thought so. Thinking that we were
unable to make much impact in these
highly sophisticated fields, some of us
found areas within oceanography where
elementary ideas, simple theoretical mod-
els, first-order descriptions, and tech-
niques borrowed from better-developed
fields could be useful. I hope that it does
not offend anyone when I suggest that
oceanography has been attractive to many
of us because it is low-powered. It's just a
different way of saying that we preferred
the pioneer homesteading model of the
scientific life to the glitter of the intellectu-
ally fashionable.

On the whole we have done pretty
well. A new field of geophysical fluid
dynamics (a term coined by Willem
Malkus about 1953) has grown, with deep
connections to meteorology and astro-
physics. Leaf through the 1942 treatise by
Sverdrup, Johnson, and Fleming and you

52

are struck by the absence of any dynamical
theory beyond Ekman's 1902 spiral and the
elder Bjerknes's practical method of doing
dynamical current calculations. The most
elementary problems had not been posed,
nor the most primitive models constructed.
Since then some of the vacuum has been
filled enough, anyway, to fill textbooks
and, I fear, give new students the impres-
sion that the vacuum has been completely
filled. However, as students begin to think
and work, they will know better; they can
still find an immense unexplored universe
of ideas and phenomena to explore.

Many new sophisticated mathemati-
cal techniques that have increased our
power to study the ocean have come from
other disciplines. Fortunately there have
been oceanographers with broad enough
skills to translate these techniques into use-
ful tools for oceanography. Singular per-
turbation theory and linear programming
have come from applied mathematics.
Most of the fundamental dynamical ideas,
objective analysis, and numerical modeling
with data assimilation have come from
meteorology. Modern theory of time-series
analysis and techniques for detecting sig-
nals have come from electrical engineering.
Inverse theory has come via geophysics.
These transplants illustrate the benefits of
getting a good education in something
besides oceanography alone.

THE CHIEF SOURCE of ideas in
oceanography comes, I think, from new
observations. Today we take much of ocean
knowledge for granted. There was a time
when eddies and meanders were only
dimly perceived (1948); a time when we
didn't know of the existence of the equator-
ial undercurrent (1952), or that the slope of
the isotherms in the Gulf Stream extends to
the bottom (1954), or that there was a deep
recirculation, a time when the deep west-
ern boundary currents of Greenland Sea
water had not been discovered flowing
along the slope of Greenland around into

the Labrador Sea (1952). There was a time
when we didn't have reliable estimates of
the flow through the Florida Straits (1960),
when the ubiquity of inertial motions in the
deep sea was not suspected (1957), when it
could be thought that the velocity in deep
water was too small to measure by current
meter (1958), and when we had no clear
observational description of a deep, winter-
time, bottom- water-formation event (1969).
More recently, we were surprised by
multiple jets at the equator of the Indian
Ocean (1976), by hot vents and the great
helium plume in the Pacific, and by the red
spectrum of the nine-year drift of SOFAR

'Work at sea rubs

off the sharp edges,

and makes us

better people."

[SOund Fixing And Ranging] floats in the
Atlantic. The geochemists persist in unset-
tling our mental equilibrium with new cur-
rent patterns revealed by exotic tracers like
Freons. Who would have foreseen "med-
dies" (1981), and who knows their role in
deep-sea mixing? There is the wonderful
unfolding development of our knowledge
about El Nino. There are those subtle fea-
tures of the equation of state that Trevor
McDougall has uncovered. And there is
that amazing large-scale horizontal coher-
ence of persistent doubly diffusive layers
revealed in the Caribbean Sheets and
Layers Transects (1987) expedition that is
pregnant with implications concerning
deep-ocean mixing processes.

I have mentioned only a few of the
unexpected phenomena that have been
discovered in the past few decades mere-
ly the ones that come easily to mind. There
seems to be no end of new surprises. And,
if oceanographers are permitted in the

53

Hank draws samples from water bottles with Bob Stanley and Mindy Hall (Oceanus, 1980).

future the freedom to follow their own
noses, to scent out their own problems,
and to formulate their own goals, this flow
of new results will doubtless continue.

On the whole, when it comes to the
phenomenology of the ocean, there are
more discoveries than predictions. Most
theories are about observations that have
already been made. It is therefore particu-
larly exciting when a theorist comes up
with an idea about a feature of the ocean
that he is willing to go to sea to look for. I
urge those entering the field to take the risk.

SO WHEN WE SURVEY the personal
reasons why we entered oceanogra-
phy that it be congenial, that it be suited
to our talents, and that it be interesting I
think our choice of career was justified. And
if some of us somehow can manage to
avoid getting entangled in the "Big Science"
part of our field, then perhaps we can pre-
serve an innocent, simple approach to our

tasks. Our work can seem like a pleasant
hobby to us, it can sustain a sense of won-
der, and bring us joy and fulfillment.

There is a wonderful story about the
excellent Astronomer Royal, George Airy,
that may serve as a warning of the perils of
too much committee work and public ser-
vice. Airy was very accomplished. He also
was extremely fastidious, so much so that
all his papers are preserved every check
book, account, letter, memo. Even his scrap
paper was sewed together and saved. He
regularly updated an autobiography.

Airy is known to oceanographers as
the author of an early tidal treatise and for
the Airy function familiar to those who
work with the equatorial beta-plane. He
took on a huge amount of committee work.
In 1845 (at the age of 43), he was president
of the Royal Astronomical Society. He
served on the Tidal Harbor Commission
and did extensive studies of breakwaters
of the Dover Pier. He lectured on Irish

54

tides and the design of saw mills. On the
Standards Commission, he contributed
theoretical studies of the flexure of uni-
form bars; he helped determine the longi-
tude of Valencia Island, Ireland; he visited
tin mines. He oversaw the planning and
execution of the survey of the international
boundary between Maine and Quebec. He
studied rotary engines. He made himself
busy devising schemes for compensating
magnetic compasses on iron-hulled ships.
He served on the Railway Gauge Com-
mission whose purpose was to choose a
British standard gauge which, in his own
words, he characterized as "an important
employment."

UNFORTUNATELY HE was so busy
that he was not at home in September
and October when the 24-year-old
astronomer John C. Adams twice came
down from Cambridge to visit him, in the
hope of discussing his new prediction of
the existence and location of a trans-
Uranian planet the one we now call
Neptune. Adams had devised a way to
work backward from the observed irregu-
larities of the orbit of Uranus to the orbit of
the disturbing planet. It was an early suc-
cess of inverse theory. It was destined to
become one of the most celebrated astro-
nomical achievements.

Although they did not meet, Airy sent
Adams a set of observations of Uranus that
had been collected at Greenwich. Autumn
turned to winter, and still Adams did not
publish his work. Meanwhile, in Paris,
independently, Leverrier had commenced
his own attempt at explaining the irregular-
ities of the Uranian orbit. By November 16,
1845, he had published his first results, and
on June 2, 1846, the second part appeared.
Airy corresponded with Leverrier. He was
now aware that both predicted locations
agreed to within a degree, and by July 16th
Airy became somewhat alarmed for
Adams's priority. Ten months had passed
since Adams had tried to visit him, but still

he did not urge Adams to publish. Instead
he asked Challis at the Cambridge
Observatory, where there was a new 12-
inch refractor, to search for the new planet
where Adams had indicated it to be. But
Challis was preoccupied by his own comet
program, and Airy, as he put it, "my nerves
shaken by the work on the Railway Gauge
Commission," traveled from August 10 to
October 1 1 on the continent with his wife
and her sister Elizabeth Smith to take the
water at Wiesbaden and an excursion to the
Swiss mountains. Meanwhile, on August 31
Leverrier's third paper was published. Airy
then junketed to visit his friend Professor
Hansen at Gotha, where he heard the aston-
ishing news that on September 16th
Leverrier had mailed his predicted location
for the new planet to the Berlin
Observatory. And within five days, Dr.
Galle, using Bremiker's admirable map for
Hora XXI as a reference, had observed the

A contemplative moment on Oceanus in 1980.

55

tiny eighth-magnitude disk of Neptune,
with a retrograde motion in right ascension
of six seconds a day. Praise and honors
immediately showered upon Leverrier.
Airy had a miserable five-day sea passage
home from Hamburg to London (the crank-
pin of the steamer broke and had to be
repaired). And he was seasick.

When he got home and put forward
Adams's claim, he was shouted down by
both angry French and British, the French
for sullying Leverrier' s just claim to fame,
and the British for being so inattentive to
Adams's interests.

BREAKING NEW GROUND in science is
such a difficult process that it can only
be done by an individual mind. For some of
us, that is the main attraction of doing scien-
tific work. In this respect it is like the art of
painting or musical composition or poetry.
The exhibitions, orchestral performances,
and public readings come later, as do the art
dealers, the recording companies, and the
paperback publishers. But it all begins with
an individual's choice of medium, choice of
theme and style and subject. And if you try
to impose themes or goals with a social pur-
pose, you produce those grotesque traves-
ties one sees in Peoples' Republics and com-
mercial advertising.

Each of us has a finite supply of ener-
gy. We draw upon it when we think hard,
supervise a technical group, or go to sea.
Often it takes the last ounce of effort to
break through to something new. So watch
your Plimsoll mark, and don't become too
heavily laden with other things to do. You
need to be able to turn quickly, change
plans, backtrack, and, when the moment
comes, to drop everything else to pursue
that flighty elusive new clue.

The creative scientist asks the ques-
tion that has not been posed before. He is
like a perpetual graduate student in quest
of a thesis topic. He discovers how to
engage his own potential most effectively.
Considerations of social relevance do not

dominate his tactics. He embarks on a
course as nearly orthogonal and indepen-
dent of previously charted courses as he is
capable of descrying. And with luck, the
grace of the peer review system, and the
support of the Science Foundation, he will
produce some significantly new fact or
thought. And it will bring joy.

The prospect of being an indepen-
dent investigator is one of the great
attractions of oceanography, as contrasted
to laboring within a preplanned program.
Certainly there are drawbacks. You will
be an employee, with a time-clock num-
ber. You will be employed by an imper-
sonal corporation, owned by people you
never see. They will monitor your perfor-
mance, set your rank and salary, and
decide whether you can stay on. They
will not provide funds, however, for your
research. Those you will have to seek,
annually, by proposals to government
funding agencies. The outcome will be
decided by outside peer review. So you
will be in double jeopardy.

But serving two separate masters is
the key to the freedom you need to carve
out your own research program. So if
someone mentions block funding, or sug-
gests a big project in which you are wel-
come to work, you might consider rolling
over and playing dead.

YOU NEED NOT work entirely alone.
From time to time you will find anoth-
er investigator whose skills and equipment
complement yours. This will be a collabo-
ration for a single, well-defined scientific
purpose, not collaboration for its own
sake. It will be comfortably below the
threshold of big science.

My own most pleasant past collabo-
rations, with English, French, and German
oceanographers, were of this transient
variety. Even the Mediterranean Deep
Ocean Convection experiment (MEDOC
69), an international program involving six
ships, lasted only three months and was

56

organized completely in a single, half-day
meeting. The funding agencies were in dif-
ferent countries and so were all indepen-
dent of one another, and we could work at
the individual proposal level. In a sense,
the Genie of Big Planning was momentari-
ly let out of the bottle. . .but it was easy to
stuff back in again.

A few words about the Genie of Big
Planning. It is an old acquaintance of scien-
tists. When let out of the bottle it feeds on
our attention and time. It requires constant
attendance at its court. There are those who
can look into its face without turning into
pillars of salt. For others, like me, pro-

"Breaking new ground

in science is such a

difficult process that

it can only be done by

an individual mind."

longed exposure threatens brain death.

In the early days of the Committee
on Oceanography, when it came to
putting some substance into a promotion-
al report, one of the best and most effec-
tive statesmen of our science would com-
mandeer the chalk and proceed to para-
phrase the table of contents of Sverdrup's
textbook as an outline. He repeated this
performance over the years, just changing
the words around a little. It provided an
overall statement of the scope of oceanog-
raphy at a time when few were acquaint-
ed with the word. It saved the rest of us a
lot of work. It saw us through the 1950s.
And it did not involve formulating
detailed national plans. For the individual
investigator it did not threaten the integri-
ty of the peer-review system.

By 1958, it became clear that we
needed to augment the research fleet, and
that launching something big would help
justify the expense. The International

Indian Ocean Expedition of the early 1960s
was the adventitious child of this need. It
was a last-minute inspiration of Columbus
Iselin, who, during a coffee break at an
international meeting in Woods Hole, hap-
pened to glance at a chart of the positions
of deep hydrographic stations in the world
ocean that was lying on the table in Fritz
Fuglister's office. Iselin noticed the paucity
of deep data in the Indian Ocean. A small
idea expanded to fill a vacuum. He
rejoined the meeting and suggested that an
international expedition to the Indian
Ocean might be the ticket. And soon we
had the Atlantis II the "new Discovery" -
and had begun the last great nineteenth-
century cruises of geographical discovery.
There was no master plan; each cruise was
the work of an individual scientist. A sig-
nificant data gap was filled. And it became
possible to visit such features as the Somali
Current. Our interest in the monsoonal cir-
culations of the Indian Ocean date from
that time. The Genie's bottle had been
shaken, but the stopper was not loosened.

YOU WILL RECALL HOW, as a school
child, when the geometry teacher had
you stand in front of the class and asked
you to prove an unfamiliar proposition of
Euclid, your mind went blank. You might
have responded, "Should I drop a perpen-
dicular, sir?" although you hadn't
thought of the next step. Oceanographers,
when confronted by a need for immediate
action, respond by dropping a CTD and
making a hydrographic section. It has
been a fruitful reflex, often leading to
important useful results.

If the West had too few ships, some sci-
ence administrators in the Soviet Union were
embarrassed by having too much ship time
to justify. They acted reflexively. In 1962,
they placed before UNESCO a proposal to
ask its members to make regular, quarterly,
hydrographic sections on a number of stan-
dard lines. If adopted, it would soak up
much of the world's research-vessel time.

57

Advocates could argue on behalf of climate
monitoring. We of the opposition feared that
all our ships would hit the fan. The stopper
in the bottle had been loosened, but before it
popped out, a UNESCO delegation was sent
to Moscow to offer a more scientifically
interesting plan and ram the stopper hard
home. The engineer of this countermove was
a Russian, Konstantin Federov. Some major
changes amongst the oceanographic and
hydro-meteorological administrators in
Moscow followed, and a first rate scientist
was appointed director of the Institute of
Oceanography. Federov was a brave and
skillful dragon-slayer. He was a good friend
and an excellent marksman with a rifle.

LOOKING BACK to this time, one can
now see how weak a sword that coun-
terproposal was. It was technologically
impossible in 1962 to set out and recover a
field of 100 moorings, each with a string of
reliable current meters. It was not exactly a
matter of opposing the undesirable by the
impossible, but more a matter of introduc-
ing a new language into the debate: the lan-
guage of time series, aliasing, power spec-
tra, separation of time-and -space scales,
etc. things those sturdy old polar-explorer
types who ran the Hydrometeorological
Service didn't know about.

Seven years went by; I gave up pro-
moting mooring experiments. It was in
1969 that Andrei Monin so stung my pride
that I got involved in the Mid-Ocean
Dynamics Experiment (MODE). It was at a
meeting in Dublin; Ozmidov gave a paper
on a Russian current-meter mooring
experiment. Monin and I were sitting at a
white enamel table in the college cafeteria.
In a mildly sardonic tone he asked,
"Henry, what ever happened to the US
100-mooring experiment?"

By 1969, Sverdrup's table of contents
was overtaken by the growth of oceanogra-
phy, and a new technique had been devel-
oped to stimulate oceanography: The
International Decade of Oceanography

(IDOE). It became possible for the first time
for oceanographers to organize sizable col-
laborative field projects and experiments,
on a scale hitherto out of our reach. Under
the wise leadership of Feenan Jennings it
was possible to carry out MODE and the
GEOchemical SECtions Study (GEOSECS).
These projects involved important devel-
opments in measurement technology, for
example, acquisition of significant numbers
of moored current meters and Sound
Fixing and Ranging floats. The projects
were a form of Big Science, but they were
not permanently established. They were
formed for a particular job and dissolved in
a few years when that job was done. Some
future historian reviewing science policy
may decide that it was at this point that the
Genie got out of the bottle. I don't think so.
I hope not. But there was a steep increase
in the amount of administrative work and
committee meetings. At one time someone
suggested that we manage our projects
with "PERT" or organizational diagrams,
something big industries were presumed to
do. To comply, Allan Robinson and I actu-
ally hired an expert from the Sloane School
of Management to do it for us. MODE and
the less successful POLYMODE that fol-
lowed exhausted four successive executive
officers.

I REALLY CAN'T JUDGE the full impact
that these projects had on the field in the
long run. In the short run, we got data avail-
able in no other way, we acquired numbers
of new instruments, learned about objective
analysis, and, I think, did worthwhile sci-
ence. MODE may have been a model for
future process-oriented experiments. It was
my first experience with the socio-adminis-
trative aspects of joint scientific planning
with the funding agencies and the setting of
priorities that seemed to imply a preference
for planned efforts over individual propos-
als. In the long run, one could reasonably be
uneasy about whether this priority for the
planned program was good for the future

58

The scientific party aboard Oceanus in 1980 for a "beta spiral" cruise included, top row, from left,

Richard Tench, Mindy Hall, and George Knapp; Middle row, Affonso Mascarenhas, Bob Stanley,

Ron Kroll, and Cindy Chandler; Front row, Larry Armi and Henry Stommel.

health of oceanography. I was certain that it
stifled my own scientific productivity. And I
realized that I wasn't shrewd enough to
play poker with the professionals on the
Potomac River sidewheeler.

Long ago at a meeting of the Harvard
Oceanography Committee, the chairman
announced that the committee had accu-
mulated $30,000 in funds of its own, and
that the dean had asked to see him. He
asked us for advice as to how to keep the
dean from taking the money away. A dis-
tinguished chemistry professor said,
"Remember that Dean Bundy is a lot
smarter than you, and put all your cards
on the table." I took that advice to heart.

It took a few years to find my way to
the egress. In 1973, 1 chaired a National
Academy of Sciences (NAS) report entitled
"The Ocean's Role in Climate Prediction"
for something called the National Climate
Plan. The meteorologists were embarking

upon the First Global Atmospheric
Research Program (GARP) and had invited
us to join them. And, they had some funds
to offer.

WE HAD TWO MEETINGS with at
least 100 attendees. The substance of
the rather slender report was a tabulation
of assorted ongoing oceanographic pro-
jects, a time table, and some general
remarks not much of a report, really. It
was something that one of us and a pro-
gram officer could have produced over a
weekend. Perhaps some of you will
remember those hot September days in the
parlor of the Brandigee Estate in Brookline,
with the windows wide open. We were
sweating over the great central table, sur-
rounded by fading opulence, and, like
Pharaoh, plagued by flying insects.

The atmosphere of the meeting was
oppressive. As we pursued one tedious

59

Hank helps Dave Bitterman manhandle a velocity-sensing tow body aboard Atlantis //in 1979.

topic after another, the sense of having
been there before and the enormity of what
I was subjecting all my friends to overcame
me. I went into some kind of emotional
overdrive and spent the rest of the after-
noon with Claes Rooth swatting flies.
There was little joy in that meeting.

DURING THE PAST DECADE, I have
renounced the Genie and all its works
and haven't kept up with big planning.
One does notice that there is a lot of com-
ing and going over the surface of the
earth an unusually large number of
meetings. The final World Ocean
Circulation Experiment (WOCE) plan
seems to be a fair balance between tradi-
tional and novel, between geographical
and process-oriented programs.
Participation in the planning has been
widespread. Perhaps it really isn't Big
Science at all just an assemblage of the
miscellaneous smaller projects that people
would have wanted to do anyway. Surely

there is a Dean Bundy who will see to it
that the outsider, the little guy, doesn't get
pushed off the edge of the earth.

One is encouraged by the success of
some of the other planned projects, such as
Tropical Oceans-Global Atmosphere. This
is one instance where repeated standard
Equatorial Pacific Ocean Current Study
sections made by National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration vessels with
the encouragement of Joe Fletcher have
paid off in a handsome scientific fashion.
This is a marvellous example of a natural
system in which the sampling intervals
and signal strengths are suitable for moni-
toring by standard sections. Further, the
Office of Naval Research still manifests its
old high skill in identifying and assem-
bling little groups of oceanographers to
work fruitfully together on special
process-oriented projects such as Topo
and Subduction.

If my little story about Sir George
Airy has any prophetic value, and if our

60

science is a healthy one, wonderful and
unplanned things will happen, unrelated to
the large-scale planning. Young, unknown
Leverriers will appear on the scene. They
will be beginning postdocs unknown to our
steering committees. And they will con-
found our cautious planning by important
new insights that we had overlooked and
by risking predictions that the rest of us
will then be forced to confirm. New ideas
have a dynamics of their own; they don't
need to be promoted. If a simple theory can
lead to a discovery in the real world, it
commands attention, and is bound to shake
up carefully planned programs.

LOOKING INTO THE future beyond 20
years of WOCE, I think that we will see
establishment of a regular oceanic data net-
work, using remotely controlled vehicles to
make routine subsurface measurements on a
global scale, like that of the meteorological
network. Presumably, such regular data-col-
lecting systems will eventually be taken
over by responsible government agencies,
and the research community will be relieved
of taking much of these climate-motivated
data. They will feed the hungry computers.
But certainly we will always need ships to
do our own work in the ocean.

Looking ahead, I think there may be a
transformation in what we mean by "scien-
tific understanding." When we use com-
puters to process large amounts of data, it
is a convenience that sharpens the data
analysis. When we use complex numerical
models to replace simple analytical ones,
we may be doing something different.
When we couple these numerical models to
the inflow of data, in the so-called assimila-
tion mode, we are doing something very
different. And yet we must take this step if
we are ever to have useful forecasting mod-
els for social purposes. Computers have
also led us to accept the limits of pre-
dictability and have had a chastening effect
on the arrogance of the exact sciences.
Suppose that we concoct a model that actu-

ally forecasts climate with significant suc-
cess. We know how the model is built
because we programmed it. Once the pro-
gram takes over it follows such intricate
tortuous internal paths that we cannot
understand them. It could be socially use-
ful, maybe even a great triumph of sanitary
engineering, but it will present us with a
problem of understanding.

I wonder how our concept of under-
standing will evolve to accommodate itself
to the complexity of these models. You all
know that the notion of understanding is a
rather slippery thing. For example, we can
understand the interaction of discrete vor-
tices most easily in terms of vorticity inter-
actions, whereas resorting to the primitive
inviscid equations would be a mess. We
invoke ideas of normal modes in explaining
vibrations. Rossby waves are easier to think
of in terms of the vorticity equation rather
than the momentum equations. These are
old acquaintances, so we are comfortable
with them. To some extent, analytical con-

"New ideas have a

dynamics of their own;

they don't need

to be promoted."

cepts will be recognizable in the first data-
assimilating models. For example, in Moore
and Anderson's recent assimilation of
expendable bathythermograph data into a
layer model of the tropical Pacific Ocean
(1989), the authors are able to interpret com-
puted features as variants of familiar Kelvin
and Rossby waves moving through the
computed field and adjusting to the up-
dated data. In more complicated models,
features resembling analytically familiar
ones may not dominate the action, and we
will want new definitions of what we mean
by understanding.

61

I have been asked by the two other
surviving members of SOSO, the Society of
Subprofessional Oceanographers, to con-
vey our best wishes and felicitations to The
Oceanography Society, and to wish it suc-
cess. It will be an important forum in
which oceanographers can consider their
needs and can have an independent voice
in organizing their affairs. In the past we
have derived great benefit from our associ-
ation with other societies, but they
inevitably had an agenda additional to our
own. Now we have a new start.

I hope that this is a good forum in
which to make a statement of the main rea-
son for being a scientist, as I see it. The
president of the leading scientific honor
society in this country has recently stated
that students should be interested in sci-
ence because it is fun. I think it is some-
what deeper than plain fun: It is a voyage
of intellectual exploration, and an expres-
sion of the human spirit.

THE CONFLICTING tension between
following one's own sense of direc-
tion and dutifully serving a social pur-
pose is a strong one, especially when gov-
ernment funding is involved. I sense that
so far I have given only one side of the
story, so here are a few instances where
the embattled pure scientist was unable to
maintain a balance.

The history of science is strewn with
melancholy wreckage from struggles to
maintain some balance. When Ferdinand
Hassler was appointed first director of the
Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1816, he
tried to begin with a general triangulation
grid along the eastern seaboard. It was

slow, meticulous work, and to many con-
gressmen it seemed much too academic.
He was insensitive to the impatient com-
mercial interests who wanted immediate
surveys of their harbors. Consequently, the
survey was disbanded in 1819. Thirteen
years later it was resurrected under the
superintendency of the more worldly
Alexander Dallas Bache. Under Bache, the
Coast Survey made many fine charts and
maintained high professional standards. It
even served as a refuge for a few scientists.

JOSEPH HENRY HAD great hopes that
the Smithsonian Institution would be a
national center for pure science. He was
frustrated by the federal government's dif-
fering view: that it was the nation's attic.
There is the case of Josiah Whitney
(for whom the mountain is named) who in
1861 was appointed head of the Geological
Survey of California, on Louis Agassiz's
recommendation. He embarked upon a
serious scientific survey and had to appear
before the state legislature each year to ask
for a continuing appropriation. This was a
time scarcely 1 1 years after the gold rush,
and the lawmakers were anxious to exploit
mineral resources. Whitney fed them a diet
of paleontology, and undiplomatically lec-
tured them on merits of science for its own
sake and the evils of crass commercialism.
The survey was discontinued after four
years. Whitney was so outraged that he
lost his sense of equilibrium and began to
behave in a demented fashion; he lashed
out against innocent bystanders, accused
his colleagues of improprieties, and tried
to destroy the reputation of his old
acquaintance, Benjamin Silliman, Jr., of
Yale because Silliman had publicized the
opinion that there were useful oil reserves
in Southern California. Whitney was on
record that there were none.

In the nineteenth century, American
scientists were very much on the defensive
against the popularity of the unschooled
Yankee inventor. Thomas Edison estab-

62

lished the first industrial laboratory in
1872. By 1876, he demonstrated his phono-
graph and carbon microphone before the
National Academy of Sciences, but it was
not impressed. Edison went on to invent
the electric light, the motion picture cam-
era and founded whole industries.
During World War I, the Navy had to con-
sult him outside the National Research
Council. Edison liked to make fun of pure
scientists and loved to play the role of the
common-sense practical engineer. In 1926,
efforts were made belatedly to elect him to
the engineering section of the academy.
The members of long-standing who had
resolutely opposed his election for 50 years
had mostly passed away. R.A. Millikan
made an impassioned speech of nomina-
tion, in which he asked, "Is there any
physicist here who will deny that Edison
has made great contributions to sci-
ence?"- and A. A. Michelson rose from his
seat to say, "I am that physicist." He was
the president of the Academy. This is a
measure of how much pure scientists
sometimes feel on the defensive.

With growing appreciation of
approaching ecological disaster, oceanogra-
phy has now been swept up in the effort to
stave it off. There are important jobs to be
done and perhaps scientists like Hassler,
Henry, Whitney, and Michelson would not
be psychologically equipped to implement
them. Perhaps oceanography has come of
age in this respect, and in the future will
inevitably be increasingly organized. So you
see in all honesty there is another side to
the question of pure science and scientific
planning for public service. I'm trying to
give the Genie his due, and to clarify the
nature of the tension between the two sides.
This new Oceanography Society can serve
both pure and applied, the little and the big,
the individual and the programmed.

However, in my heart I believe that,
for a scientist, it is his personal mental
wrestling match with some aspect of the
universe that is his central activity and

reward. All alone, one confronts the
unknown and divines some meaning from
it. We sort the pieces and arrange them in
new patterns.

When we stand before the tomb of
Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey, our
sense of reverence stems not from his emi-
nence as President of the Royal Society, or
because as Master of the Mint he was so
good at catching counterfeiters. We wor-
ship his memory because of that golden
year in 1666 when, as a youth, exiled to the
Lincolnshire countryside on account of the
plague in Cambridge, he laid down, with
the help of his own home-made calculus,
the principles of theoretical mechanics. His

"Science is a voyage of

intellectual exploration,

and an expression of the

human spirit/'

overweening sense of self-importance and
his government service came afterwards.
We have recently celebrated the twentieth
anniversary of NASA's Apollo Mission,
one of the largest and most expensive
planned technological feats of all time yet
I think it no exaggeration to assert that, in
a basic sense, it actually was the blazing
fire in the mind of the boy Newton that
put those men on the moon.

Members of the Society, we are
putting the fate of oceanography into your
hands. We trust you will be faithful keep-
ers of that flame. *

63

Barbara Gaffron

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Might I find

a big bunch of

giant zinnias,

a bouquet of

fragrant

sweet peas,

or a quart

basket of red

and yellow

plums?

Chug up the rise with short strokes, there's the sedate red sedan.
Smooth cruise down the hall and around the corner (it's a
Rollerblade day). Up in the elevator with lingering cigar smoke: Henry
has come this way.

What would there be this morning? A new trick puzzle whose solu-
tion would be announced with enthusiastic guffaws? An issue of
Soundings or the National Fisherman advertising ships useful for short-
lead-time research cruises, or a National Enquirer with discreetly indis-
tinct photographs of the Loch Ness Monster (why didn't we see this on
televised news last night)? Perhaps a colorful catalogue of fireworks
available at a not-too-distant store in New Hampshire: I would park my
car (definitely not a sedate red) a couple of blocks away (not a straight
line) and be sure I had a "plain brown bag," get a nice supply of Roman
candles, then continue upstate for weekend hiking. Upon returning to
Falmouth, I'd go directly to Sippewissett Farm and deliver the cache.
And listen on clear nights.

Or, would we be treated to an impromptu (for us at 0800) accordion
recital? Henry would have been practicing for months in the sunroom
or outside the house. We would see a strolling musician with that
"unseeing" look of concentration and hear Hungarian polkas, Viennese
waltzes, and English or French folk tunes, all played by ear.

Perhaps he'd bustle down the hallway, unfolding a map of
Newfoundland that we'd pore over on the counter. He'd draw my
attention to how much land was not crisscrossed by roads and how
some coastal villages were connected by roads but gaps between others
indicated passage by water.

Or, might I find a big bunch of giant zinnias, a bouquet of fragrant
sweet peas, or a quart basket of red and yellow plums?

Something new every morning. <

Editor's Note: Barbara Gaffron served as secretary to Henry Stommel from
1985 to 1992.

Peter Niiler

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

In early December of 1965, my postdoctoral advisor at Harvard told
me that there was not a position for me on the Harvard faculty. I was
crestfallen and called Hank Stommel at MIT about my predicament of
being unemployed six months hence. He told me to immediately take a
bus down Mass Ave. and meet him for lunch at the MIT faculty club.
Hank arrived at the table with a motley, dog-eared manila file under
his arm. After hearing my tale of woe over several glasses of wine, he
handed the file to me with a comment that Bill Richardson and some
graduate student named Bill Schmitz had sent it to him, but he really
did not know what they were getting at in the enclosed material. He

64

then added with a wink that, as a theoretician, perhaps I would under-
stand better what they were doing than he had and that I should pay
them a visit at Key Biscayne Oceanographic Laboratory of the
University of Miami.

I was now further confused in my predicament, having fully expect-
ed the guru of oceanography to help me with a long list of famous uni-
versity departments to which he would then give me personal introduc-
tions for a position which I thought I fully deserved. Instead, I had got-
ten an unsavory manila folder containing one piece of coffee-stained,
blue-checkered, graph paper. On it was a pencil-drawn abscissa depict-
ing distance in kilometers east of Fowley Rocks and the ordinate was in
units of Sv/km. A hand-drawn pencil line connected a series of black
dots, first increasing and then decreasing with distance toward Bimini.
On the bottom lefthand corner was a scribble that, upon closer scrutiny,
could be taken as 32.4 Sv.

Hank had not waxed over the fact that this graph was of the first
direct measurement of the surface-to-bottom transport of any major
ocean current system in the world. The number 32.4 SV was the mass
flux (in Sverdrup units) of the Florida Current between Miami and
Bimini that Bill Schmitz had measured, knee deep in the bilge of a
decomposing 32-foot motorboat using dropsondes invented by Bill
Richardson. Over the next few weeks, while preparing for my trip to
Miami, the facts on the coffee-stained paper dawned for me with the full
force that Hank knew revolutionary facts of science would. I had been
handed a jewel of scientific data in disguise and the possibility of joining
a most exciting, but very unconventional, research group in the tropics.

That was his way; to be seemingly irreverent in the presence of
what he knew was considered sacred by others and to be unimpressed
by the normal academic ways of doing the business of oceanography.
With this simple act of showing me a jewel of scientific data in disguise,
he also sent me to live for eight years in the swamps of Florida and
work on a small houseboat laboratory in Ft. Lauderdale. He could not
have given a better gift from the real world to a young theoretician. *

Valery Lee

World Meteorological Association

** ** **

What do you say to an aspiring oceanographer (female) who goes
to sea in dresses?

Become a lawyer.

That's what Hank's advice to me was back in 1973 as we mused
over my future, drinking gin and tonics on the fantail of an old cable
layer sailing around the Bermuda Triangle in search of eddies.

From the first day he interviewed me as an MIT undergrad apply-
ing for a job during the January Independent Activities Period, Hank
and I hit it off. We both liked to laugh about the same sort of things, and
I was always game for one of Hank's pranks. One of my favorites was
the light-bulb trick. I was often invited to the Stommels' cozy old farm-
house in the evening or on the weekend for a beer and a friendly chat.
Usually we sat around the kitchen table, but on this particular day

He could

not have

given a

better gift

from the

real world

to a young

theoretician.

65

Hank had another guest, and he ushered me into the parlor. He said,
"It's a little dark in here, Valery. Could you please turn on the lights?"
So I proceeded dutifully to switch on the many lamps. However, each
time that I turned another one on, the room seemed to get darker! Hank
had screwed light bulbs into the fuse sockets, which meant that as each
additional lamp was lit, the output of all the others dimmed.

On another visit, we were sitting around the kitchen table and the
doorbell rang. Hank came back all excited there was a very distin-
guished-looking gentleman with a beautiful antique car asking after me
out front. Hank was always concerned about my personal life as well as

His Trophy Presented Problem In Logistics

Oceanographer Henry M. Stommel came back from the llth Pacific Scientific
Congress at Tokyo recently with a stuffed albatross in a cage that accompa-
nied his citation by the American Miscellaneous Society.

It is quite a trophy.

The Albatross Award of the American Miscellaneous Society was first award-
ed in 1959, the year the society was founded. The award went to the three
founders "for conceiving the idea."

These charter members were Dr. Arthur E. Maxwell, assistant director of the
Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole; John Knauss, dean of oceanography at
the University of Rhode Island; and Gordon Lill of the Office of Naval Research,
director of the late Mohole project.

Someone dug up the stuffed albatross out at the Scripps Institution at La Jolla,
Calif. It is a rather handsome bird at that, twice as good as a husky sea gull, with a
puffy white chest, a cocked head and a beady eye. The cage he came back from
Japan in is lightly built of wood and wire.

After that first year, the founders broadened their view and gave the Albatross
Award out of the society to Walter Munk of Scripps, to Harrison Brown, professor
of geochemistry at California Tech and former foreign secretary to the National
Academy, to Victor Vacquier of Scripps, discoverer of a fault in the floor of the
Pacific, to John Swallow, the distinguished Briton.

Mr. Stommel, the latest recipient, had received international attention for his
discoveries and theories regarding circulation of the oceans.

Mr. Stommel received the award, according to his citation, for "abandoning
the cherished chairs of oceanography," which perhaps reflects oceanographers'
envy of Mr. Stommel's independence.

A tradition growing up about the seven-year-old Albatross Award of the
American Miscellaneous Society is that it be presented in an out-of-the-way place
where the recipient will have the maximum difficulty bringing his prize home.

This is the reason the sponsors waited for the occasion to present the award to
Mr. Stommel in Tokyo. Dr. Vacquier had crossed the Pacific on one of the Scripps
vessels, bringing the albatross with him. It was up to Mr. Stommel to get it back.

66

my professional one, and he would do his best to make encouraging
remarks if someone came to the office to invite me to the movies or din-
ner. This time, however, it turned out that the gentleman in question
was interested only in my vintage Mercedes, which he had seen parked
in the Stommels' driveway.

Hank had a myriad of projects all going at once, and he always
found something interesting for me to do. After graduation, I stayed in
his employ to produce an atlas of data from one of the first "big sci-
ence" physical oceanography experiments, called Mid-Ocean Dynamics
Experiment (MODE), which Hank had been instrumental in conceiving

Mr. Stommel, who had reservations by air, might have been apprehensive at
the very start of the trip. At Tokyo airport he was stopped from carrying the bird
on the plane.

"It's an animal," the official said.

"It's not alive," added Mr. Stommel defensively. A superior had to be sum-
moned. It ended up that the bird was given special handling in the plane's bag-
gage compartment, which still left the problem of getting it through the Customs
at San Francisco.

But at San Francisco, it couldn't have gone more smoothly. "Hey, Bert, we
don't want to see this, do we?" the examining Customs officer called to a
colleague.

"No," said Bert. The bird went
through.

Nor was there any problem on the
TWA plane that brought Mr. Stommel
and his prize across the country. The
albatross in its cage is, said Mr.
Stommel, about "seat size." The bird sat
beside him all the way.

The albatross now decorates the liv-
ing room of Mr. Stommel' s house in
Sippewissett. Mr. Stommel travels a
great deal. Next recipient of the
Albatross Award may find it being
handed to him on the far side of the
Gobi Desert or some equally remote
place.

At the llth Pacific Science Congress

in Tokyo were several from Woods Hole. Oceanographer Stommel and the Albatross
L.V. Worthington read a paper on the
Kuroshio Current, which is the Pacific's Gulf Stream. Jonathan Leiby and

Mather 3d of the Oceanographic Institution were there. *

The Enterprise

September 9, 1966

67

Not Afraid Of Life

by Starbuck

ON THE AFTERNOON of Jan. 7, 1975, the wind came up in the Gulf of
Maine. By evening it was from the northwest at 40 knots. The water
temperature was 40 degrees. The little research vessel Gulfstream was unable
to radio for help and foundered with all on board. During the next few days
an extensive search recovered the body of one of the crew of five and a few
bits of flotsam. The cause of the tragedy remains unknown.

Among those lost was William Richardson, a good friend of many at
the Oceanographic since the early 1950s when he came to Woods Hole
with a fresh Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Harvard. Bill first worked
on the development of infrared sensing of ocean surface temperature from
aircraft and later on the early stages of moored current meter instrumenta-
tion. His unceremonious and informal ways earned him the friendship
and respect of those who worked with him. He was also independent and
outspoken, by no means a tame spirit. In the early 60s he set up a new lab
at Nova University where he could be his own boss and undertook an
outstanding series of measurements of the fluctuations in strength of the
Florida Current.

As a naval aviator at Midway, Bill had experienced the anguish of seeing
his entire squadron wiped out in battle. He claimed that from that time he
could never again take seriously the petty worries that bedevil most of us:
financial security, job advancement, health, academic prestige. He tended to
discount his own personal safety. When a crew member fell overboard on
one oceanographic cruise, instead of calling to the helm or throwing over a
lifeline, Bill plunged instantly into the sea to rescue him: rare courage.

Bill found people endlessly entertaining; he liked adventure and work-
ing at sea and in aircraft and the kind of person one finds there. He had

seen death so close that he was not afraid of life. *

The Enterprise
January 7, 1985

68

and designing. At the same time, Hank had a National Science
Foundation grant (with Ants Leetmaa of the Atlantic Oceanographic
and Meteorological Laboratories) to take current profiles across the
equatorial Indian Ocean from a locally built and operated schooner in
the Seychelles. By the time the project was in its second year, Hank had
exhausted his entire stock of students, technicians, and scientific collab-
orators willing to go on this romantic venture. He still needed someone
for the last three months, and there I was, willing!

Hank was always encouraging, and willing to give people a chance,
especially if they were inclined to take a lot of initiative and free him up
to tackle the problems he found truly interesting, which did not include
the nitty gritty of managing a field experiment on the other side of the
globe. He warned me about driving in the Seychelles (his own experi-
ences having resulted in unscheduled encounters with Arabs behind
beaded curtains) and sent me on my way. I got to the island to find that
the boat had just left, the captain had quit, and I had no place to live.
From there started a wonderful adventure, and everything worked out,
even the data gathering.

Hank continued to contemplate what would be the best use of my
particular talents, and one of his ideas was that I should work for a
United Nations organization, and start up an oceanographic equivalent
of the World Meteorological Organization's World Weather Watch. Now
(many, many years later) I work for the World Meteorological
Organization, and it is a measure of Hank's prescience that the first steps
toward a Global Ocean Observing System have recently been taken.

Hank was many things to many people. I will always remember
him as the first oceanographer I ever met, a good friend and guide, and
the one who infused me with an enthusiasm for oceanography I have
never been able to shake. *

Robert Heinmiller

OMNET, Inc.

I came to WHOI in 1962, right out of MIT with my BS in hand, know-
ing nothing of oceanography. It seemed like a nice place to spend a
year learning to sail. Hank Stommel was one of the people who intro-
duced me to the wonders of oceanography and was responsible for the
fact that, 14 years later, I was still there.

In late 1976, 1 was commuting from Boston to Woods Hole every
day, getting ready to move to a position back at MIT. Knowing that I
was driving to Boston every evening, people would send graduate stu-
dents and other itinerants who needed rides to me.

One day in the fall, I was driving up Route 3 with a student who
had graduated from a midwestern university and had arrived to enroll
in the WHOI /MIT Joint Program. He had just been to Mecca for the
first time. He went on at length about how thrilling it was to see the
ships and the famous labs.

And, then, he said, breathlessly, "And... and do you know who I met?"
"No," I replied warily, wondering what eminent notable had been
in town, "Who?"

I got to
the island to

find that

the boat had

just left,

the captain

had quit,

and I had

no place

to live.

69

We're Over The Ridge!

by Starbuck

IN THE EARLY 50s the IRS was trying to decide whether the National
Geographic Society with its ten million members could really qualify as a
non-profit scientific society. "Doc" Ewing thought it a favorable moment to
ask them for some research funds to sample the ocean bottom near the Azores.
Shortly thereafter the magazine carried a colorful article about his success in
scooping up some rocks there, and a salty photo bearing the legend "We're
over the Ridge!" Recovering anything at all from the ocean bottom impressed
us greatly.

Some of us who were wondering whether we could place instruments on
the ocean bottom and recover them by dragging thought it might be worth-
while to consult a cableship captain. Our friend, the Marine Superintendent
for Undersea Cables at Western Union, Mr. C. S. Lawton, arranged a visit to
the cableship Lord Kelvin. Three of us from Woods Hole flew to Halifax, were
duly impressed by her size, which dwarfed anything we knew, and ushered
into Captain Beady' s (as I will call him) cabin.

A small, delicate martinet of a man with, as I remember, manicured nails,
Captain Beady politely had us seated and introduced the subject of golf. He
must have run a taut ship, because as we sipped his sherry, the seamen, scrub-
bing down the bulkhead outside his open door, kept out of view: all we could
see were their hands with the sponges.

We were interested in the type of grapnel he used, ones that could cut a
cable and clamp onto the end desired, even if they tumbled over while being
dragged along the bottom. Instead of taking us down to the welldeck he had
the crew manhandle them up to his cabin and lay them out for our inspection
on an immaculate canvas. It was a lesson in command.

Before we departed Captain Beady enquired whether we were associated
with the place that operated the Atlantis. He had read the National Geographic'^
article. And he had been ordered out to the mid- Atlantic in winter to repair
one of the transatlantic cables. Sending the mate to copy out the position of the
splice, he said the cable had been probably cut by a rock dredge.

Upon our return to Woods Hole we found in the Atlantis' s log that she had
lost a dredge at that very position. It caused us to reflect upon the professional
precision of his repair as contrasted to the amateur nature of our random
scooping up of rocks. It might have been polite to write to him and confirm
his guess, but somehow we didn't think the redoubtable Captain Beady really
needed to know * The Enterprise

March 25, 1985

70

"Professor Henry Stommel," he said, in tones usually reserved for
the beatified.

I stared blankly at him for a moment, and then blurted out, "Oh,
you mean Hank!"

I am sure that that graduate student eventually became more com-
fortable around Hank. I am not sure whether Hank would have been
amused or pained at the idea that anyone stood in that kind of awe of
him. I don't think I ever took Hank's stature, intellect, and importance
to science for granted. But it was perhaps useful to be reminded that
this wonderful, accessible, friendly person wandering around Woods
Hole was also the famous oceanographer "Professor Henry Stommel."

The world was fortunate to have had Hank. Those of us who
worked with him and knew him were incredibly lucky. *

William Schmitz

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Hank was a terrific person, colleague, and friend as well as a great
oceanographer. I came to Woods Hole to a large extent to be
around such an original and free spirit, and especially enjoyed our
early-morning coffee breaks together throughout the years. All topics
were fair game, although matters related to physical oceanography
were most likely to come up. Hank was a mentor for a lot of us, a warm
and brilliant light in our life. He will be deeply missed. *

Harry Bryden

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Those of us

who were

wide awake

got an

Oceanographic
education
unequalled

in any
curriculum.

In the early 1970s, Henry Stommel was organizing the Mid-Ocean
Dynamics Experiment (MODE) program and commuting to MIT
nearly every day. At the same time, the WHOI-based Joint Program
graduate students organized a station-wagon commuter run to MIT for
courses every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Each day we would
pick up Hank at his house at 6:30 a.m. and head for Boston. Many of the
students slept all the way there, but those of us who were wide awake
got an Oceanographic education unequalled in any curriculum. We
learned how the National Science Foundation and Office of Naval
Research worked, what was going on in MODE, what the upcoming
International Decade of Ocean Exploration programs like International
Southern Ocean Studies and Geochemical Ocean Sections Studies
would be doing, how to get tenure. Hank discussed them all not in spe-
cific or personal terms but in a general philosophical approach that
taught one how to frame practical solutions and approaches within
one's own philosophy of science.

We had traffic problems, of course, on the Southeast Expressway.
We utilized breakdown-lane driving before it was fashionable (legal);
we developed a route through the neighborhoods of Boston so copied

71

I thought it
was an

interesting

problem

until it
showed up as

one of my

general

examination

questions.

that the city eventually eliminated it by reversing the one-way nature of
a critical street to make it impossible. One day, Hank showed up with a
sign reading "This is not our car" for the car window; he was convinced
it would keep the Boston drivers away from us as we repeatedly
changed lanes on the expressway. The WHOI car managers, however,
removed the sign before we could adequately test its effectiveness.

Hank always brought scientific problems along. Why does the sun
set earliest on December 8th instead of on December 21st, he asked as
he was reading the Farmer's Almanac one afternoon. I would wonder for
days about the answers, and it was more fun to wonder about the ques-
tions than to look up the solutions. One day, Hank began talking about
traffic flow as being similar to water flow: When the traffic density
becomes too great, disturbances propagate upstream against the flow
and the transport of cars decreases. Until the end of the term, we tabu-
lated traffic statistics, estimating density and speed under various con-
ditions, trying to identify the critical density for maximum transport. I
thought it was an interesting problem until it showed up as one of my
general examination questions, and then I felt foolish for not looking
into the theory in more detail.

Commuting with Henry Stommel weekly over two years for three
hours a day was one of the most remarkable experiences of my gradu-
ate education. I learned much about what was going on in oceanogra-
phy, about the fun in asking and trying to answer interesting questions,
and about the importance of maintaining a philosophy of science.

I once tried to explain to a Woods Hole faculty member about how
much I had learned from Hank in the course of commuting, and he
decided Hank should give a formal course so he and others could learn
as well. But it proved impossible to bottle what Hank had to teach. You
just had to be there with him to absorb the curiosity, the deep philoso-
phy, and the joy of doing oceanographic research. *t*

Joseph Reid

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Leg 1 of the SCORPIO expedition (Eltanin cruise 28), along 43S from
Melbourne to Valparaiso, was 54 days long, from March 12 to May 5,
1967, though there was a half-day stopover in New Zealand to let Manik
Talwani (Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory) off. This was to be one
of the longer lines of stations ever made. With one set of gear, techniques,
reagents, and people all the way, the Aristotelian unities of time, person-
nel, and place would be preserved: The data would have the virtue of
internal consistency. It occurred to us that the geochemists, who had been
collecting their own particular data in bits and pieces here, and using a
range of different techniques and sampling schemes, might profit by get-
ting together and carrying out such a line of stations in a more coherent
fashion. We (Henry Stommel, Bruce Warren, and I) thought of perhaps a
single long line from the north to the south end of one of the oceans, and
decided that Henry should suggest this to the proper people. He did, and
the result was the Geochemical Ocean Sections Study expeditions.

72

The Eltanin had brought along a lot of movies. Not all of them were
prize winners, but they were accepted with some wry good humor. One
B-grade horror movie had as its subject a human hand, severed but still
active, that committed various crimes. The concept intrigued Henry. He
found a large heavy-duty glove and put into it a device of his own cre-
ation that made it contract and jump at irregular intervals. He put it on a
table in front of the movie screen and when the lights were darkened for
the fourth showing of the horror movie it began to clench its fist and
move around. After it was all explained, and the creator identified, the
first mate, a rather proper fellow, looked at Henry and then turned to me
and asked, "Is that the great Stommel?" It was, of course, as much the
real Henry as anything else he had done. He was a grand shipmate. >

W. S. (Wally) Broecker

Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory

* * *

A story I heard but can't vouch for is that during a GEOSECS isotope
discussion held at WHOI's Carriage House circa 1971, Hank,
dressed as a witch, crawled up the aisle, reached up a gnarled hand,
and wrote on the blackboard

K =

then, without a word, he disappeared.

On a more serious note, it was Hank who launched GEOSECS. Ed
Goldberg (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and I were attending
some sort of meeting at WHOI during the late 1960s. Hank came to us
and said that radiocarbon measurements in the sea were of great impor-
tance. He went on to gently chastise us (the geochem community) for
doing only scattered stations.

"What is needed," he said, "is a line of stations extending the length
of the Atlantic."

"Gee," we said, "that would cost a million dollars, a sum greater
than the entire NSF annual budget for ocean chemistry!"

Hank replied, "Well, it would be worth more than a million."

He spurred us to propose such a venture. Soon plans were being for-
mulated not only to do carbon-14 but also a host of other chemical and
isotopic properties along Hank's Atlantic line. Boosted by the appearance
of Department of Energy monies, Hank's dream became a reality that
ultimately covered the entire world ocean and cost NSF $25 million! <

Peter Rhines

University of Washington

* * *

My most compelling memory is of gales of Hank's laughter echoing
down the halls of the Oceanographic. He found fun in chasing
and discovering ocean problems, and in all the mad adventures of life
at Sippewissett Farm. That high state of whimsy came from a fresh view
of life, just as fresh as was his approach to oceanography. *

Hank's

dream

became a

reality that

ultimately

covered

the entire

world

ocean.

73

Henry Stommel On the Light Side

by F.C. (Fritz) Fuglister

This is an excerpt from a contribution to Evolution of Physical
Oceanography: Scientific Surveys in Honor of Henry Stommel (MIT Press)
edited by Bruce Warren and Carl Wunsch and published in 1981 in cele-
bration of Hank Stommel 's 60th birthday. It is reprinted with permission.

DURING THE 1940s Stommel went to considerable effort to bring oceanog-
raphers together, using his own car to drive groups to Brown or Cambridge
from Woods Hole. His car was old and he was a very careful driver, but the con-
versation was animated and the more spirited the discussion became, the slower
the car moved. I remember, after one such trip to MIT, Carl Rossby, stepping out
of the car smiling and stretching his arms wide, sighed, "It is hard to believe that
only this morning we left Woods Hole."

It was on this same trip that we all had a thrilling experience. At one point,
about halfway on our journey, we were amazed to find that we were behind a car
that was traveling even slower than we were. The excitement ran high as Hank
pulled over into the left lane and drew up abreast of the slow vehicle: He was
going to pass him! Then we all saw who was driving the slow-moving car. It was
George Veronis. He had a smile on his face as he waved to us, his thumb to his
nose, and sped off for MIT. That is the closest we ever came to passing another car.

Fortunately, other cars and other drivers came along, and this regular move-
ment of oceanographers back and forth, started by Stommel, continued and
flourished; today, I understand that even going as far away as Yale is not consid-
ered unthinkable.

Over the years, Henry Stommel of course did more than drive cars. . ..He was
the first President of SOSO, and he is the Special Committee for The William
Leighton Jordan, Esq., Award. Because of his retiring disposition, Hank has
managed to keep these activities more or less secret.

In 1 961, or thereabouts, L.V. Worthington (Val) showed me an item in an ONR
newsletter about a new laboratory in Europe that was to be staffed by eight
Ph.D.s and fifteen subprofessionals. "That is what we are," he said, "subprofes-
sionals," and I had to agree with him. By the same token, we both realized that it
made Stommel and others subprofessional, an astounding thought! That same
evening I asked my young son to set up type for a letterhead for the Society of
Subprofessional Oceanographers (SOSO). He asked me whether the society
would have any administrators; I shuddered at the thought but I said, "Oh, make
Hank President, me Vice President, and Val Ambassador to the Court of St.
James"; so he did and that was the birth of SOSO. Since the society never holds
meetings or keeps any records, we don't know what that birth date is.

We know that in 1964, when Henry was off in California receiving the
Sverdrup Medal of the American Meteorological Society, I, in a bold coup d'etat
took over the presidency of SOSO.

74

Stommel joined his membership in SOSO to his fascination with the nine-
teenth-century English amateur, William Leighton Jordan, in the following
announcement, issued some years ago:

Society of Subprofessional Oceanographers
Special Committee

for
THE WILLIAM LEIGHTON JORDAN, ESQ., AWARD

Announcement

The William Leighton Jordan, Esq., Award is given
annually to the Oceanographer who makes the
most misleading contribution to his field. Ignorance
and utter incompetence do not automatically qualify.
The work cited must be distinguished not only by being
in error, but it must be outstandingly bad: wrong both
in principle and fact, and revealing the most mistaken
intuition and the most faulty insight. It should be over-
ambitious, and exhibit egregious error willfully artful,
well and plausibly presented, and totally misleading
and false. It is not expected that every calendar year
will be graced by so grand and profoundly negative an
achievement deserving of this award commemorating
our most illustrious and our deadest member. The
author of many theoretical works on ocean currents, a
fearless critic as in the pamphlet entitled: "The
Admiralty Falsification of the Challenger Record, exposed
by William Leighton Jordan, Esq.," has few peers indeed.
But the members of this Special Committee will remain
alert to commemorate the truly deserving oceanographer
with this newly established award.

Stommel and SOSO have never quite had the nerve despite several temp-
tations actually to bestow this award on anyone. <

Editor's Note: Fritz Fuglister (1909-1987) studied music and art at the Washington (DC) College of
Music and the Corcoran Galley of Art School. He continued painting studies in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, did WPA commissioned paintings, and sold easel paintings. In 1940, of economic
necessity, he was hired for a series of R/V Atlantis cruises to Georges Bank. He went on to become
a highly respected oceanographer, winning the National Academy's Agassiz Prize in 1969.

75

Valentine Worthington

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (retired)

Many years ago, an article appeared in the European Scientific Note
of the Office of Naval Research that described a laboratory, in
Germany, I think, as being staffed by five Ph.D.'s and nine subprofes-
sionals. (I am hazy about the actual numbers.) I brought the article in to
Fritz Fuglister's office at coffee time, and told Hank Stommel and Fritz
that the three of us were clearly "subprofessionals."

Hank immediately founded SOSO, the Society of Subprofessional
Oceanographers. Hank got a lot of fun out of SOSO. I recall his amuse-
ment when Georg Wiist, an archetypical "Herr Doktor Professor," sent
a preprint of his treatise on the results of the Meteor Expedition to
Woods Hole. It was inscribed: To the Physical Oceanographers of
Woods Hole Stommel, Fuglister, and Worthington. Wiist had actual-
ly selected the members of SOSO to be the first American recipients of
his life's work.

Wiist, of course, had put the members of SOSO in the correct order.
Fritz's work was sometimes more aesthetically pleasing than Hank's;
after all, Fritz was an artist. However, Hank's work had a scholarly
dimension that was lacking in Fritz's and mine.

After Fritz died, I asked Hank if we should not invite a prominent
unhooded, western oceanographer to join us.

Hank said, "No, let's keep it exclusive."

As the sole surviving member of SOSO, I hereby declare there is no
further purpose for its existence and that the Society of Subprofessional
Oceanographers is dissolved. >

Cecelia Fuglister

Woods Hole, Massachusetts

This painting is from
Hank Stommel's
"mouse period."

Influenced by his friendship with Fritz,
Henry at one time became quite inter-
ested in trying his hand at painting.
Fritz gave him a fair number of
tubes of oil paints, surplus from his
large store, unused because Fritz
had adopted tempera for his own
medium. That year, a Christmas
present arrived for the Fuglisters
from Hank, beautifully wrapped
in papers of the season. It was a
small painting by Hank, very
amusing because of its odd geo-
metrical shape and intense colors.
A certain place on one of our walls
has been enlivened by this little paint-
ing for a good many years. <

76

Shirley Webb

Sippewissett, Massachusetts

<*

Sippewissett Corner is much quieter and sadder, now. Two good
friends and neighbors, Hank Stommel and Bob Weeks (see editor's
note, page 79), are both gone, and we miss them every day.

Around 7:15 a.m., I still expect to see
Hank's red car trundling down "the back road"
to work, and home again for lunch.

The evenings are more predictable without
the exciting volley of firecracker bangs, with
which Hank would often amuse himself or
the startling wail of the Canadian Pacific train
whistle that he ran on a tank of compressed air.

One of the interesting sights of spring
might be Hank climbing a ladder in his shorts

(made by Chickie from an elderly suit) and wearing his "Peter Rabbit"
slippers, which were fetchingly checkered and fuzzy, and most unsuit-
able for climbing ladders, or strolling over for a visit.

Some years ago, Hank appeared at the Stommel Christmas party in
a rather alarming, pale-blue, 1940s "zoot suit," genially passing drinks
out and obviously happy and relaxed in his sartorial elegance,
amongst neighbors and friends.

He and Chickie were always friendly and generous hosts, and to
us, part of the fun was to admire Hank's latest works of art in the
kitchen. Over the years, he went through various phases of expres-
sion although the hand-painted tropical foliage on the Stommels'
refrigerator remained the same. One year he had amused himself (and

SIPPEWISSETT

Hank painted this sign

for his Sippewissett

Farm.

The Cape Codder Hotel
was a landmark in Hank
Stommers neighbor-
hood until it was torn
down to make way for
condominiums a few
years ago. He imagines

it on fire in this
"disaster" painting.

everyone else) by imagining "Disasters" and producing dramatic
murals of "Bourne Bridge Falling Down," "The Cape Codder Hotel on
Fire," and "Woods Hole Flooded by Raging Seas."

After living in France for a time, the mural over the kitchen fire-
place depicted a very French street and market scene, with houses,
stalls, and people. He had ingeniously wired small lights in the win-

77

dows. The "mouse period"
(perhaps influenced by
Chickie's beautiful hand-sewn
toys) showed amusingly
dressed mice in homelike
surroundings.

Hank would often appear at
our kitchen door at unlikely
times, with a book, an idea, or a
bag of fruit or vegetables
usually in his slippers or slip-
on canvas shoes (often wet). He
would sit and visit, then disap-
pear abruptly, thinking a new
thought, probably.

Sometimes he would
request that we collect the mail,
while he and Chickie went
traveling (which he disliked, as

Hank Stommel's gallery

of artwork includes a

French street scene, a

circus wagon from

the "mouse period,"

and Woods Hole

inundated from the

"disaster period."

78

he preferred home and garden). One of these trips, we knew, was
twofold. On a Monday, in London, he was to become a Fellow of the
Royal Society, and on the following Wednesday, in Sweden, the King
would present him with the Crafoord Prize.

I was very curious to know how on Earth he handled the possible
need for very formal clothing at such important gatherings. I asked him
if he had to pack an evening suit, and he replied happily, "Oh no! I just

went down to the hospital thrift shop and found a nice, navy suit for 15
dollars. It will do very well!"

So, our memories of Hank often bring a smile, which he would con-
sider a fine memorial, I know. <

Editor's Note: Shirley Webb is a Stommel neighbor and the wife of ocean engi-
neer Doug Webb, who often worked with Hank. Bobby Weeks was a 40-year
WHOI employee, the mechanical shop supervisor for many years. Many horses
are boarded at Bobby's farm, adjacent to the Stommel property. Bobby died six
months before Hank. It was Bobby's father-in-law who drove the ambulance
that took Chickie Stommel and her brother to Boston in the mid-1 930s (see
"Counting Our Blessings," page 111).

Animals figured

prominently in Hank

Stommers paintings!

The names on the

tombstones all

belonged to

Stommel cats.

79

The Ocean and William Leighton Jordan, Esq.

A closing note to this biography says: "This sketch is based upon

research done during the years 1958-1962 by Luis Capurro, Henry

Stommel, and Mary Swallow. In the spirit of Leighton Jordan's inflexible

custom, it is privately printed. October 1980"

DR. PEDLAR, THE CORONER who
conducted the post-mortem examina-
tion of the body of William Leighton
Jordan, reported at the inquest on May 23,
1922, that the cause of death had been heart
failure, and since it appeared that the
deceased had no friends, asked, through
the medium of the Press, that any relatives
communicate with him. The Evening
Standard, which reported the inquest under
a headline "Lonely Savant's Death," located
a solicitor who had acted for members of
the family, and a sister living in Bristol, too
old to travel. A niece came to London to
arrange the funeral. A literary friend of
many years standing had little more to tell
but that the 86-year-old Jordan had written
scientific books about the ocean, about
principles of natural philosophy, and the
case for bimetallism. This friend remem-
bered that one of the deceased's greatest
sorrows was not having been appointed
manager of a bank in Buenos Aires, and
that one of his happiest memories was hav-
ing, at the age of 15, heard Faraday lecture
at the Royal Institution an Institution to
which he remained loyal to the very end,
having attended a lecture there the very
day before he was found dead in bed in his
residence at 25 Hill Street, Mayfair.

From these few who knew him, it was
clear that he had never said anything
about his private life, he lived and dressed
well, giving the impression of being com-
fortably off.

We confess to being peculiarly fascinat-
ed by Mr. Jordan. From time to time, stu-
dents browsing through the stacks of refer-
ence libraries came upon mouldering
copies of his books. Being the works of an

reputable literature. They were first written
at a time of great interest in the deep ocean:
telegraph cables were being laid across
oceans, and strange living creatures fished
up from depths which until recently had
been generally thought to be without life. If
Jordan's pre-Galilean physics was absurd,
it cannot be claimed that his professional
contemporaries in the 1870s were able to
make much use of correct hydrodynamical
theory in their thinking about ocean circu-
lation. One need only read the acrimonious
correspondence which raged in the
columns of Nature during the two years
previous to the sailing of the Challenger
Expedition in late 1872 to appreciate that
the professed experts themselves were
quite confused. The overbearing Dr.
William Carpenter engaged the erstwhile
janitor of the Anderson Technical College,
Mr. James Croll, in a heated exchange of
letters debating whether the ocean circula-
tion was due to density difference or to
wind-driving and it became so pusillani-
mous that even the protest of an
Anonymous Eminence (whose identity
must remain forever unknown because the
magazine's files were destroyed in World
War II) was to no avail. It is no wonder that
poor Jordan was mercilessly cut down.

But he was a man of great resilience
and energy, and though rebuffed count-
less times, managed to badger academic
oceanographers, and carry on a cam-
paign to enlighten the Admiralty for
another 50 years. What kind of man was
he to pursue his personal vision of how
the ocean works for so long with so little
encouragement except at the very
beginning it seems when A.G. Findlay

eccentric, they are completely ignored in all did encourage him.

80

He was born in Rio de Janeiro on June
4th, 1836 to Swinfen Ker Jordan, merchant
from Manchester, and Mary Louisa,
daughter of William Pennell, H.M. Consul-
General in Brazil. Until the age of 12 he
lived there, and then was sent to a school
near Manchester for four years, during
which time he once listened to the great
Faraday, and underwent the emotional
experience which supported his life-long
interest in natural philosophy. There fol-
lowed two years' work under a tutor. At
the age of 18 he entered his father's busi-
ness, but evidently was so engrossed
studying science, without any outside
assistance or guidance, that he must have
neglected his business duties so scan-
dalously that his father suggested that he
retire altogether from business at the age
of 27 to devote his life to science.

AT ONCE HE embarked upon a world
tour, in the spirit of von Humboldt.
He crossed the Andes on foot, and traveled
through much of California, and moun-
taineered in the Alps from Breuil and
Zermatt. And all this time his brain was
teeming with a theory about the causes of
ocean currents and tides, built upon what
to him was to become an idee fixe: that
Newton's first law was erroneous, that
momentum is not conserved, but always
runs down.

Jordan's misconception about particle
dynamics is well illustrated by his discus-
sion of a thought-experiment proposed by
Newton. Newton envisaged a mountain
high above the atmosphere upon the sum-
mit of which a cannon was placed to shoot
a ball horizontally. Common sense tells us
that the greater the velocity, the further the
ball will go before it strikes the surface.
The genius of Newton recognized that at a
certain muzzle velocity the ball would cir-
cle the earth forever. Jordan preferred
common sense but we should remember
this was in the days before artificial satel-
lites became familiar and he thought
Newton had made an illogical leap of

imagination. It was this idea that things
must run down that Jordan tried to illus-
trate by deducing from it various features
of the ocean currents and tides. He could
hardly have chosen a more puzzling and
controversial example.

In his view the fluid envelope of the
earth was swept westward by its being
unable to keep up with the earth's rotation.
Since this tendency to fall behind is
strongest at the surface and at the equator,
and since the oceans are blocked from
indefinite westward flow by continental
land masses, the net result would be a
series of cellular swirls, vertical and hori-
zontal, similar to the patterns actually por-
trayed on charts. Where they were not sim-
ilar, he contended, more careful surveys
were called for. It was a theory in which
the curl of his "vis-inertia" played the part
of our present-day curl of the wind-stress.

Within a short time he had a paper on
ocean currents ready for the Royal Geo-
graphical Society (in 1866) and another on
tides for the Royal Society (in 1868) and he
took up residence at 24 Eastbourne
Terrace, London, to await the result. As
was inevitable, they were both rejected. Sir
George Stokes, who had the unpleasant
task of refereeing the paper on tides,
wrote: "We all recognize that your friend is
just the man to be encouraged to stick to
science, but his views are so directly at
variance with what we know to be true
that no serious society can have anything
to do with them."

BEFORE THE YEAR was out Jordan had
returned to South America, this time to
Buenos Aires, where he lived for some
years with occasional visits to England. In
view of the rejection of both his papers he
had them privately printed, and in 1874
Longmans published The Ocean, its Tides
and Currents and Their Causes. It is this
book, in one of its several editions, which
one sometimes stumbles upon in a dusty
library corner. When the reviews came out,
they were disastrous and because it was

81

a time when public interest was high, even
South America was not a secure shelter
from ridicule.

Just what he did with his time in
Buenos Aires is not clear. At one time later
in his life he claimed to have been manag-
ing director of a railway construction com-
pany, and hinted that he was in the bank-
ing business. The hydrographer of the
Argentine Navy, in 1962, searched around
Buenos Aires for information about
Jordan. Families of that name still living
there did not know of him, nor did the
British Legation. The English Club had no
knowledge of his existence, nor did the
Argentine Engineering Society. There was
nothing in the Central Police records. A
large correspondence to the Editor of the
English language newspaper The Standard
in Jordan's name was located in the
National Library, but the files of the news-
paper itself were consumed in a fire before
the first World War.

IT WOULD APPEAR from the correspon-
dence in The Standard that Jordan carried
his scientific controversy to South America
with him, and engaged in relentless debate
with the president of the Engineering
Society and with a pseudonymous Dr. Zeb.
When editors gave sign of tiring of the
stream of letters from Jordan, an unknown
Mr. "Y" implored them not to cease pub-
lishing them: (January 21, 1879) "His letters
are most interesting and easily understood
by a little study, but in this hot weather one
must take his coat off while reading them."
The reader today will see clear signs in the
carping tone of Jordan's letters that he felt
there was a conspiracy amongst scientists
against him, and he must have felt that he
should have a little recognition at a time
when the world was celebrating the suc-
cessful return of the Challenger.

Sometime shortly after 1874 Jordan
wrote the article on Argentina in the Ninth
Edition of the Encylopedia Britannica an
article which is both surprisingly liberal

and sympathetic to the plight of the
Indians and peasant gauchos, and for a
man of Jordan's blunt diplomacy, unchar-
acteristically prudent in describing the
regime in power at the time.

IN 1877 he made a short visit to London,
and in November 1877, in Willis's rooms,
delivered a challenge to all Fellows of the
Royal Society and the staff of the Challenger
Expedition. While on this visit he decided
that the Hydrographer Evans had pur-
loined an idea of his about tides, and when
he called upon him at the Admiralty he
found the Captain's conduct to be "some-
what mysterious." Back in Buenos Aires his
correspondence with editors burgeoned,
and much of this he had printed in a book
entitled Skirmishes in the Vanguard of
Science, which he seems to have distributed
privately. One hopes that this acrimony
was relieved a little in 1880 and again in
1881 when he was elected President of the
English Literary Society (the Society seems
to have been last heard of in 1922 the year
Jordan himself died). At last he found, in
the little expatriate British group, a recep-
tive and appreciative, if uninformed, audi-
ence he must have relished it.

But by 1887 Jordan was back in
London, and it seems this time, for good.
He moved about from 5 Gordon Street to
the St. George's Club, Hanover Square,
then to 25 Jermyn Street, the Thatched
House Club, St. James's Street, and the
Royal Societies Club. He made valiant
attempts to join the establishment, was
elected to the Institute of Civil Engineers
in 1887, the Royal Statistical Society in
1888, and the Royal Meteorological
Society in 1897 they thereupon received
copies of his printed works for their
libraries. He also became a Life Member
of the Royal Institution in 1896, where he
is remembered (1962) by Mr. Cory, the
Librarian of the time, "as a very regular
reader in the library. He had a very pleas-
ant personality, rather quiet. He spent

82

Skirmishes
in

The Vanguard of Science

August 1880 to February 1881

by

William Leighton Jordan,

President of the English Literary Society

and
Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society

Buenos Aires

Imprenta a vapor cle Juan H. Kidcl, Calle Corrientes 117
1881

whole days consulting books and dealing
with his pet subjects, ocean currents and
tides. I think his views and theories were
rather unorthodox and I recall he had a
long correspondence with the Editor of
Engineering who eventually had to say
'this correspondence must now cease!'"

IT WAS AT THIS period of his career,
when he had just returned to live in
London for the remainder of his long life,
that he made Ms most determined attempt
to gain recognition of his views, by attacking
his tormentors in a campaign to expose "The
Admiralty Falsification of the Challenger
Record." The 35-page printed version of cor-
respondence between him and the authori-
ties associated with the Challenger
Expedition concerned what he claimed to
believe was a deliberate falsification of the
observed temperature data, but seems more
likely was a device to procure attention.

In his first salvo of November 8, 1887,
aimed at the Lords Commissioners, the
Admiralty, Whitehall, Jordan explains how
his interest in the vertical structure of tem-
perature in the ocean led him to take a keen
interest in the temperature measurements
of the Challenger Expedition. His paper on
ocean currents, rejected in 1866, had pre-
dicted that because the driving force of
ocean circulation was unrelated to density
convection there would be many thermal
inversions and interleavings observed,

whereas conventional wisdom had predis-
posed other scientists to expect that the
temperature would drop monotonically
with depth. He described how the
Preliminary Reports issued during 1876 by
the Admiralty had disappointed his hopes,
and caused his friends to accept that he was
mistaken. Then, he says, upon returning to
London, and examining the Final Report of
the Expedition published in 1884, he found
that there were more than 100 temperature
inversions actually observed on the ther-
mometers, some amounting to many
degrees Fahrenheit. To him this meant that
the inversions had been "suppressed" in the
Preliminary Reports eight years previous.
He insinuated that this was evidence of con-
nivance of the scientific staff to rob him of
his just recognition, and that the Admiralty
owed him and his country a definite
statement as to which reported tempera-
tures were correct. Moreover he offered his
own services as investigator of the matter,
should they care to appoint him.

WITH APPROPRIATE bureaucratic
delay the Admiralty replied that it
was to the Lords of Treasury that he must
apply, and in due course the Treasury itself
informed him that they could not comply
with his request to be appointed because
the Challenger Staff "is already in the course
of reduction."

No guns spoke for several months, but
if the Lords Commissioners were under
the impression that they had silenced
William Leighton Jordan, Esq., they were
mistaken, for shortly after receiving a fur-
ther demand to explain certain wide dis-
crepancies in reported temperature (one of
33Y2 F!), a question was directed to them
at Parliament by Mr. Marum. According to
The Times account of July 24th, 1888, the
First Lord G. Hamilton replied: "The
reports of the Challenger exploration, pub-
lished at intervals by the Admiralty from
1873 to 1875, had not at that time been
dealt with in the light of the investigations
subsequently made, especially those on

83

deep-sea thermometers by Professor Tait.
These reports, therefore, can only be
looked upon as preliminary. Careful
perusal of the official narratives of the
Challenger's voyage, and also the report by
Professor Tait published in connection
with the temperatures, will satisfactorily
explain the discrepancies between the pre-
liminary and final reports."

Jordan immediately recognized that
this reply was not to the point. He was
familiar with Tait's report it had to do
with small corrections that should be made
to the deep-sea thermometers because they
were not completely protected from pres-
sure (only the large bulb was). We know
that the Challenger staff had trouble with
their thermometers, that they could not be
read to better than 0.1 T and had a bad par-
allax of 0.25 T. They were the so-called
Miller-Casella variety of Six's maximum-
minimum thermometer the extremum
temperatures being read from indices slid-
ing on top of the mercury column. In princi-
ple these thermometers were incapable of
registering temperature inversions, but
because of the great thermal inertia of the
large bulb, they could be hauled fast
enough up through a cold layer without
registering it, and all evidence of inversions
not erased. Thus what looked like errors to
the Challenger scientists might be the inver-
sions looked for by Jordan. Jordan was
aware of this, and that field experiments
with varying types of insulation might have
revealed, had they been made, what was
accepted as errors to be the truth, but he
could elicit no discussion of this from the
Admiralty, or even later, as we shall see,
from Murray. The curves in the final report
are drawn through data points actually
observed. The points show many inver-
sions, the curves are all drawn with temper-
ature decreasing. Murray simply stood on
the record, and disdained to explain his jus-
tification for drawing the curves to Jordan
(or to anyone else, so far as we know).

Following the First Lord's reply in
Parliament, Jordan was referred to the
Edinburgh office and the following corre-
spondence ensued.

* ; *;

25 Jermyn Street, London, SW
September 10, 1889
John Murray, Esq., F.R.S.E.
The Challenger Office
32 Queen Street, Edinburgh

Dear Sir, At intervals between four-
teen and ten years ago, the Lords of
the Admiralty sent me various reports on
the exploration then being made on board
the Cliallenger.

Report No. 6, dated 1875, gives the fol-
lowing among the statements of tempera-
ture obtained by the thermometer:
In lat. 347'S., long. 7356'W.:
At 1,100 fathoms 35.9
In lat. 419'N., long. 13015'E.:
At 40 fathoms 74.5
Nine years after the above, that is to
say in 1884, vol. i. pt. iii., "Physics and
Chemistry," part of the large work on the
Challenger Expedition, was published, and
in this new record the results of the above-
mentioned observations are recorded as
follows:

In lat. 347'S., long. 7356'W.:
At 1,1 00 fathoms 47.4

instead of 35.9
In lat. 419'N., long. 13015'E.:
At 40 fathoms 41 instead of 74.5
Will you kindly inform we (sic) which
of those Reports is correct? You will notice
that there is in one instance a difference of
more than 11 Fahrenheit between them,
and in the other more than 33 .

I address you in consequence of having
been referred to the Edinburgh Office by
the First Lord of the Admiralty, and I
notice from one of the above-mentioned
volumes that you appear to be in charge of
that office.

I am, Sir,

Your obedient Servant,

WM. LEIGHTON JORDAN

84

* *

Challenger Expedition Office

32 Queen Street, Edinburgh

September 11, 1889

Dear Sir, The temperature shown by
the thermometer when hauled up
from 1,100 fathoms in lat. 347'S., long.
73 56' W., was 47.4 F.

The temperature shown by the ther-
mometer from 40 fathoms in lat. 419'N.,
long. 130 15'E, was 41F.

It is evident that in these cases the ther-
mometers had not worked properly. The
temperatures you give from Report 6 are
not the observed temperatures, but tem-
peratures from the curve, as is fully
explained in pt. iii of vol. i, "Physics and
Chemistry" of the Challenger Reports.
Yours sincerely,
JOHN MURRAY
* ;

London: September 13, 1889
John Murray, Esq., F.R.S.E.
Edinburgh

Dear Sir, Your explicit and friendly
reply to the inquiries I made on the
10th instant encourage me to ask you fur-
ther to inform me what is the evidence that
in the two cases about which I inquired the
thermometer had not worked properly;
and also as to whether in all the 163 cases
in which there are important differences
between the first and second Reports, of
the same character as the two cases above
alluded to, the observed temperatures
were discarded for the same reason.

I am acquainted with the explanation,
to which you refer, of the manner in which
the temperatures have been obtained from
curves, but can you explain why such
exceptions were made in the first records
as to give the temperatures of 33.7 at 500
fathoms and 41.4at 1,100 fathoms in lat.
4557'S., long. 3439'E.? Do you suppose
that the thermometer was correct in those
readings?

Yours sincerely,

WM. LEIGHTON JORDAN

Edinburgh: September 17, 1889

Dear Sir, The indices of some ther-
mometers work much better in
some instruments than in others, and if
the index of a thermometer shifts easily
there is always a suspicion if such a ther-
mometer records a temperature widely
different from the temperatures usually
recorded in a certain depth or locality. I
refer you to the Introductory note to
"Deep Sea Temperatures" in vol. ii,
"Narrative," for further information as to
errors, curves, etc.

In lat. 4557'S., long. 3439'E., to which
you refer, there is a note to say that "Prob-
ably owing to the rolling of the ship, a
number of the thermometers were shaken."

The observed readings have never been
discarded: they are published in the "Report
on Deep Sea Temperatures" for your infor-
mation and for all others interested.

It is evident that when observations are
plotted on squared paper the curves may
be drawn different through the points of
observation, and of course the tempera-
tures taken from the curves will be differ-
ent. To show how we have drawn them,
they have all been published in the Report
just mentioned above.

Yours sincerely,
JOHN MURRAY

London: September 21, 1889
John Murray, Esq.
Edinburgh

Dear Sir, I have to thank you for your
reply of 17th instant to my inquiries
of 13th, from which I gather it to be your
opinion that wherever a thermometer has
recorded a temperature intermediate
between the extremes above it cannot have
worked properly. I shall be much obliged
if you will kindly confirm or contradict
this interpretation of your letter.

I also understand that in such records
as that in lat. 3278'N., long. 15433'W.,
where the temperature is recorded as 35 "at

85

1,300 fathoms, and also 35 "at the bottom,
2,850 fathoms, the only positive evidence
given is that from 1,300 fathoms to the bot-
tom there is no water colder than 35, but
that it may be warmer to any extent not
exceeding the surface temperature of 74.
I hope you will kindly confirm this also if
correct, as I wish to be clear as to what may
or may not be deduced from the records.
I must say that in the first record sent
to me there was no such note as that you
give in reference to lat. 4557'S., long.
3439'E. The temperatures appeared to be
given as if there was no doubt as to their
correctness; and when I used the word
"discarded" I alluded to the observed
readings having been discarded as regards
publication for eight or nine years, whilst
temperatures obtained from curves were
published instead of those obtained direct
from the thermometer, which gave a very
different bearing to the records.

Yours sincerely,

WM. LEIGHTON JORDAN
> *
Fife: September 26, 1889

Dear Sir, Your letter of the 21st instant
has been sent on to me here, where I
have no books or papers on temperatures.

I must say I do not understand your
letter, unless it be on the assumption that
you do not know the kind of thermometers
used on board the Challenger. If you will
look at the narrative of the cruise you will
find all the necessary explanations as well
as my opinions on the temperatures.

The preliminary reports of the captain
of the ship were prepared at sea, and
never professed to give all details; these
you will find in the official Reports, and I
will always be glad if I can give you any
information or further details about the
observations recorded in these official
Reports, but you must refer to date and
page of the Reports, for my time is very
much occupied.

Yours sincerely,
JOHN MURRAY

London: September 28, 1889
John Murray, Esq.,
Edinburgh

Dear Sir, On receiving your letter of
26th I looked back at mine of 21st,
and it seems to me that the two questions
asked in that letter, as also the question at
the end of my letter of 13th, were suffi-
ciently clear and explicit to have enabled
you to answer without more trouble than
that of putting pen to paper: that, indeed,
you might have answered by a shorter and
less troublesome letter than the one you
have written.

I well know the kind of thermometer
used on board the Challenger, and was
much disappointed when it was decided
that the vessel was to go to sea with such
thermometers only, as such decision
showed a determination not to admit the
possibility of such a distribution of temper-
ature as the late Mr. A.G. Findlay declared
to be required by the sections which I sub-
mitted to the Council of the Royal
Geographical Society in 1866. 1 know what
was then supposed to be the working of
these thermometers, and that in the
Challenger narrative you continued to be of
the same opinion; but I wished to ascertain
whether you had been led to change, or in
any manner to doubt, the correctness of
that opinion. Viewed by the light of the
full details given in "Physics and
Chemistry," vol. i, it certainly looks as if
there had been, even during the voyage,
some changes of opinion on that point.

For instance:

It appears from Plate XVIII, "Physics
and Chemistry," 1884, vol. i part iii, that on
May 2, 1873, in lat. 3725'N., long.
71 40'W., the thermometer recorded:

3514 Tahr. at 550 fathoms and

45Fahr. at 800 fathoms;
but in the original Report, 1876, No. 7,
page 17, the latter temperature is discard-
ed, and instead of it the temperature is
given as 37.6 as if obtained direct from the

86

thermometer, and is made to show in that
report a constant fall of temperature, as
that of 351/4 at 550 fathoms is not recorded.
As both records broke the curve which it
was supposed the thermometer must
record if working properly, they were dis-
carded as erroneous. But, later on, on
December 24, 1873, as appears from Plate
XCIII of the above 1884 volume, in lat.
4557'S., long. 3439'E., the thermometer
recorded:

34Fahr. at 500 fathoms, and

42Fahr. at 1,100 fathoms;
and these are given in the original Report,
1874, No. 2, page 14, as

33.7 at 500 fathoms, and

41 .4 at 1,100 fathoms;

though no reason appears for discarding
the rise of temperature at 800 fathoms
near the Gulf Stream if that at 1,100
fathoms near the Agulhas Current was
to be retained.

When I received the latter record I sup-
posed that some arrangement had been
made to enable the thermometer to record
correctly the temperature of its resting-place
without being affected by the strata above.

It certainly appears from the above and
other cases that there were either some
changes of opinion on board the Challenger
as regards the working of the Miller-
Casella thermometer or carelessness as to
misleading students of the subject who had
not the advantange of being on board.

I now therefore venture to ask again if
you still consider that in none of the 163
serial soundings in which the thermome-
ter recorded a temperature intermediate
between two super-incumbent tempera-
tures it can have worked correctly? To
give weight to this question I will point
out (as is probably well known to you)
that in experiments made by Commander
Beardslee, U.S.N., with the Miller-Casella
thermometer in an ice-bath of the temper-
ature of 3272 T., in which a standard ther-
mometer fell from a temperature of 70
degrees to that of 32 l /i in one case in 20

seconds, and in another case in 40 seconds,
the Miller-Casella took in the latter case
25 minutes to fall only 35.1 , and in the for-
mer 14 minutes to fall to 35 F. These
records I take from page 1 14 of Deep Sen
Soundings, by Charles D. Sigsbee, USN,
Washington, 1880.

This seems to show that a Miller-
Casella thermometer might pass tlirough a
cold stratum of water without recording it,
whilst another higher up on the sounding-
line, chancing to rest in the cold stratum,
would record it.

Yours sincerely,

WM. LEIGHTON JORDAN
; ;

Edinburgh: October 2, 1889

Dear Sir, I refer you to pages 85 and
420 of the Narrative of the Cruise for
an answer to your question as to the tem-
peratures recorded by the Six's ther-
mometers.

I don't think one of these thermome-
ters could be drawn through a cold stra-
tum of water without being affected by it.

Whether or not it would record the
correct temperature of that stratum would
depend on the time the thermometer was
in the stratum.

I enclose you a paper which gives
examples, I think, of alternate layers of
water of different temperatures which
could not have been recorded by the Six's
thermometers.

Yours sincerely,
JOHN MURRAY

London: October 7, 1889
John Murray, Esq.,
Edinburgh

Dear Sir, I have to thank you for your
note of 2nd instant and reference to
pages 85 and 420 of the Challenger
Narrative, with both of which I was, how-
ever, already acquainted. They express the
same view of the action of the Miller-
Casella thermometer as given by Sir
Wyville Thomson in The Depths of the Sea.

87

I never for a moment supposed that those
thermometers could be drawn through a
cold stratum of water without being affect-
ed by it; and your present statement is the
first made by anyone connected with the
Challenger Expedition (as far as my knowl-
edge goes) to the effect that a Miller-Casella
thermometer might, whilst working quite
correctly, pass through a cold stratum of
water without recording it, though correct-
ly recorded by another Miller-Casella ther-
mometer higher up on the sounding-line
and chancing to rest in that cold stratum.
The action of the cold stratum on the ther-
mometer passing through it to the lower
stratum would of course prevent it from
recording the full amount of the rise of
temperature in that lower stratum. The evi-
dence would be an increase of temperature
not less than the difference between the
minimum indexes of the two thermome-
ters, nor greater than the temperature of
the surface stratum unless recorded by the
maximum index of the lower.

This action of the Miller-Casella ther-
mometer gives increased importance to
evidence which has been ignored through-
out all the diagrams published to illustrate
the distribution of temperature shown by
the Challenger observations.

As an instance of the manner in which
those diagrams have supressed evidence
given by the Challenger thermometer, I ask
you kindly to refer to "Physics and Chem-
istry," vol. i, Plates CLXIII to CLXXII.
Those ten Plates show that in ten consecu-
tive serial soundings taken in 1875 from
June 28 to July 14, and extending from

Lat. 3522'N., long. 16953'E., to

38 9' " " 15625'W.,
where the depth varies from a minimum of
2,550 fathoms to a maximum of 3,125 fath-
oms, the thermometers show in every one
of those soundings a higher temperature at
the bottom than at a depth between 1,300
and 1,500 fathoms.

The vertical distribution of tempera-
ture shown by the Challenger thermometer

in that part of the ocean is professed to be
given in the Narrative, diagram 18, p. 756.
But that diagram completely ignores the
fact that each one of the serial soundings
on which it is based shows a higher tem-
perature at the bottom of the ocean than at
a depth about halfway between the surface
and the bottom. How in the face of this is
the publication of that diagram to be justi-
fied? It in fact suppresses the most impor-
tant evidence by far given by the Challenger
thermometers in that region. And, accord-
ing to what we have now agreed to be the
action of those thermometers, the rise of
temperatures thus shown indicates a still
greater rise.

I am much obliged for your pamphlet,
and intend, with your kind permission, to
reproduce one or two of the diagrams in a
new edition of my work on "The Ocean"
which I have had for some years in
preparation.

Yours sincerely,

WM. LEIGHTON JORDAN

London, October 29, 1889
John Murray, Esq.,
Edinburgh

Dear Sir, I notice that in my letter of
7th instant I said, when alluding to the
ten consecutive serial soundings, that the
rise of temperature was "at the bottom"
instead of at deeper depths than 1,200 to
1,500 fathoms. The phrase "at the bottom"
holds good literally only for the six con-
secutive soundings, Nos. 248 to 253, on
which diagram No. 18 is constructed, and
not for No. 247, which is repeated from
diagram No. 17.

To state the case briefly: Through sev-
enteen consecutive soundings extending
east and west for 3,000 miles the ther-
mometer showed a break in the fall of tem-
perature which commences at a depth of
about 800 fathoms in the warm Japan cur-
rent, and falls gradually in a waving line
until the rise of temperature is shown quite
at the bottom of the ocean.

It seems to me quite incomprehensible
why such a break in the fall of tempera-
ture, corroborated by seventeen consecu-
tive soundings, has been ignored as it has
been. This alternation of temperature starts
from near the surface where the hot waters
of the Japan current interlace on the sur-
face with the cold Arctic current, and falls
in an easterly direction, at first steadily,
and then in a waving line, until, 3,000
miles to the east, it is spread along the very
bottom of the ocean.

There is also a similar alternation at a
lesser depth starting from the same local-
ity, and shown by every sounding for
700 miles.

When my paper on Oceanic Circulation
was submitted to the Council of the Royal
Geographical Society in 1866, the late Mr.
A.G. Findlay insisted that my diagrams
required that the alternations of tempera-
ture found on the surface in the temperate
zones should be carried downwards into
the lower strata; and it is a mere matter of
fact that the Challenger thermometers have
superabundantly shown such an alterna-
tion extending from the meeting of the
warm Japan and cold Arctic currents for
3,000 miles through the lower strata.
Yours sincerely,
WM. LEIGHTON JORDAN

A sample sounding made in the North
Atlantic from the Challenger 1884
report is shown in the figure below. The
temperature curve is not drawn through
all the observed points. It is likely that
some of the points observed are errors. In
reporting some of the furthest south sta-
tions in the Indian Ocean no curves or dots
are shown, only tabulated values, and
these appear to be consistent with what we
now know to be true; there is a tempera-
ture inversion of several degrees actually
there, and the Challenger staff not only
observed it with thermometers which were
not supposed to be able to do so, but they
also mistrusted the inversion so much that
they decided not to plot points or draw
curves. We do agree with Murray, howev-
er, that much of the scatter at other stations
was probably due to errors, and the Final
Report, if not the Preliminary Report, is
very clear to anyone without a monumen-
tal chip on his shoulders.

There seems to have been no further
reply from John Murray. It is a pity he
could not avow his predilection for an
ocean that always gets colder as one goes
down; and it is a pity that Jordan could not
simply take the observations themselves as
verification of his prediction (no matter
how absurd the way he
thought them up). Jordan
instead appealed again to
the Admiralty for redress
in the words: (November
14th) "...If, my Lords, you
should think that I have not
shown sufficient reason for
requesting an official opin-
ion as to whether the state-
ments of 'observed temper-
atures' or the statements of
temperature obtained by
the above-mentioned alter-
ations of those observed
temperatures most faithful-
ly represent the existing

89

THE SLING

Letters to the Royal Institution
The Institution of Civil Engineers

and the Admiralty
May 1905 to May 1912

by
WM. LEIGHTON JORDAN

Member of the Royal Institution; Associate of the Institution of

Civil Engineers; Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, of the

Royal Society of Arts, of the Royal Statistical Society, and of the

Royal Meteorological Society; Past President of the English

Literary Society of Buenos Ayres

Second Edition

London: Simpkirt, Marshall,
Hamilton, Kent and Co. Ltd.

distribution of temperature, I shall be quite
ready, my Lords, to give you a perfect del-
uge of further evidence."

The brief note acknowledging receipt
of this letter once more stated that the
Admiralty would not in any circumstances
offer an opinion on the scientific question
raised, and that it was not responsible for
the Challenger publications. Jordan closed
the correspondence on July 14th, 1890,
with a final blistering protest.

Now, so long after the battle, it is easy
to appreciate both sides. Jordan was a
crank, he had inexhaustible energy and
time, he was a terrible pest. The Challenger
Office was cautious, reserved, willing only
to stand on the record as published, but
not to explain it to Jordan for fear of
becoming embroiled. And we cannot
refrain from recognizing that the tempera-
tures first published, taken from a smooth
curve without warning or explanation, on
the assumption that all inversions were
simply errors, was misleading, to say the
least. Poor Jordan.

During the last thirty years of his life
Jordan loitered about the Royal Institution,
to the dismay of Rayleigh, Crookes,
Larmor, Love, and other distinguished sci-
entists who found their paths crossed his.

Jordan published his side of these encoun-
ters in a volume entitled The Sling a
weapon to which he often refers, and the
theory of which he tried to use to con-
found the experts. Perhaps it also cast him
in the role of David.

And then a wonderful thing happened
to him in 1916. His veracity was ques-
tioned and he was exonerated, and the
apology was handsome indeed. It hap-
pened this way. The Journal of the Alpine
Club reprinted an article entitled "The
Second Ascent of the Matterhorn by the
East Face" by J.M. Elliott in which an allu-
sion was made to a previous attempt by
Jordan in 1867, and J.P. Farrar had added a
footnote: "It is probably that Mr. Elliott
was misinformed." But Farrar soon discov-
ered that Jordan's ascent was a fact and
located and apologized to the old man.
The interview was a great success, the
young mountaineer much impressed, and
he persuaded Jordan to write up the
account of his experiences on the
Matterhorn. Moreover, Jordan's 1867
report in the visitor's book at Breuil was
found and published as well. Farrar was
deeply impressed by the octogenarian
Jordan. It even emerged that Jordan had
risked his own life to rescue one of the
guides who was about to be abandoned
because judged to be in a hopeless posi-
tion. Jordan was the first to traverse the
Matterhorn from Italy to Switzerland, the
second to climb the Matterhorn following
Whymper's tragic accident; he left a rope
which is still called the Echelle Jordan
there Farrar called him "a splendid veter-
an of the mountain." Jordan must have
basked in the adulation of youth generous-
ly bestowed.

We find Jordan in retrospect to have
been a sympathetic character. Today we
have some inkling of what a long road
there is yet to travel from Newton's laws of
motion to a full elucidation of how these
laws work in the actual ocean. The notions
which Jordan on one hand, and Carpenter

90

and Croll on the other, put forward all
seem to fall so short of the mark that the
difference in starting point seems insignifi-
cant. Only the caution imbibed with prop-
er academic training restrained Carpenter
and Croll from trying to climb as high as
Jordan did. One does not see that their def-
erence to the laws of motion, nor their
inability to apply them, led them to a bet-
ter overall view. Like the rest of us, Jordan
did not reach that summit from which
someday we will be able to see the mecha-
nism of the oceanic circulation laid out in
detail before us. He chose the wrong route,
and suffered the indignity of being judged
a fool, but in his dogged way he did tra-
verse the mountain. <

Publications of Wm. Leighton Jordan

1866 The elements: an investigation of the forces which
determine the position and movements of the ocean and
atmosphere. 2 vols., maps, charts, and plates. R.G.S.

1868 A treatise on the action of Vis Inertiae in the ocean;
with remarks on tlie abstract nature of the forces of Vis
Inertiae and gravitation and a neiv theory of tides. 212 pp.,
maps, and charts. London: Longmans, Green & Co.
R.G.S.

-University of London Library, (copy held)
-Reviewed in Nature, London, 3, 505-506, 1871.
1871 Remarks on recent oceanic exploration by the British
Government and the supposed discovery of the law of
oceanic circulation hi/ Dr. W. B. Carpenter, F.R.S. Buenos
Ayres: Imprenta Inglesa, 56 pp. R.G.S.

1873 The. oceans, its tides and currents and their causes.

London: Longmans, Green & Co. R.G.S.

-2nd edition. Royal Society, Admiralty Library, 1885.

1877 A lecture on the loinds, ocean currents and tides and

what they tell of tlie system of the world. 2nd edition,

map. R.G.S.

-Royal Institution; Lecture delivered at Willis's rooms

"A public challenge to the Council of the Royal

Society and all scientific staff of the Challenger

Expedition."

1877 The winds and their ston/ of the tuorld. R.G.S.
-3rd edition. 1885.

1877 Remarks on tlie recent ocean exploration and tlie cur-
rent creating action of Vis Inertiae in the ocean. Maps and
plates. R.G.S.

1881 Skirmishes in the vanguard of science, August 1880
to February 1881. Buenos Aires. R.G.S.

1882 The standard of values. 150 pp. London. R.G.S.
-5th edition. University of London Library, 1888.

1883 Tlie new principles of natural philosophy. Royal
Institution 2nd edition. 570 pp., plate. London:
Longmans, Green & Co. R.G.S. A defence and exten-
sion of the principles established by the author's trea-
tise on ocean currents.

1888 The Challenger explorations. 15 pp. London:
Spottiswoode & Co. R.G.S.

1890 The Admiralty falsification of the Challenger record.
35 pp., 1 fig. London: Spottiswoode & Co. R.G.S.

1895 The cardioid earth. R.G.S.

1900 Essays in illustration of the action of astral gravita-
tion in natural phenomena, pp. XIV + 192, diagram.
London. R.G.S.

-University of London Library, Royal Institution
Library. (Much on ocean currents, information that
manuscript charts on "ocean cyclones" in Map Room
ofR.G.S.)

-Reviewed Nature June 13, 1901, No. 1650, Vol. 64, p.
155. (copy held)

1904 Astronomical and historical chronology, pp. 70.
London: Longmans, Green & Co. Royal Institution.
(Aim reformation of historical chronology to bring it
into accord with the method of numbering the years
B.C. adopted by astronomers.

Astronomers 1 A.D. preceded by 0.

Historical 1 A.D. preceded by 1 B.C.

Dedicated to "all librarians of the cities of Florence

and Pisa.")

-Reviewed Nature July 14, 1904, No. 1811, Vol. 70, p.

243 by W.T.L. (copy held)

1907 The Sling. Letters to the Royal Institution, the
Institution of Civil Engineers and the Admiralty, May

1905 to May 1912. 2nd edition, 1913, 431 pp.
London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton Kent & Co.,
Ltd. Royal Institution. (Also 1st edition 1907, letters
1905 to 1907.) [Contains also "Squaring of the Circle,"
1918 submitted to Nature and inserted in all his books
at the Royal Institution.] [The Sling refers to ocean
cyclones, polar exploration, Bering Sea, building of
the Dreadnought, and Challenger records. 1907
Japanese deep-sea thermometers.]. See also comment
in Nature April 2nd, 1914, No. 2318, Vol. 93, p. 121,
referring to Belot, Comptes Rendus, Vol. CLVIII, p. 647.
W.L.J. points out that "the motion of the earth
through space tends to create high land in the
Antarctic and deep water in the Arctic region;"
"cardioid" a term he used in 1866 and in The Sling.

91

Carl Wunsch

Massachusetts Institute ot Technology

*

But the

student who

was really

interested was

exposed to the

most intense,

enthusiastic

encounter with

the moving

frontier of

the subject.

Discussions of Hank's career have tended to downplay his role as a
"professor," but that's what he was from 1960 to 1963 at Harvard,
and then from 1963 to 1978 at MIT. I first met him the fall of 1963 when
he came to MIT from the Harvard faculty. At the time, I was a Ph.D.
student in geophysics, and Raymond Hide, who was then at MIT, sug-
gested I should go see this new professor. Hide described him in terms
of the highest praise, and only obliquely alluded to the oddity of some-
one's moving from Harvard to MIT, a change that in those days was
almost unheard of (the pay at Harvard at the full professor level was
much better). When I got to know Hank well later on, I heard several
variations of his reasons for this move, which I will pass over here.

Hank deprecated his professorial years I suspect for several rea-
sons. He was not very comfortable with the inevitable formality arising
from the gap between a senior professor and a very young, ignorant
student; he remained uneasy about lacking an advanced degree himself
while trying to advise others about how to get one; and he generally
preferred the one-on-one approach to doing science standing at the
blackboard with a colleague who could hold his own (later he referred
to the Harvard/MIT years as his 20 years of "exile").

Following Ray Hide's suggestion, I went to see this man of whom I
had never heard (I was studying things like seismology and geomag-
netism), and the meeting changed my life. I have never, before or since,
encountered anyone like him. The then Department of Meteorology
was jammed into one of the buildings left over from the World War II
Radiation Laboratory. Hank had to share an office (something now
unheard of for any faculty member, even in the most junior ranks), with
a radar meteorologist whom Hank did not greatly admire. Their desks
faced each other, with the telephone swinging on a pivot between them.
In the midst of the resulting chaos, he treated me as a colleague, almost
from day one grabbing my arm to lead me to the department library
to look up instantly something he was all excited about. Among the
things I remember him being greatly excited about were the thermo-
cline theory, Fredkin's computerized vortices, the long-period tides,
double diffusion....

For many students, having Hank as an adviser must have been a
considerable trial. If one went to him with a problem ("I don't see how
to solve this differential equation"), he would listen patiently for as
much as five minutes, before breaking in with something like "Yes, that
looks hard. But let me show you what I've been doing." With that, he
would launch into an extended discourse about something he had got-
ten obsessed with. The student who needed purely technical help was
stuck, and often had to seek assistance from the several other eminent,
but more conventionally disposed, faculty members; but the student
who was really interested in physical oceanography was exposed to the
most intense, enthusiastic encounter with the moving frontier of the
subject that one could imagine.

92

Hank's lectures were never models of preparation and polish. He
usually talked about whatever he was working on at the time even in
those classes advertised for those (like myself) who knew nothing about
the ocean. Often he would start a sentence, get to the middle some-
where, hesitate, and come to a full stop. After a short break, a new sen-
tence would start, typically in the middle, as the result of a thought that
had occurred as he had been talking, probably infuriating most of his
listeners. He was a lousy lecturer, but the most inspiring teacher, and
later colleague, I have ever encountered. I think he never himself appre-
ciated the effect he had on people. *>

Myrl Hendershott

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

*

*

At some point when I was Hank's student at Harvard I asked him
how he had visualized the difference between the mid-ocean flow
and the western-boundary-layer flow in his famous 1948 paper on west-
ward intensification of wind-driven ocean currents, since, in that paper,
he hadn't used the boundary-layer theory that we students were learn-
ing to use to think about similar problems. The ingenuity of his answer
has been striking to everyone I've ever told it to, scientist or not.

Imagine a pair of rollers side by side. Paper rolls off of one and onto
the other, and the moving paper lies horizontally flat in between the
rollers. Now suppose there is a rain of fine sand onto the moving, flat
paper. The thickness of the sand layer is zero where the paper first
leaves the offrolling roller, it gets bigger towards the enrolling roller
until very near the enrolling roller sand suddenly begins to fall off the
paper onto the floor. The gradual rise of sand thickness from the offrol-
ling to the enrolling roller corresponds to the feature of the theory rep-
resenting gentle, mid-ocean currents feeding the Gulf Stream. The sud-
den decrease of sand thickness as sand near the enrolling roller begins
to fall off the end of the paper and onto the floor corresponds to the
rapid and narrow Gulf Stream.

Later on, when I was recalcitrant about getting my thesis into the
literature, Hank printed up a notice on pink paper that said "From the
Central Committee." Beneath it he wrote, "We think you should pub-
lish your thesis."

Not too long after I came to Scripps Institution of Oceanography
there was a series of cruises in the Indian Ocean. I went along on one.
Hank and Warren Wooster were co-chief scientists. There were a lot of
stations to do, and the cruise began with a carefully thought-out station
plan. But Hank and Bruce Warren often modified it during their watch
to look into details they found. When the next watch came on, we'd have
to scramble hard to catch up to the station plan. The weather was some-
times rough, so much so that the ship's physician feared for the life of
one of the other students (who went on to a distinguished career in solar
physics). With Hank, we conceived the idea that a deck chair could be
rigged to hang from the I-beams of the lab ceiling so that its occupant
would be shielded from the worst of the rolling. It worked pretty well,

\ I I

Diagram represents a

paper-roller-and-sand

concept Henry Stommel

used to describe

how gentle, mid-ocean

currents feed the

Gulf Stream.

93

Wlien I

began to

work with

graduate

students, I

more or less

unthinkingly

treated them

the way

Hank had

treated me.

but the walls of the lab now came rushing at the person seated in the
chair at a frightening rate. That was the summer that US ships were sup-
posed to have been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the shortwave
radio was filled with news of possible US retaliation. "Just think, Myrl,"
said Hank, "you may end up a prisoner of war in China." I recalled
those days vividly when I was at sea in the Strait of Gibraltar as US
planes flew overhead toward Tripoli, and again when I was at sea in the
Gulf of California during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Some years later, I spent part of a summer at Woods Hole. I didn't
feel I was making very good progress with my studies of tides. Hank
offered what encouragement the work permitted him to give, talking
about his own early interest in similar calculations. He also added that
it was important to keep the physical problems foremost. Of course I
knew this at some level, but the technical problems were the ones I
thought I could do something about. So I had stayed with them, rather
afraid to try to answer the simple physical questions I thought were
important but didn't feel capable of answering. It took me a long time
to work up the nerve to take his advice, but it was when I did tem-
porarily abandon the technical concerns that I found the most signifi-
cant results of the investigation.

When Carl Wunsch and Bruce Warren put together the 1981 book
in his honor, Hank sent each of the contributors a letter. He included in
mine some reprints on tides autographed by some of the greats in that
field. On top of those reprints in the envelope was his biographical
paper about William Leighton Jordan, Esq. When I opened the pack-
age which I guessed was from him and was about the book that
name was the first to strike my eyes and I thought for a short, frighten-
ing moment that something I had written in my chapter had qualified
me for the award (see page 75 for the award citation).

My association with Hank was the great experience for me when I
was trying, as a graduate stu-
dent, to think for myself about
science. But of far greater
importance to me has been the
fact that, of the many people
I've known, Hank was one of a
handful about whom I consis-
tently felt from first acquain-
tance "I want to be that kind of
person." I can't say I suc-
ceeded, but I am ever more
appreciative of his example and
his friendship as I get older.
The most visible result may
have been that, when I began to
work with graduate students, I
more or less unthinkingly treat-
ed them the way Hank had
treated me; the results have
been my very best professional Warren Wooster took this photo of Hank

contributions. * Stommel " n ' he boat be ^f n Anzi

and Ponza in 1969.

94

David Halpern

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

< * *

Hank Stommel's lessons always extended far beyond the science of
oceanography, making me feel fortunate to have been his student,
for many reasons. In September 1964, Hank started my training at MIT
by having me mark ocean temperatures on a large sheet of paper.
Instead of assigning me the tedious plotting duties, Hank connected
the values himself because, as he told me, drawing in the isolines
encourages a variety of interpretations of the numbers on the paper.
Even in our current era of voluminous data sets analyzed by supercom-
puters, I keep in mind Hank's emphasis on the human element, and the
value of intuition.

In my second semester, Hank suggested that I look for internal
waves in Massachusetts Bay as a research project. Although I had never
been on a boat larger than a canoe, Hank told me to gather up equip-
ment at WHOI, buy appropriate instrumentation, and charter a boat
and that he would back me with his research funds. Hank expressed
confidence in a concrete way and motivated me to reach beyond what I
thought I could do, in the same way that he encouraged so many others.

I learned from Hank that service to the scientific community is
important, although he once quipped that bringing oceanographers
together toward a common goal was akin to conducting an orchestra of
elephants. In the middle of my training, Hank taught me the most
meaningful lesson. While describing his view of the future of oceanog-
raphy, he told me that we were fortunate to live in a time when some-
one would pay us to do our hobby. Hank made me realize how lucky
we are to be able to spend our time doing something we love. t

Bob Munns

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (retired)

Henry Stommel was a wonderful shipmate, by which I mean full of
wonder. It was on longish voyages that I was most associated with
him. The work might be dull for those not directly involved with the
stations and the data, but life was not. It is on such trips that nerves
might wear thin from boredom or irritating personalities, but not with
Henry aboard.

I was always amazed at the breadth of his interests. Astronomy,
navigation, merchant shipping, shortwave radio, mathematics, geogra-
phy, exploring seaports, weird chemicals, gardening, and using a print-
ing press are among those that I recall. Whatever he took up, it was
with great enthusiasm. He had the essence of life, in that everything
good should be FUN to do.

An oceanographer should be international, and Henry was. That he
worked closely with British, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Japanese,
and Israeli oceanographers I have seen, although he was not a linguist.

Even in our
current era

of super-
computers,
I keep in mind

Hank's

emphasis on

the human

element, and

the value of

intuition.

95

Hank uses his trusty

calculator in the top

photo and plays with a

computer in the

lower photo.

Henry was most kind to those less fortunate than himself, as I have
witnessed. He gave much credit to others who needed it.

In addition to the pleasure of sailing with him, I much enjoyed hav-
ing dinners with Elizabeth and himself at their home and several others
in Falmouth.

I do hope there is a sailor's "Fiddler's Green" where I may see him
often. If there is not a special branch for oceanographers, I hereby nomi-
nate HENRY M. STOMMEL as an honorary member of that deep-sea
sailor's society. <

James Luyten

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The Pencil Is Mightier Than the Computer*: After spending a year at the
National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, where I
became interested in personal computers, I tried to get Hank interested. It
seemed hopeless he said that it was too much trouble to learn something
new; his old Texas Instruments calculator was just fine for his level of com-
puting. He would show mild interest in the color graphics, but he felt
intimidated by having to learn a computer language. I finally hit upon a
solution. I was going to Italy for a week, and I told him that I was con-
cerned about leaving the computer in my house while I was gone, suspect-
ing that Hank would offer to babysit for the computer. I played up the risk

of theft at my house, and he bit. I took it over to
Hank's house, and offered to set it up, as long as it
was going to be there. Hank agreed but relegated it
to a rickety table in the corner of his study.

When I returned a week later, Hank couldn't
wait to show me what he had been doing he had
learned BASIC and had found that he could solve
nonlinear equations. He was enthralled because he
could proceed on his own where he had always
needed to get mathematical help before. I think
that it also had the immediate feedback of work-
ing in real time that Hank needed. Soon he had a
simple LPS (ventilated thermocline) model of the
thermocline, a planetary system, and a fireworks display. Hank also
loved the graphics in spite of the primitive resolution at that time.

It took two weeks to get my computer back from Hank, and then only
after the one he had ordered had arrived. He was thoroughly hooked,
because the personal computer combined an interactive way to solve
equations with a visual display. It gave him a way to visualize the solu-
tion and unravel the problem to get to its essence. Hank enjoyed using a
computer greatly, writing more than 1,600 programs between 1985 and
1992, but it was just a tool to get where he wanted to go to understand
problems clearly enough to explain them without any mathematics. <

*from Henry Stommel's talk "The Goldsbrough Variations" upon accepting the
Crafoord Prize; Tellus, 111-119,1984.

96

Close Encounter

by Starbuck

WHEN HALLEY'S COMET visits the sun again this coming spring, it will
herald the 300th anniversary of Newton's presentation of Principia to the
Royal Society in April 1686. All during the summer of 1685 Newton labored
upon the final draft, and the world of science was never the same again.

Halley became the Astronomer Royal and began to apply the theory of
universal gravitation to comets. Assuming that the orbits of comets are
parabolas (a geometrically simpler form than extremely elongated ellipses),
Halley calculated the elements of some 24 comets observed back to 1337. He
noticed that the elements of the comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682 were much
alike and speculated that they might all be appearances of the same celestial
body. He predicted that it would appear again in 1758-1759.

The reason for the indefiniteness of his predicted date of reappearance was
that there was a 15-month discrepancy between the periods of historical
appearances. The interval between 1531 and 1607 was 76 years and 62 days;
that between 1607 and 1682 was 74 years and 323 days. He attributed this dif-
ference to the derangement of the comet's orbit by its encounter with Jupiter.
However, the means of calculation of this derangement did not exist in
Halley's time. He died in 1742, leaving it to the French mathematician Clairaut
to attempt a more precise prediction. Clairaut managed to present it to the
French Academy just one month before Halley's comet was seen again. His
error was 22 days.

The advent of computers has made calculations of the motions of comets
much easier than they were in Halley's time. It might make a good science
project for some Cape Cod high school student to demonstrate with a pro-
gram on the screen of his personal computer just how a massive planet might
be expected to affect the orbit of a highly eccentric comet during a close
encounter. As a starter, one could begin with both orbits in the same plane.

So I'm offering a prize of $250 for the most interesting entry by a high
school student, or younger, to be judged by two of my scientific friends. We
will be looking for some physical understanding of the phenomenon and the
discovery of some good questions. An actual prediction of Halley's Comet
itself would be more intricate and is not expected.

Entries on a floppy disk, with an explanatory essay, should be at The
Enterprise office by Thanksgiving. Entrants should put their names on both

disk and essay. * The Enterprise

August 2, 1985

97

The annually averaged

surface temperature
and salinity in the North
Pacific Ocean, drawn
from data compiled by
Levitus. Notice that if
one starts on the 17C
isotherm and cruises
northward, both the
temperature and salini-
ty decrease. This
means that these two
properties make antag-
onistic contributions to
the density of the

ocean. But the
temperature wins, so

that the density

increases as one goes

northward.

William Young
Scripps Institution of Oceanography

*> *> <*

50 N

40 N

30 N

120E

Stommel's Thermohaline Regulator

When personal computers became widely available, Hank Stommel
was one of the first oceanographers to become an enthusiast. His
adoption of this new toy was so complete that I feared his scientific career
had been derailed. He displayed some of the classic symptoms of a grad-
uate student hacker: large programs written in rambling, uncommented
BASIC, a happy disregard for questions of numerical accuracy and stabil-
ity, and an inability to stay focused on one problem for very long. This
condition abated after a few months and he returned to science. But the
personal computer made an enduring change in the way Hank attacked
problems. One example of this is his last work on the mixed layer "ther-
mohaline regulator."

During the summer of 1991, after an interval of over 30 years, Hank
returned to a simple box model of the thermal and saline structure of
the ocean. His original publication in 1961 used this model to describe
the grand thermohaline circulation of the oceans. But in 1991 his inter-
est was engaged by observations of the temperature and salinity in the
ocean mixed layer. Hank suggested that some of the same processes
that determine the temperature and salinity fields in the thermohaline
circulation operate on the much smaller space-and-time scales of the
mixed layer. He used his 1961 box model to illustrate this possibility.

The other difference was that
in 1991 Hank had a personal
computer and he solved this
box model numerically.

Some of the observations
of mixed-layer temperature
and salinity that caught Hank's
attention are shown in the
figure at left. Notice how tem-
perature and salinity make
antagonistic contributions to
the density. If one starts on the
17 isotherm and heads north,
both the temperature and the

salinity decrease. The fall in temperature makes the fluid denser, but this
increase is partially offset by the decrease in salinity. Hank examined
this more quantitatively and noticed that in all ocean basins roughly half
of the density increase due to temperature in the range 7 to 17 C is can-
celled by the fall in salinity.

Of course this partial compensation between temperature and salin-
ity might be because all oceans are forced by the same atmosphere. In
other words, the temperature-salinity relation in the mixed layer is a
reflection of the patterns of heating, cooling, evaporation, and precipita-
tion imposed by the atmosphere on the ocean. Hank did not dismiss
this "imprinting hypothesis," but he did have a strong emotional bias
against it. He remarked to me that it was demeaning to consider that

175W

110W

98

meteorology was solely responsible for determining something as
important as the temperature-salinity relation in the ocean mixed layer.
The box model shown below right is Hank's alternative "regulator
hypothesis," in which internal mixed-layer processes set the tempera-
ture-salinity relation. Box 1 is a control volume in low latitudes and its
temperature is set at T } = 1 , while Box 2 is a control volume in high lati-
tudes with T = 0. The respective salinities are S 1 and S 2 and y is identi-
cal with S 1 - ST The density difference between the two boxes is pro-
portional to (T-, - T.,) - (S 1 - S ) - 1 - y. Conservation of salinity is

and

2 = (1 -

(1)

t

1 - S 2 ) -

where the exchange of mass between the two boxes is modeled by the

"exchange function," (1 - i/). The exchange function

depends only on the density difference, 1 - y, between

the two boxes. The imprinting hypothesis corresponds

to a constant exchange such as E = 1. The regulator

hypothesis corresponds to an exchange that becomes

more vigorous as the density difference increases. An

example of this second possibility is E(l - y) = 1 1 - y I .

In this case the exchange gets bigger when the density

difference gets bigger.

Precipitation and evaporation are included with the
forcing function p (t). This term is the random effect of rain
showers taking fresh water from one box and dropping it
into the other. This process is uncorrelated with the salinity
in the boxes, and in Hank's numerical calculations he cre-
ated p(t) with a random-number generator.

Subtracting the two equations in (1), we have a single equation for
the salinity difference between the boxes:

The two-box model.
The precipitation is p(t)

and the salinity differ-
ence is y = S 1 - S 2 . The
mass exchange, E, is a
function of the density
difference.

P(t)

I

P(t)

(2)

Thus the state of the system is defined by y(0 = S l - S 2 . This is the equa-
tion Hank solved on his personal computer and, as always, he used the
very simplest time-stepping scheme: i/(f+ 8t) = y(f) + St[ - E(f)y(f) + p(t)]
where p(t) is a random number and 8t is the time step. This method,
sometimes called forward Euler, is usually discussed in numerical
analysis texts as a precursor to more refined and accurate approaches.
But, as far as I know, Hank always used this primitive technique. I am
not sure why. His training in astronomy had included orbital calcula-
tions using the methods devised by Adams. In this problem it probably
makes little difference since high accuracy is not required and computer
time is not a constraint.

In the figure overleaf, I show typical results obtained by integrating
equation (2) with forward Euler. This figure compares two integrations,
one with E = 1 and the other with E = 1 1 - y I . The difference Hank
noticed is that in the second case the average salinity difference is not 0,
even though the forcing, p(t), is symmetric. By compiling the results of
several calculations, Hank found that if E = 1 1 - y I and the random
forcing is very strong, then the average value of y is close to 1/2. This is
the thermohaline regulator the nonlinear exchange function rectifies
the random forcing and creates an average salinity difference between the

T =

E(l-y)

99

Y o.o

-1.0 -

-2.0

A comparison of two
time-stepping solutions
showing the salinity dif-
ference y as a function
of time, t. Both of these

jagged curves are

produced by randomly

forcing the box model in

equation (2). The upper

panel is the thermo-

haline regulator. Note

how the average salinity

difference is nonzero
(the curve spends more
time above the y=
axis than below). The
lower panel shows the
imprinting case in which
the average salinity dif-
ference is zero (the
curve spends equal
time on each side of the
y= axis).

boxes. In fact half of the density difference due
to temperature is cancelled by the average salini-
ty difference.

Of course, Hank wasn't content to just
observe and publish the results of a calculation.
He found an explanation of the computed aver-
age salinity difference and also started trying to
interest his colleagues in this problem. I think
that this was a strong characteristic of Hank's
scientific personality when he didn't under-
stand something, he pounded the pavements
looking for help from his colleagues. And it
usually wasn't too hard to find someone who
was interested in what he was doing. He told
me about the thermohaline regulator on the
porch at Walsh Cottage, and I suggested a sta-
tistical approach that enables one to compute
various properties of the random functions in
the figure at left. Hank was more impressed by
this than he should have been I simply
recalled what I'd learned in a statistical mechan-
ics course 12 years earlier. I had always hoped
to apply these techniques to an oceanographic
problem and Hank delivered it on a platter!

The box model is really only a metaphor for the poorly understood
processes that distribute heat and salt in the surface layers of the ocean.
But, like many of Hank's ideas, it seems endlessly open and inviting. In
the fall and winter of 1991, Hank spent much time playing with stochas-
tically forced chains of boxes and speculating about the temperature-
salinity correlation in the mixed layer. In a letter to me he remarked,
"Whether any of this has anything to do with the real ocean doesn't
seem to be known by anybody yet, but we do have a fresh lead to fol-
low up. And someday maybe there will be a good observational test. In
the meantime it is enjoyable material to puzzle over." *

Robert Weller

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

* *

At 7:00 in the morning, the Clark Lab is quiet. Phones are not yet
ringing; there is an hour or more before meetings and seminars
begin. It is a good time to make a solid start on writing or computing.
On a special subset of mornings, before I moved from the third to the
second floor of Clark, it was also the time when Henry Stommel would
stop by. Henry's visits were always fun. Waiting for the coffee to brew,
perhaps not fully up to speed yet, Henry's infectious enthusiasm and
energy drew you into whatever he wanted to talk about.

One morning was spent working out pressure loss in pipes, hydro-
static heads, and other technical details of a plumbing project for his
yard. Many discussions were about his work with Jim Luyten and Joe
Pedlosky on the ventilated thermocline. Another morning we searched

100

through catalogs and wondered how to install small differential pres-
sure transducers in the laboratory apparatus he used to demonstrate
Coriolis force. Sometimes we went back to his office for a demonstra-
tion of an oceanographic atlas or of his latest computer visualization of
a geophysical fluid dynamics problem. We also talked about his previ-
ous observations of Langmuir circulation, and he encouraged every
attempt to learn something more about the physics of the ocean.

These mornings, and Henry Stommel himself, were a source of
inspiration. A discussion with him, his energy, and his enthusiasm blew
away the silt of the daily routine that settles and tries to bury the fun
and excitement of physical oceanography. J

Jean Claude Gascard

Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France)

<* *t* <*

Henry has been a constant source of inspiration for me. I met him
for the first time during the Mediterranean Deep Ocean
Convection experiment in 1969. The following year, Henry invited me
to spend a year in Woods Hole. This was undoubtedly one of the great-
est experiences in my life.

I had always been fascinated by his ability to set up powerful physi-
cal concepts using the simplest mathematics. The fascination was also
due, I believe, to Henry's immense talent for surreptitiously introduc-
ing the mysterious dilemma between the simplicity and complexity of
nature. In essence, I strongly believe this was a distinctive sign of his
genius, which extended far beyond oceanography.

Henry was the kind of person with whom you don't feel the frontier
between home and office. I remember well his cheerfulness in all details
of social as well as professional life.

I visited Henry almost every year during the past 20 years, and I
have so many remembrances of him that it is hard to pick a few! I will
never forget Thanksgiving at Sippewissett Farm and all the MIT-WHOI
students Henry loved to have with him on this occasion. There were a
lot of happenings in his garden, ranging from hot air balloons to rail-
way tracks (everybody knew of Henry's fascination with railways). In
addition, there were serious discussions, dealing, for instance, with
Mao Tse Tsung and the future of a billion human beings in China.
Henry loved antiques, especially the music boxes he collected from all
over the world; he found fantastic specimens in Paris.

I also remember well the Bastille Day we celebrated on July 14,
1971, at the house I rented for a year in front of Little Harbor in Woods
Hole. All the French immigrants around Woods Hole gathered there
with hundreds of American friends. Henry provided the fireworks,
which he asked us to take care of since in the US they were forbidden
(for Americans, I supposed!). We had a wonderful party that a lot of
tourists, waiting overnight for the Nantucket ferry, enjoyed too, as well
as the director of the institution and his guests.

I well remember the winter cruise that Henry led to Barbados on the
Atlantis II. We left Woods Hole in a blizzard, crossed the steamy Gulf

I had

always been
fascinated

by his

ability to set

up powerful

physical

concepts

using the

simplest

mathematics.

101

A week later,

back in Paris,

I received a

letter from

Henry with

a detailed

plan for

starting the

construction.

Stream, and by the time we reached the hospitable Sargasso Sea, we
realized that a cat had been trapped outside the boat from the very
beginning. It seemed completely frozen. By the time we started the salt
fountain experiment, plunging a long pipe in to the deep ocean, both
the Atlantis II and the cat were melting. Amazingly, the cat recovered
just enough to make up his mind to retire in Barbados. The experiment
was a success, the pipe spouting salt spray like a whale's blowhole.

More recently, I visited Henry in Sippewissett and we had a big dis-
cussion about building a railway track in my garden in Gif sur Yvette
just like his. A week later, back in Paris, I received a letter from Henry
with a detailed plan for starting the construction. It was a transfer of
technology, just as I understand the TGV (train de grand vitesse) has
recently been transferred to Texas.

Henry was a master, a friend, and a great companion for me. No
one has influenced my career as much as he did. Henry is still very
much alive in my heart. The best memorial I can think of would be to
rebuild the towed pipe that we both used successfully on the Asterias to
measure internal waves on Stellwagen Bank north of Cape Cod. We had
intended to use it to study the deep convection in the Mediterranean
Sea. Perhaps we will do it one day as Henry suggested.

Henry, I miss you. <

William Simmons

Woods Hole, Massachusetts

Hank was one of the best organized people I have ever known. He
did so many different kinds of things during his lifetime that plan-
ning and maneuvering became absolutely necessary to fit them all in.

Once, in 1975, he whisked into my office at MIT and announced
proudly he had just finished planning all his major scientific projects
for the next decade, roughly to his retirement!

He often made light of planning in conversation, but I suspect he
actually came to enjoy it. He could become visibly disturbed when
plans went awry, especially if he was feeling boxed in by them.

Hank and Chickie loved gardening, and named their Falmouth
property Sippewissett Farm. I was first invited there for dinner in
October of 1967, as a young, MIT postdoc. Having no idea what to
expect, I showed up, wine bottle in hand, dressed in a suit and tie.
Hank and Binks, their large, independent-minded, shepherd dog, gave
me the penny tour, and I was mightily impressed. I wanted to ask
about each and every thing I saw, but Hank seemed unwilling to dally.
In fact, he seemed downright annoyed, which made me a little uneasy.
The tour ended in the cold shed adjoining the house, where, next to the
food freezer, stood six 3-foot saplings, still in wrapping paper. The pace
of his speech quickened as he explained with annoyance they had just
arrived from Miller's Nursery, two weeks late, that he was due to go to
sea for a month the very next morning, and there would be no opportu-
nity to plant them.

102

It seemed simple enough. "Why not do it now?" I asked. His face lit
up with relief, almost disbelief that a theoretician would offer a practi-
cal and unconventional solution.

"Would you mind?" he asked softly.

I told him I loved gardening and he beamed. We dug six large holes
parallel to the north wall at the eastern end, filled them half and half
with Bobby Weeks' s horse-farm product and soil, mixed well, and
watered to soupiness. They were set by the waning rays of an autumn
sun, just in time for our dinner call. By that time, we were both
drenched in mud to the knees, well-splattered just about everywhere
else, and generally quite sweaty. It was a feeling I would come to expe-
rience on many occasions at Sippewissett Farm (but never again in suit
and tie). Hank's sense of relief was obvious, and we all had a wonder-
fully happy meal, with copious references (always the planner) to the
tasty fruit pies we'd be enjoying in three to five years.

* * *

Hank was fond of things that happened as a result of serial process-
es. He liked to try to understand them, and seemed delighted when he
could. He especially loved mechanical things, machines that performed
tasks: clocks, music boxes, machine tools, scientific instruments, print-
ing presses, and, particularly, trains.

In the 1940s, he installed an elaborate model train in the basement
of the rectory of Woods Hole's Church of The Messiah, when it was a
cooperative dormitory for Oceanographic bachelors. The train could go
from room to room through tunnels Hank had blasted in the cement-
work, and he was especially proud of its ability to run through the bath-
room. Whilst there, it could be remotely stopped near the hopper, and a
tiny spring-loaded flag could be tripped that read: "Passengers should
please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is in the station or
within its view." He liked to test its efficacy on unsuspecting female
guests who were using the facility. His trickster side will be described, I
trust, elsewhere in this issue.

He once invited me to listen to a new high-fidelity recording. I
thought it would be a special piece of music, but it was authentic train-
whistle sounds from famous routes around the country. We sat
through the entire recording, while Hank knowledgeably annotated
the commentary.

Years later, when Hank was a grandfather, he built, singlehandedly,
and ostensibly for his grandchildren, his own private railroad. The track
was angle iron and the ties were two-by-fours, all purchased with prize
money. Visitors were often invited to ride it. It started at the shack
behind his house. Hank donned his engineer's cap, and a copy of the
train record played on a small portable cassette recorder he kept there.
The engine was roughly handmade of wood and about the size of an
orange crate. It was driven by a DC motor, pullies and belts, and an
automobile battery. There was a lab-type, double-pole throw switch on
the control panel, and a huge smile on his face when he encouraged me
to engage it. I did, and sure enough the train pulled out slowly but
determinedly to the south, turning eastward across the property along
the garden. It did quite well on flat ground, but required assistance
along uphill sections. Hank had actually flattened the hills to some

He especially

loved

mechanical

things: clocks,

music boxes,

machine tools,

...printing

presses, and,

particularly,

trains.

103

His magnetic

charm and

limitless

inventiveness

brought

people

together,

and often

launched

them in

new directions.

extent, using cinder blocks as standards. It pulled a child's weight quite
well. The track ran the width of the property and made a huge U-turn
back in the woods, finally heading westward along the north side of the
garden. There, at the edge of the lawn, it confronted an impressive
abutment straddling the track, and bearing, of course, a small sign that
advised reversing the polarity of the switch to enjoy the return ride
back to the station. I could see that devilish smile of satisfaction on his
face as I arrived at the abutment, the same one that flashed whenever
the "Passengers should please refrain..." flag was raised at the rectory.
It was cleverly conceived. It worked, it pleased, and, except for the
motor, it was mechanical.

: ; .

Next to his infatuation with ideas, I like to remember Hank's yea
saying. He pursued the right to try new things that interested him, pro-
tected it fiercely, and helped others, individuals and groups, do the
same. He loathed negativism. His magnetic charm and limitless inven-
tiveness brought people together, and often launched them in new
directions.

Once, in the early days of POLYMODE, an unspecified delegation
of American oceanographers was invited to a joint scientific planning
meeting in Moscow. It was to run for a week in the middle of spring
semester, mud season in Moscow, and a difficult period for American
academicians to get away. I was dreading the cajoling that would be
required, but, with Hank as a nucleus, Allan Robinson and I were
readily able to assemble a working group of a dozen or so sterling
young scientists.

We departed, en masse, at mid evening from Logan airport. On
board, I noticed Hank carrying a small green plaid zipper-topped suit-
case. It was about the size of a briefcase, and I thought he intended to
use it as one.

With the bag on his lap, he opened a conversation with, "This time,
I'm really traveling light." When I asked what that meant, he told me,
matter-of-factly, the bag contained all his needs for the entire trip. Being
new to international travel, I was mightily impressed. "How'd you pos-
sibly do it," I asked. For awhile, he dodged the question coyly, building
suspense. When the stewardesses were a safe distance away, he agreed
to show me. Unzipping the bag, he reached in without lifting the flap,
groped around, and produced two tiny spent shot bottles, refilled with a
very strong, reddish rum, and offered me one. "It takes awhile to get a
drink on these long flights," he said, "and I want to turn in early."

Anticipating an interesting show-and-tell, I pressed on about the
bag. Again, he groped under the flap, like a striptease artist, this time
producing, with an enormous smile, two rolls of soft American toilet
paper, and offered me one. Everyone had heard Soviet toilet paper sto-
ries, and we roared hilariously.

There was much excited chatter within our group that evening, but
Hank had been up since five. He was yawny and had the seat back at
the first opportunity, settling in for the night. I respected that, but I real-
ly wanted to know more about the contents of that bag, and pressed
one last time. "Okay," he hissed, in a you-asked-for-it tone, and tossed
back the flap so I could see for myself. Except for the one roll of

104

American toilet paper, a razor, a toothbrush, and a handful of under-
clothing, it was absolutely empty! I wanted to press further but his
smile was fading and his eyelids were beginning to droop. By the time
the refreshment wagon arrived at our row, he was in a deep sleep.

We were met at Moscow airport and driven to our hotel. The first
day of meetings all went smoothly. Late that evening, Hank took Allan
and me aside to tell us he would be returning home the very next
morning. He didn't say why and I never asked, but I like to think it
was to coalesce some other group in some other city, to help them do
what needed to be done but they somehow couldn't quite start with-
out his presence.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many an oceanographic pro-
gram functioned on the Stommel diesel principle: Hank provided the
spark during the warm-up phase, after which internal heat assured
self-ignition. J

Walter Zenk

Institut fur Meereskunde (Kiel, Germany)

*>

Krissy Hogg and Steffi

Zenk ride Train No. 99

at Sippewissett Farm in

the summer of 1987.

Train No. 99 to Sippewissett Farm: For me, the day that I first came
to Woods Hole is almost like yesterday. It was the week after Labor
Day 1973 that the young Zenk family approached the Cape in an Avis
car and settled in Roslansky's old house down the street from the
aquarium. Although well prepared for our American
adventure ("Keep left after you leave the airport tunnel"),
we encountered so many exciting new things that we will
never forget.

One of these very personal experiences was my first
meeting with Henry Stommel. It must have been in
October that all of a sudden Hank dashed into my office. I
sat in the uppermost northeast corner lab of the Smith
Laboratory where I had just started to enjoy the hospitality
of Chairman Ferris Webster's Physical Oceanography
Department. Hank needed translation of a sentence in a
will from a regional court in Idar-Oberstein, Germany. He
and I had a funny discussion about hopefully, I recall
correctly his late, great aunt and the little German vil-
lage, Stommeln. With this rural town (mostly sugar beets)
west of Cologne, the Stommels of Falmouth,
Massachusetts, share their name in some complicated way.
As I have experienced so many times since, the result-
ing invitation to the Stommels' home was nearly

inevitable. How many young oceanographers' families may have been
welcomed in the cozy kitchen of Chickie and Hank's home on Palmer
Avenue? Hard to imagine they were more impressed than we were by
the endless wonders of Sippewissett Farm: the big fireplace, which
Hank later converted for a wood-burning stove, decorated with his
painted vision of the burning Cape Codder Hotel, the king-size gramo-
phone with the big crank, Hank's favorite video performance of the

106

cunning fox who needs to see a tiny mouse dentist, or the railroad net-
work Hank built for his grandchildren.

Not only for them when we visited the Stommels years later,
together with Nelson Hogg and his family, Hank had not forgotten to
charge the engine's battery well in advance: Our youngsters had a won-
derful time riding the old train No. 99 around Sippewissett Farm all
afternoon.

This short remembrance would not be complete without cordial
thanks to Chickie. Just as the Zenks in Kiel keep Hank in memory as a
genius oceanographer and a great friend, so do many colleagues and
their families around all three oceans. <

Nelson Hogg

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

>

Over the years of knowing Hank I have been continually amazed at
the variety of his interests beyond oceanography and science. One
of those we shared was an amateur, but deep, interest in gardening
and when I think back, it is likely that interest that brought us together.
At one of our first dinners together, I remember getting an amused
laugh when I summarized my own gardening efforts as building up the
soil with all the failed seeds that I had sown. With some seven acres to
work at Sippewissett Farm, Hank could be quite ambitious and, at one
time, I am told, took to selling surplus produce at the roadside. One of
our usual subjects of the gardening season was the perennial problem
of what to do about the woodchucks. I suspect that Hank grew so much
food that they weren't a serious problem but, nevertheless, he did keep
a live trap baited and waiting.

One summer, however, the problem was not woodchucks but sev-
eral deer that had invaded his garden. With the continued encroach-
ment of new housing developments, his land was part of a narrowing
corridor linking Woods Hole with the more open lands to the north.
The deer were a serious problem, eating vegetables, fruit, and shrub-
bery by night, so Hank took battle. He set up lights around the garden
and had a radio playing loud music all night long, believing that the
noise and lights would act as a deterrent. It did as far as the deer were
concerned, but one night, apparently attracted by the prospect of a late-
night party, someone came into the yard and made off with his wood-
chuck trap!

I've often thought of Hank as a fisherman as well a fisherman of
people. After returning to Woods Hole, he had the habit of roaming the
halls with regular stopping places for chats about whatever new ideas
were on his mind. At those infrequent times when he had run out of
problems that interested him, he turned to some person, usually
amongst the junior staff, that he found interesting, instead. He would
then decide what bait to try namely some problem he knew would
interest the unsuspecting, cast it out, and then reel in the catch.

I was fortunate to be one of those caught, and the problem that
hooked me concerned the physics of the Gulf Stream recirculation, my

I've often
thought
of Hank

as a

fisherman
of people.

107

Ideas

flowed out

of him with

no restraint;

he was a

totally

generous

man.

main interest over the past decade. Once caught, we then went on to
explore other problems of Hank's choosing, particularly the dynamics
of the "Hetons" (a kind of vortex). It was a wonderful and invigorating
experience from which I learned much more than how vortices work. <

Charles (Chip) Cox

Scripps Institution of Oceanography
> ; #>

For me, three memories of Hank stand out. In one he is questioning a
graduate student during a departmental exam. He asks totally
unexpectable questions that delve into simple, yet fundamental,
aspects of the physics underlying fluid dynamics. He is a deeply seri-
ous professor of immense intellectual power.

Another wonderful memory is a family dinner at his Sippewissett
Farm. He is working in the garden putting up fence posts when we
come. The tractor is inoperable but an irresistible attraction to my
three-year-old son, the garden a treasure of delights to all. Then the
evening in the wonderful house with its remarkably diverse artifacts!
He is a devoted and deeply happy family man.

A few years later, he unexpectedly comes bounding down our
driveway on a weekend, a joyous figure full of fun and ideas.

What I remember best about all my encounters with Hank is
that ideas flowed out of him with no restraint; he was a totally
generous man. <

Bernard Saint-Guily

Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Paris, France)

Henry Stommel was ever wonderful with fresh and unexpected
views. Indeed he was naturally looking at things "as never yet
seen," and he was sensitive to the casual and unusual sides of facts and
circumstances.

I remember one of his at the same time funny and romantic tricks.
Once I was just arriving at his home when Henry dragged me off direct-
ly to the garden to hear, close-up, a few blasts of a genuine old locomo-
tive whistle, which he had attached to a compressor. For an instant we
remained motionless, delighted with this rich and evocative sound.

He was also enthusiastic, and pressured himself to clear up without
delay all vagueness in ideas and notions. Very long ago, perhaps the first
time I came to Woods Hole, we were speaking of chance in discoveries,
and I was curious to know the etymology of serendipity. Immediately
Henry took me to the wonderful Woods Hole library, urgently to consult
the Oxford English Dictionary and illuminate the question. <

108

High-Iron

by Starbuck

THIS YEAR IS THE 150th anniversary of the opening of the railroad from
Boston to Worcester. The through route to New York City didn't open till a
few years later, but already in 1833 ground was being broken for the new line
at Stonington, cuts and embankments made across farmers' meadows toward
Cranston, the levelling survey being carried forward by a 17-year-old lad,
fresh from an apprenticeship at the construction of the Grand Western Canals
in the southwest of England.

We happened to find his daybook among some family papers. It conveys
the sense of adventure and excitement as the first railroads were being laid
out: setting out the pegs, calculating the cut and fill, negotiating with the
laborers about their 65-cents-a-day pay.

The chief engineer on the job was Major George Washington Whistler, age
33, who had resigned his professorship at West Point to take up a career of
railroad construction. When the Tsar of Russia decided to build a railroad
between St. Petersburg and Moscow, he engaged Whistler to do it for him.
American companies took over the Alexandrovsky State Factory just outside
of St. Petersburg to build locomotives and rolling stock, an early example of
technology transfer.

Many of the transplanted American, Scottish and English families
continued in business in Russia until they were expelled during the
Bolshevik Revolution.

Three weeks ago I rode Amtrak from Wilmington to Boston. The cars
seemed as crowded as during the War. It was a leisurely, comfortable ride, and
a good chance to renew acquaintance with old familiar landmarks. And
though we made our obligatory stops at Old Saybrook and Westerly, many of
the stations on the old railroad maps seem to have disappeared. What has
become of Slocum, Leete or Wood River Junction?

The railroad mileage in this country increased rapidly until the 1920s,
when it first began to decline. At one time there was a mile of track for every
four square miles of land area in Massachusetts. Amtrak is the gallant, though
tired, survivor. Now, according to the TV news, David Stockman says it's got
to go. He's probably right: it must be cheaper to send a Senator on a junket to
outer space than a high-school girl for a train ride to Philadelphia. Whoever
asserts otherwise will be suspected of high irony. *

The Enterprise
May 20, 1985

109

Michele Fieux

Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France)

Michele Fieux's
photos show Hank

Stommel in his

Sippewissett Farm

garden, holding one of

the Stommel cats, and

at his lathe.

Hank was like a second father to me. When I arrived to work with
him at Woods Hole in 1973, 1 was impressed with his stature, but
also soon found another family in Hank and Chickie. I remember when
Hank first showed me his nice garden, and discovered my interest in

gardening (although I never had a gar-
den), he said, simply, "Here is a row for
you. You can grow what you like." Every
weekend I had a marvelous time with
him in his garden.

One day, at Sippewissett Farm, Hank
decided to harvest his wild grapes. I was
a little surprised to see him with a chain
saw in his hands. We went to his woods
where he showed me the grapes growing
on trees. All of a sudden Hank started the
saw and cut down the tree to get the
grapes. To my astonishment, Hank told
me it was his way to get grapes and wood
for winter at the same time!

One night, Hank invited another friend of his and me to one of
Chickie's famous dinners. We were in their marvelous kitchen at
Sippewissett, surrounded by Hank's
paintings. The fire hummed compan-
ionably and the cat and dog were
stretched out, asleep. Hank was talking
about the stars. He asked the visiting
theoretician to calculate the distances
between some stars, and he asked me to
go outside and measure them with a
sextant. Then we could compare the
results. Hank always managed to make
his guests feel comfortable and impor-
tant in his home.

Hank loved to play pranks. One of

his favorites was to wait until friends were visiting his garden, and then
suddenly blow his loud train whistle!

Every time I traveled to
Woods Hole, either Hank or
Chickie came to fetch me at the
airport and bring me home. One
day I saw Hank, after working for
hours, go outside to have a tour
of the garden on the little home-
made train.

Hank was able to make any-
thing with his hands. He was

110

Counting Our Blessings

by Starbuck

OUR ATTENTION IS SO directed by the media towards the shortcom-
ings of our society that we often forget to count our blessings. One that
particularly comes to mind is the Falmouth Hospital, which but for the
efforts and devotion and vision of some of our physicians and citizens might
never have come to be.

Only a few short years have passed since we had to rush to Wareham or
Hyannis in an emergency and now, seemingly miraculously, there it stands-
a secular temple of care and kindness and medical knowledge. There is some-
thing comforting and homely about a community hospital: faces known for
half a lifetime, the nurses with whom your own children went to school. And
all of this, grown out of the good intentions of our neighbors great and small.

It was not always so. About fifty years ago, in the mid-thirties, a little girl
and her brother on Shore Street came down with what was diagnosed as
infantile paralysis. Dr. Oscar Simpson, who used to live in a red-trimmed
white house where LiT Peach Grocerette now stands, tried to arrange for the
town ambulance to take the pair to the Children's Hospital in Boston for fur-
ther examination.

Polio was then viewed with the same fear that AIDS is now. It seemed that
no one was going to volunteer to drive the two children down to Boston but
finally one fireman stepped forward to take the risk. It must have taken con-
siderable resolve and courage for anyone to contemplate the possibilities of
infection, especially for a father with children of his own.

It is one of the redeeming features of our human race that, when everyone
else wrings his or her hands and turns away there is always someone else who
stands firm and does the needed job. We have our splendid hospital now,
largely through the devoted efforts of a few. The town ambulance sped to
Boston on its mission of mercy those long years ago, on account of one man's
courage and generous heart. He is my neighbor Stanley Fisher. The little girl is
my wife. * The Enterprise

February 20, 1985

111

always trying to explain difficult theories in the simplest way possi-
ble. He was always passionate about something new and trying to
communicate these passions. He was a wonderful friend, and I miss
him very much. *J*

James Luyten

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Wliat were

the qualities

of working

with Hank?

Fire, sweat,

heat,

out of control,

laughter,

despair,

rebirth, cigar

smoke..

Annealing: Although I first met Hank during the summer of 1968 at
Walsh Cottage, I didn't start working closely with him until he re-
turned to Woods Hole in 1978. 1 was in an office next to Hank's, so we
often met in the hall. It began by his just coming to ask me what I thought
of some idea or problem. It was flattering to be asked and to have Hank's
attention. Hank was always on the lookout for people who could comple-
ment him, particularly in mathematics, where he felt shaky. After several
months of these sporadic conversations, we began talking about a specific
model and said, "Well, let's work it out." We continued from that point
for about 14 years. It has certainly been the most exciting and entertain-
ing period of my life, both scientifically and personally.

What were the qualities of working with Hank? Fire, sweat, heat,
out of control, laughter, despair, rebirth, cigar smoke.... The imagery is
emotional because Hank was so passionate and emotional.

Most collaborations began with a free-ranging conversation, sparked
by some new observation, a remark made at one of the seminars, a
recent paper, or, as it turned out, one of the questions that Hank had
been pondering for 40 years. (In 1955, Hank laid out a blueprint for him-
self and oceanography in an address to the staff of the Oceanographic,
entitled "On the Present Status of Our Physical Knowledge of the Deep
Ocean.") That pretty much covered most of oceanography, as well as
most of our human experience. The next stage was what I call the confla-
gration, in which we tried to get a problem going. It was like trying to
build a fire with damp wood, little kindling. We needed the spark of
curiosity and a feeling that we might be able to make some progress, a
problem where you could try to develop an explanation in simple terms
(i.e., how does a gyroscope really work when thought of as point mass-
es?). If the explanation made sense, and could not be further elaborated,
that was nice, but there was no place to go with it. There was no rub.
Time to get some more coffee or read the mail....

Sometimes, we couldn't get any purchase on the question at all,
everything was just too wet to burn, even though it looked like great
material. That was sort of depressing...

Then there were questions where the simple explanations lead us fur-
ther afield, to larger or deeper questions. This is where the fire really got
going, a real conflagration. It worked best if our initial guesses turned out
to be wrong. It became very intense, all ideas were thrown into the fire,
challenged, picked apart, discarded; all seemed lost and hopeless. It was
very chaotic and all attribution was lost. We would calculate, dig out
some atlases, analyze some data, plot things up, drive down to the MBL
Library, whatever was needed. In the evening and on weekends, the

112

phone would ring and Hank would start as if in midthought. It was like
being at sea in a storm you knew that you would just have to ride it out.
Hank had such a deep intuitive feeling for how the ocean worked that he
could keep his bearings where few others could.

Often this process lead us to seeing what was essential for modeling
the phenomenon at hand. Then began an annealing process, in which
we could move ahead a little and see what could be thrown away as not
being essential to the understanding. As we got closer to understand-
ing, the pace increased. More phone calls, but this process was a bit
more controlled putting the ideas into the fire to strengthen them
rather than transmute them involved talking them through again and
again, with colleagues and visitors. For Hank, the continuity of the com-
munication was part of the creative thinking. Everything was still up
for revision. This was also the time to start writing and, here again, you
could hardly keep up with Hank. His passion to express himself was
given free reign. Every morning copies would be distributed to all who
were interested, as we struggled to get it right.

In the end, we got the manuscript together, checked everything,
made the figures. After the manuscript was sent off to the journal, Hank
would come in and say, "Now what are we going to do next...." *

Philip Richardson

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
*> < <*

Dropping by to chat with Hank was like going on a roller coaster
ride a scary acceleration down a steep slope, a sudden swerve
around a tight turn, a dive into a dark tunnel, and out again into sud-
den brightness. You were never sure where you were going or how
long you would be gone. It might last days or weeks or even longer.
These rides were always interesting and usually fun.

My favorite visit to Hank's office began after a seminar he gave
about the interaction of discrete eddies. When I showed him some new
drifting float trajectories in eddies near the Gulf Stream, he became
very excited and off we went on one of these rides. He quickly
launched model floats into his computer-simulated eddies, and for
hours we played wonderful games, trying to guess the number of
eddies and their behavior by observing trajectories of model floats.
Hank dashed back and forth between his two computers, changing
model parameters and the number of floats and eddies to see what
would happen. With quick side trips to the blackboard he worked out a
mathematical scheme to calculate the properties and behavior of eddies
using a minimum number of floats.

At one point he became so excited and spewed out ideas so fast that
I was afraid he would collapse right there on the spot. We both hung on
and survived. This particular ride lasted a few weeks, but that first day
was the wildest and most fun. In a few hours he taught me a lot about
the interpretation of float trajectories, and, more importantly, how he
approached and solved a problem swiftly, directly, and playfully.

Hank had
such a deep

intuitive

feeling for

how the ocean

worked that

he could keep

his bearings

where few
others could.

113

Hank
envisioned
hundreds of

Slocnms
porpoising
through the

ocean.,

Once in awhile Hank and I would cross the street from his house to
Doug Webb's garage to see the latest exciting technical developments of
the Slocum vehicle. A Slocum is a mini submarine powered by the ther-
mal stratification of the ocean; it is named after Joshua Slocum, the first
person to sail single-handed around the world. Hank envisioned hun-
dreds of Slocums porpoising through the ocean, monitoring it in the
same way as weather balloons monitor the atmosphere.* Once again,
we would be off on another ride. <

*Henry Stommel's "The Slocum Mission" can be found in Oceanus, Vol. 32, No. 4,
Winter 1989/90.

John Van Leer

Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences

* *

Those of us who worked with Hank Stommel were all exposed to his
amazingly diverse interests, infectious curiosity, and keen original
mind. Many, however, may not be aware of his fascination with things
mechanical, particularly those involving steam. As a person with an
engineering background, he would regale me with his mechanical
adventures. Hank loved to tell stories on himself, such as the following
sample.

About 20 years ago, Munroe's Shipyard in East Boston decided to
get rid of an ancient coal-fired steam crane. This prize was self-pro-
pelled on caterpillar treads and had a large clamshell shovel, which
Hank could use to clear the brush out of his pond at Sippewissett Farm.
Best of all, the boiler had enough capacity to blow a locomotive steam
whistle Hank had previously acquired.

Hank and WHOI naval architect Jonathan Leiby somehow
arranged the purchase of the crane and its transport to Woods Hole
on one of Dan Clark's barges. The next question was how to unload
it. The next Saturday morning Hank calculated that the tide would
bring the deck of the barge to the same level as Dyers Dock, allowing
them to drive it off the barge under its own power. Early on the
appointed morning they set about making a fire under the boiler in
the firebox to get up steam.

As they began to move the crane it became painfully evident that
the steam pressure was not going to move the crane more than halfway
off the barge. Meanwhile, the tide was falling and the crane began to
tilt. They quickly decided to intensify the fire by adding a quick shot of
drain oil to the blaze.

Unknown to them, the firebox had small rust holes in the bottom,
which allowed the ignited oil to run out the bottom and onto the wood-
en dock and barge. Soon the dock and barge were starting to burn, leav-
ing them with the interesting choice of whether to concentrate on fight-
ing the fire or moving the crane. Moving the crane took precedence, and
they succeeded in getting it completely onto Dyers Dock, whereupon
they could concentrate on putting out the fire. J

114

Dennis Moore

University of Hawaii
*

Hank Stommel loved to pose and solve interesting problems, and
hated to make errors. I once asked him about global sea-level rise,
and he sent me a sketch of Woods Hole awash! He asked me to have a
look at Compton's 1913 Science paper on a laboratory demonstration of
the earth's rotation. That was much more interesting to Hank!
Compton's sketchy theory was incorrect by a factor of two, but Hank
spoke of Compton in heroic terms, and really wanted him to be right. In
the appendix to our book on the Coriolis force [An Introduction to the
Coriolis Force, Columbia University Press, 1989], Hank discusses
Compton's work very politely, and never says outright that Compton
made a mistake.

Hank was on the fourth draft of the Coriolis book when he asked
me to help with it. Typical of Hank's generosity, he had Columbia
University Press rewrite the contract, giving me an equal share. It was
very demanding, but great fun, working closely with him. His enthusi-
asm was tremendous and his mirth was contagious. Hank was very
meticulous. At the last minute we had to have a figure redrawn to cor-
rect a careless drafting error we had cautioned against in the text and
then made ourselves. Hank said we would have been "hoist by our own
petard" if we did not correct it. I added an acknowledgment to the
draftsman who "created" the redrawn figure on the computer. Hank
did not see this until the book appeared, and then gently suggested that
if the book were ever reprinted we should change "created" to "drew."
Hank said "created" should be used exclusively to describe what God
has done. >

Gabe Csanady

Old Dominion University

Among my fondest memories are the dinner parties at the
Stommels'. We never knew what to expect: a demonstration of
black light, Hank reading aloud a passage from an old classic, or a ride
on the narrow-gauge railway in the yard. There were, of course, lively
discussions on topics ranging from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History
of Time to new ideas in evolutionary theory. We also looked forward to
the new or modified painting by Hank, hanging over the fireplace:
Would it be a cat cemetery, a cat with mesmerizing eyes, or the Cape
Codder Hotel burning?

Hank and Chickie were very close. Once, when Chickie was in the
hospital, we invited Hank for dinner. At the last minute, Hank called,
saying that he could not leave the phone. So we took the dinner over to
his place, which cheered him up a bit. When visiting hours came, Elijah
and Hank went to see Chickie.

Continued on page 124

I once asked
Hank about

global

sea-level rise,
and he sent

me a

sketch of

Woods Hole

awash.

115

The Woods Hole Marine Exhibit

During 1989 and 1990, a Master Plan was drawn up for Woods Hole

Oceanographic Institution property. After hearing about a proposal for a

deep-sea "telepresence" center, Hank Stommel offered this idea.

1 . Information Center
(gift shop, rest rooms)

2. R/VOceonus

3. DSWAMn (The Abyss)

4. Museum

5. Lecture Hall

6. Hydrosphere

7. The Wave

8. Operations Center

1 . Information Center

It is a good idea to start your tour of
the Marine Exhibit at the Information
Center, where you can obtain a free
brochure and a map of the exhibit. The
center also has a souvenir shop and
rest room facilities.

2. R/V Oceanus

R/ V Oceanus was one of Woods Hole's
most active research vessels. When it
was retired, Oceanus was moored per-
manently along the dock at the point
on the map indicated by the numeral 2.
Visitors are welcome aboard to inspect

116

the laboratories, deck equipment,
winches, living quarters, engine room,
and pilothouse.

3. The Abyss

On the dock, next to R/V Oceanus,
there is a rather ordinary inconspicu-
ous Cape Cod shingled shed. Inside
you will find the widely known deep-
sea submersible Alvin, open for your
inspection. This is the vehicle that
enabled the discovery of the thermal
vents along the deep crests of mid-
ocean ridges.

The exhibit also includes a special cham-
ber in which visitors can experience a
simulated deep dive to view one of
these vents, with the flood lights of
Alvin illuminating a "black smoker" and
the other-worldly life forms around it.

4/5. The Redfield Marine Museum

The Redfield Marine Museum is housed
in the remodelled Redfield Laboratory.
The main building contains a wide vari-
ety of exhibits, such as the collection of
historical instruments, models of
research vessels, specimens of marine
animals and plants, etc.

It also houses a lecture hall (5) in
which formal lectures for the public are
regularly scheduled during the sum-
mer months.

6. The Hydrosphere

One of the main results of the World
Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE)
was the series of hydrographic sections
of the WOCE Hydrographic Pro-
gramme (WHP). These were prepared
in the uniform style of the 1960
Fuglister IGY atlas of the Atlantic, the

Scorpio sections, the Warren and Toole
sections of the Indian Ocean, and the
Atlantic sections by McCartney.

At the end of WHP there were 30 mod-
ern sections in this color-printed format,
each section comprising seven panels
about 2 feet by 3 feet. They are mounted
in seven superposed horizontal rings
within a cylindrical wall 30 feet in diam-
eter and 12 feet high. It is an impressive
and informative exhibit, rich in detail. It
gives a good, accurate, and positive pic-
ture of what we do at WHOI.

The exhibit is presented inside a spe-
cial building "The Hydrosphere,"
something like the display of the celes-
tial sphere in a planetarium or the fish
world in the Boston Aquarium.

You are suspended inside the building.
If you look up or down you will see
that inside the hemispherical ceiling

and floor there are maps of submarine
topography. The lines of the sections
are clearly marked on these maps.

The color-printed sections are mounted
on the inside of the cylindrical walls.

117

Access to the display is made possible
by fairly narrow balconies. However, it
is more exciting for visitors to be
moved about by a carousel-like ring of
baskets (made to resemble CTD
rosettes that measure conductivity,
temperature, and depth and take water
samples) that are suspended from trol-
leys on a circular track around the ceil-
ing. Winches raise or lower the baskets
so that the various circles of panels can
be viewed closely. The winch can be
controlled by the lecturer for formal
presentations to groups, or can be run
personally by the individual rider who
is exploring the exhibit by himself with
aid of an explanatory audio set.

There are various dramatic visual
effects such as controllable spotlight-

ing. Some sense of the vertical distrib-
ution of temperature in the ocean is
imparted by strong thermal stratifica-
tion of the temperature of the air with-
in the building, so that one runs
through a strong temperature change
as the rosette ascends and descends.

7. The Wave

The Wave houses several exhibits that
illustrate various features of the ocean

in motion. Among these is a working
Air Sea Climate Model that illus-
trates the complex interactions of the
atmosphere and ocean as they absorb
and reflect radiation energy from the
sun, then are set in motion by buoyancy

forces. The motions of air and ocean
are the winds and currents that trans-
port the heat to other geographical
locations, from which the energy is all
dispersed to space again by infrared
radiation. These processes are all simu-
lated by the working model using real
fluids. The physical principles are
described and explained. Another
model shows the Gulf Stream, how it
gathers up waters flowing around the
subtropical gyre of the mid-ocean, how
it intensifies and channels the warm
waters back towards the north, and
how it fans out to modify the climate
of Europe. This model also operates
using real fluids. It illustrates the
process of "ventilation."

The Deep Ocean model shows how
deep waters are formed by sinking in
polar regions, and by overflows from
adjacent seas such as the Norwegian
Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. These
waters have different colors in the
model, and one can see how they make
up different mixtures in each of the
deep sea basins.

118

El Nino is an exhibit that describes
the interannual fluctuations of tem-
perature that occur in the equatorial
Pacific Ocean. The idea of data assim-
ilating dynamic modelling and pre-
diction of El Nino is illustrated with
an actual computer.

There are also some smaller exhibits
that illustrate the physical ideas behind
Coriolis Force, the reason for two
simultaneous high waters of the semi-
diurnal tide, ideas about sea ice, etc.

The building is a long rectangle in
plan. It has a low profile. The south
wall is a double thickness of heavy
plate glass, extending the full length of
the building. In the space between the
two sheets of glass are two immiscible
fluids of different density and color, in
which a giant internal wave is main-
tained in motion.

8. Operations Center

Built in the form of a rather broad
lighthouse, sheathed with a dark blue-
green glass exterior, this is an exhibit
aimed at communicating the magni-
tude of past and ongoing efforts to
gather data about the ocean. Upon

entering, visitors find themselves
enveloped in a dim blue-green light on
all sides, filtering through the outside
walls, much as though they are stand-
ing at the bottom of a shallow sea. The
light is brighter and yellower near the

top. In the center of the tower is a
nighttime globe of the world 15 feet in
diameter. Images can be projected onto
the translucent surface of the globe
from a computer-controlled laser gun
inside the globe to depict patterns of
geographical distribution of stations,
moorings, float tracks, XBT lines, etc.
drawn from a complete and exhaus-
tive data file of all historical data sets.
In a sense this globe simulates the
"card index" of a world-class library; it
lists and locates both in space and time
all the observational material that
oceanographers have to work with.
The display can be manipulated by the
tour guide, or lecturer, to illustrate the
entire history of scientific oceanic
exploration over the past century and
a half. In this sense it is something like
a planetarium (seen in this case from
the outside rather than the inside of
the globe): one views the evolving con-
stellations of data records as patterns

119

of bright-colored dots over the surface
of the ocean. The lecture begins in 1860
with the surface observations begun by
Maury. We see how the data follow the
shipping lanes up until our own time.
Then the lecture turns to deep-sea
hydrographic measurements, begin-
ning with the historic cruise of HMS
Challenger, and shows the routes of all
the succeeding cruises over the world
as the years roll by.

Next the lecturer shows, in more recent
years, how moorings have proliferated
over the oceans, and the tracks of neu-
trally buoyant floats, whose depths are
coded by color.

Next a composite cinematic view of
satellite thermometric data is projected
upon the globe.

Finally the actual tides over the whole
globe are predicted using the Schwi-
derski model. The present daily
progress of the tide is displayed on the
sphere so that the viewer can find the
height of the tide at any point in the
world during the day.

Ascending to the top of the tower visi-
tors enter the actual Operations Center.
This room occupies what would ordi-
narily be the lantern of a lighthouse.
Outside it, there is a surrounding broad,
railed platform with splendid views of
the Hole, the Elizabeth Islands, the
Vineyard, and the ocean beyond.

The Operations Center is in touch with
all programs of oceanographic observa-
tion as they are occurring in real time.
There is a large map that locates the
position of all research vessels, and indi-
cates the nature of the measurements
they are engaged in making. It is updat-
ed daily by electronic mail. It also shows
the status of major moored buoy arrays,
such as the Tropical Ocean-Global
Atmosphere network in the equatorial
Pacific. When a tsunami alert occurs, the
pertinent epicenter and times of arrival
of the tsunami are plotted on this chart.
The general effect emphasizes the impor-
tance of collecting data from the ocean,
and the magnitude of the effort required
to do so. <

Nantucket
Dear Aunt Anne ,

We have arrived here at last, and the house seems to have survived the winter,
so we are practically already settled in with the kids.

The ferry boat was delayed for two hours and we had some time to spare in
Woods Hole. You would be amazed by the changes there.

The Oceanographic Institution has built a wonderful new exhibition center
that gives a splendid overall view of its activities. There are so many different
exhibits that 1 haven t the time to tell you about the Hydrosphere or the Ocean
Climate buildings . They have moored one of their retired research vessels at the
little dock behind where the old drug store used to be; it is open to visitors and it is
arranged to show how different equipment is used. I rather liked the wet lab with

120

its ararys of reversing thermometers, the winches, various buoys and instruments
cluttering the deck, and the kids loved the pilothouse.

To my mind the best part of the exhibit is near the head of Little Harbor the
so-called Operations Center. It is a four-story structure sheathed entirely in
translucent green and blue glass , shaded more lightly at the top than at the bot-
tom. When you enter, you get the impression of being at the bottom of the sea,
with the sunlight filtering down from above. It is a little eerie and cool. Nested
inside there is a second building with spiraling floors with various exhibits , of
which more later. At the top one emerges upon a large open roof with a railing
around it, like the platform about the lantern of a great lighthouse, and splendid
views of the Hole, the Elizabeth Islands extending down the Sound, and the
Vineyard.

In the center of the roof in the place of what would ordinarily be the lantern is
a large hall that contains the Operations Center. I can best describe it as the brain
of the Institution. The dominant feature is a great map of the world on which the
locations of all the world's research vessels are marked by lights , and it is kept up-
to-date by electronic mail, and the nature of the scientific work that they are doing
is cleverly indicated. You can also see at a glance where major experiments are
being conducted. I was impressed to see the extent of ship-borne research activity
being carried out around Japan. Also 1 was unaware of such enterprises as the
arrays of moorings set out along the Pacific equator. They have hundreds of free-
floating instrument packages in the ocean too. The complexity of the tracks that
they follow is intriguing, and I wonder that the scientists can make any sense of
them. One cannot come away from this exhibit without being impressed by the
global nature of ocean research that these people are attempting to conduct.

There is a great deal else to see, and it was wonderful for keeping the children
occupied during our brief layover. Jimmy was thrilled by The Abyss a simula-
tion of a deep sea dive down to the Mid-Ocean Ridge to see a thermal vent. Quite
spooky with the black smoke and other-worldly (plastic, I think) animals.

Jimmy says he wants to be an oceanographer. Joyce , all eight years of her, is
now going to become a maritime lawyer.

When you come to visit us this summer, be sure to allow enough time to have
a look for yourself. It is very much worth arriving in Woods Hole well ahead of
the departure time of the ferry.

Your loving nephew,

121

We traveled

during a

moonless

night with

distant wild

animals

roaring.

Roberto Frassetto

Istituto per lo Studio della Dinamica delle Grandi Masse

(Venice, Italy)

* *

Oceanography from a Camel. A magnificent disaster and a triumph for
superstition: It was 1977. Henry wanted to record over a sufficiently

long term the temperature variation in the Somali upwelling area. There

was no oceanographic ship available.

As an Italian, assumed to be a
friend of the Somali people and their
authorities, I was to take Henry's tem-
perature recording instruments, cali-
brated for the purpose, carry them
1,000 kilometers north of Mogadiscio
(we did not know how) to a beach near
Bender Beila, a small, superstitious vil-
lage of African huts.

The people ate fish and a few
gazelles, traded with India on small
handmade, wooden sailboats that were
constructed on the beach without a nail
or screw, rather sort of sewn together.
Through the Italian ambassador in
Mogadiscio I got the Somali Police
Department's one-engine Cessna plane
to take me, a diver, and a minimum of
essential equipment, to a stony landing
strip along a long, moonlike coastal

area. We stopped midway to get fuel from barrels that had been rolled

over sand, which raised great concern for us travelers and perhaps also

for the plane's engine.

We arrived at the end of

a day, 30 kilometers from

the coast and from Bender

Beila. Luckily, we found a

camel and his desert-
dwelling owner willing to

transport our instruments

all the way to the sea, pro-
vided we would run along

after the camel at the

camel's pace! We traveled

during a moonless night

The lighthouse: filling the oil
lamp for the night

Finding the first anchor at Bender Beila

with distant wild animals roaring.

We were expected at the village and given rest in the only empty
stone building, which served, with an old oil lamp, as a lighthouse for
the village. This is the reason we fortunately found, in the following
days, several shipwrecks on the beach, from which we cut off all the
material we needed for mooring our instruments.

122

Ready to conquer the breaking waves

In a week we put

together a reasonable

anchoring system and

moored the instru-
ments offshore in a

well-fixed position

with the help of two

"sambuca" sailboats,

eight men rowing

through the breaking

waves to get off to sea.
With great relief

we succeeded in returning to Mogadiscio and Italy after having instructed

the telegraph man of Bender Beila to take wind, air temperature, and pres-
sure measurements regularly from his
so-called station, with our instruments.
Six months later we returned. This
time Henry sent with us his freshly
graduated Ph.D. Ants Leetmaa, who
could not fit in the small plane but,
being a new, young professor, could
endure a three-day trip in a bumpy
Land Rover. He made it, and we
began searching for our instruments
in the sea, exploring the bottom for
days in a shark-infested area with a
dense biological chain. No success.

Noticing our desperation, the local
wise men took pity on us and said,
"Perhaps you should look in the
desert."

The people of the village had

feared that those instruments on the bottom of their sea would bring

evil and would make trouble for fishermen and commercial activities.

To make matters worse, the instruments were painted black, so they had

to be destroyed and

thrown far away in

the desert.

It was the end of

our adventure, from a

camel to a magnificent

disaster. We had not

considered the most

important factor:

superstition.

A few years later

the same measure-
ments were made

from ships and Sailing in the sambuca to the mooring point. The

proper oceanographic , chief scientist carries the umbrella, a symbol of
buoys. * power, given him by the village chief.

Dropping the anchor

It was

the end

of our

adventure,

from a

camel to a

magnificent

disaster.

123

It was a
privilege

to be
in on the
workings

of his
original

mind.

* Gdbe Csanady Continued from page 1 1 5 *

We never talked "shop" on social occasions, but Hank called on the
phone occasionally to discuss what he called one of his "wild ideas." It
was a privilege to be in on the workings of his original mind. The great-
est compliment I ever had was when Tom Spence remarked that I had
"the Stommel view of the world." At my farewell party at WHOI, Hank
presented me with the medal of the Maria Theresa Shoals Society.
Apparently, Hank and I were the only members.

Last summer we were fortunate to have Hank and Chickie visit us
at our cottage on Lake Huron. We did not know it would be our
farewell to Hank. We had our usual lively chats, sitting on the deck,
watching the waves, Hank smoking his cigar. We saw him to the airport
bus in Kitchener, and waved good-bye to a wonderful friend. *

Oleg Mamaev

Moscow State University

Editor's note: This contribution is excerpted from a longer biographical
note that O.I. Mamaev wrote about Henry Stommel. It was translated for
this volume by Kirill Pankratov.

//T t seems that he will never stop doing oceanography," answered
JL WHOI Oceanographer Terrence Joyce, when I asked him about
Stommel during his 1989 visit to Moscow University. This phrase was
literally imprinted on my memory, and now has surfaced again. "Great
Euler stopped computing" I read somewhere long ago, "stopped com-
puting at the moment of his death." Great Stommel stopped doing
oceanography but will remain in oceanography forever.

Stommel was a person who helped other people to live. Working in
oceanography (though quite weakly), I always remembered that there
is somewhere on Earth a man whose very existence gives one strength
and confidence. I felt this particularly when reading his book The Gulf
Stream. I was astonished by its simplicity and clarity, and it seemed to
me that I could write something like this. And although it was not so, I
could not, of course, write like that the book did not repel (as unjusti-
fiably complicated books sometimes do) but attracted, seemingly say-
ing, "Do not be afraid! You too can contribute." His works were always
like a hand of help and support.

: j j

Having arrived at the UNESCO oceanographic service in Paris at
the end of 1969 I learned that Henry Stommel was also in Paris as an
invited lecturer at the physical oceanography laboratory of the
National Museum of Natural History. I wrote to him, and he answered
instantly with his letter of December 18: "I was glad to receive your let-
ter of December 16 and hope to see you soon. Tomorrow I will go to
Switzerland, where I will stay until January 3. 1 will try to visit you at
UNESCO immediately after my return."

124

And he did he came to my office, took off his old beige mackin-
tosh, and, as if we had never parted, said, "Look, 1962 was not so long
ago!" (1962 was the year we first met in Moscow.) I do not recall all the
details of this meeting but he requested that I visit him at the laboratory
of physical oceanography, and I gladly accepted.

When I visited, we met with the head of the laboratory, Henri
Lacombe and his colleague Paul Tchernia, and after some general,
polite conversation Stommel said: "Now we'll go. I will give a lecture to
Mamaev!" I was embarrassed: Stommel himself will give a lecture, just
for me alone? And we went to his office, and he began a "lecture" as he
put it. He did not write complicated things on the blackboard, which I
would not understand, but instead showed me "simple" oceanographic
sections, observational results, records of Webb's vertical floats, and
other materials the results of the studies of a deep convection in the
Gulf of Lyon when a winter mistral cools surface waters, making them
sink spontaneously to great depths. These were the results of the
MEDOC project in which Stommel participated. Stommel gave me a
lecture that I will remember for life this was one of our few meetings,
and he talked with me as an equal, like an old friend could I forget
that? Did he want to enlighten me or check some of his conclusions
with me? Probably both, because contacts with his colleagues satisfied
his internal need as a scientist, regardless of whether his colleague was
a student or a well-known specialist. The ocean interested him as a
whole and a "simple" oceanographic section was as dear to him as a
new idea.

*J < >

Henry Stommel was ailing for a long time with cancer. As I remem-
ber, I first learned about it from Joseph Reid in 1982 during a short visit
to Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. I came to see him
during a break in the session. Reid worked far away from the main
Institution buildings, in a small wooden house on a hill where there
was a wide path from the road among dwarf pine bushes, where many
striped squirrels ran away from me. Joe told me about Stommel's ill-
ness, and it was strange to see him, with the words "God, grant him
health," cross himself as Russians do (I haven't seen anybody abroad
crossing oneself when not in a church), and I felt uneasy.

Stommel bore his illness stoically because of his spiritual and moral
strength; he talked about it in a matter-of-fact manner. In a short letter
he wrote: "Dear Oleg, thank you for your Christmas card and good
wishes. Three weeks ago I had an operation for cancer, but I am already
at home and feel well. My best wishes to you and your wife. Henry.'

These words were written on a small card with the picture of his
home in Falmouth, an old Quaker wooden cottage, almost 200 years
old. (There is no date on this card, and postal stamps of Buzzards
Bay, Massachusetts, and Moscow are unreadable. I think it was 1987,
or maybe 1988?)

* * *

Henry Stommel was awarded honorary degrees by several universi-
ties and many prizes, but he was indifferent to all these decorations. In

The ocean

interested

him as a

whole and a

"simple"

oceanographic

section was

as dear

to him as a

new idea.

125

Hank's

enthusiasm,

curiosity, and

Ins deep love

of Mother
Nature were
always the
same..

1976 he was elected a foreign member of the USSR Academy of
Sciences; in those years this was a rare occasion, suggesting that he was
above contemporary events and fashions.

Once Ludwig Boltzman said about Kirchoff: "In Kirchoff's life there
was nothing extraordinary, characteristic to his genius. ...Great events
happened exclusively in his head." Those words are applicable to the
great personality of Henry Stommel, who has left us now forever. *

Rui Xin Huang
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

A Trip to the MBL Library with Hank: It was a quiet winter day,
January 9, 1992. 1 was busy working on the generalized
Goldsbrough solution in my office. Hank came in twice. We were puz-
zled by the oscillations existing in a purely haline circulation.

Suddenly, Hank and I remembered an article in Scientific American
published some years ago about diffusive waves. Hank immediately
decided to go to the MBL Library to find the article. "I can think about
the salt oscillator when I stay in the hospital," he said. On inspiration, I
thought maybe it would be fun to go with him, so off we went in his car.

Just as we passed Fenno House and headed for the main road,
Hank said, "Could you show me where those old trees are you told me
about a few months ago, which are dying?" Well, Hank turned the car
around and we went along Oyster Pond Road to a swamp beside the
road. Hank and I went down to the swamp along a tiny path. As we
soon found out, there are many big trees in the small swamp, Atlantic
white cedars. They are not so old after all. I was rather embarrassed, for
I thought they were very old and valuable. Hank was quite cheerful
saying, "That is good. Since I have seen them, I don't have to worry
about them when I go to the hospital."

In the library, it took us a few minutes to find two articles about dif-
fusive waves. Hank was very pleased and told jokes and funny stories
all the way back to our office.

That was one of the last few days before he went to the hospital,
and he was busy talking to several people about some hot topics he had
been working on. Hank's enthusiasm, curiosity, and his deep love of
Mother Nature were always the same, even before he took the last jour-
ney to the hospital. *t

126

The Viper's Jaws

by Starbuck

The narrators of those sentimental nature documentaries are fond of reas-
suring us that the field mouse in the viper's jaws feels no pain that it is
in a state of shock. But I have seen men die. The poet W.B. Yeats, in his
poignant "Sailing to Byzantium," portrays the death of old men more truly:
how the soul, sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal, knows not what
it is.

The operation is over. The nurses tend you with gentle hands. The surgeon
describes what he has found, but his moist, compassionate eyes tell you that
there are limits to his skill. Your old friend, the family physician, reassures you
that you will not suffer pain and sadly averts his face. Bewildered family
members gingerly enter the sterile room, awkwardly attempt to express their
love and hastily depart, with sorrow and relief, to the sun and fresh air in the
parking lot. And you are left to face the unknown terror of the coming night
alone.

As Mark Twain grew older, and others in his generation began to pass
away, he asserted that though others died, perhaps in his case there might be
an exception. An active mind stays young, though chained to a dying animal
body. We have been given the precious gift of life, a chance to contemplate a
surpassingly beautiful universe, minds in which to cultivate some measure of
wisdom and the companionship of other creatures no less mortal than we.

If in the midst of an often crass and strident society, we have learned to
love this world, if we have managed to control our avarice and learned to give
rather than to take, and above all to give ourselves to fellow human beings,
then we may discover how, with grace, to give ourselves to death. *

The Enterprise
July 3, 1985

127

Henry
Stommel

is the

complete

scientist,

naturalist,

and sailor,

with an eye

to every

interesting

problem and

observation.

Harmon Craig

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

28 August 1988

President's Committee on the
National Medal of Science
National Science Foundation
Washington, DC 20550

Gentlemen:

I am writing to second the nomination of Henry Stommel for the
National Medal of Science. Although nominations like this one generally
deal in hyperbole, there is no way that one could overexaggerate the
role that this amazing scientist has played in the development of
dynamical oceanography, to say nothing of meteorology, in which he
has also had a strong hand. Henry Stommel is the complete scientist,
naturalist, and sailor, with an eye to every interesting problem and
observation that comes along. One of the best examples of this wide-
ranging perception of new and interesting developments has been his
interest in welding together the tracer geochemistry people and the
physical oceanographers for a total look at oceanic circulation and mix-
ing. One result of Henry Stommel's interest in this area was the
GEOSECS (Geochemical Ocean Sections Study) Program, which was
overwhelmingly considered the best of the NSF-sponsored IDOE
(International Decade of Ocean Exploration) programs, and is the
model for the present WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment)
initiative, which will expand on and continue the GEOSECS studies
during the next decade.

One very instructive aspect of Stommel's interactions with areas
such as the tracer studies has been his continued interest in the mean-
ing of these data. Thus while the majority of physical oceanographers
continue to ignore the discovery of the large zonally spreading plumes
of helium-3 in the Pacific (or, in some cases, to wish that they would
disappear!), Stommel was totally delighted that they did not fit into his
earlier model of geostrophic circulation of the deep and bottom water.

Indeed, he has written a provocative and inspiring paper actually
proposing that the deep hydrothermal vents on the East Pacific Rise
may actually drive the deep circulation of the Pacific. This ability to cou-
ple new observations and a deep appreciation of the possible physical
effects of such phenomena are Stommel's trademark. While the plume
paper is by no means his magnum opus, it stands out to me in the sense
that one could read this paper without knowing the author, and imme-
diately identify it as a Stommel paper. "By his claw the lion" is as
applicable to Henry Stommel as it was to the original scientific carni-
vore who feasted on natural phenomena!

Stommel once explained in his typical half-apologetic way that he is
like a circus billboard painter, who comes to town before the big perfor-
mance, posts all the signs and gets everyone's attention on the show,
and then when the circus arrives, he has quietly and peacefully moved

128

on to the next town, and the next carnival. It is literally true that there
are one-, two-, and three-ring performances going on all over the world
that have been ushered in by Stommel's inspiring leadership. Many of
these are listed in the narrative statement describing his work, and do
not need further amplification here. What should be emphasized is the
strongly personal nature of his leadership in oceanography, and his
function as a centripetal and seminal role in holding together such a
diverse and wide-ranging field, in both the exploration and theoretical
development of the subject.

It is rare that one can find a major field of science so dominated by a
single person and by those who have worked with him at sea and
ashore. I am particularly struck with the way Stommel blends expedi-
tion work at sea with the insight and perceptiveness that mark his work
in theoretical developments and in the laboratory (e.g., the early rotat-
ing dishpan experiments, a typical Stommelian tour de force). It is not
often given to individual scientists to be almost single-handedly the cre-
ator, developer, and
expositor of a major
field of science, and it
is important that we
recognize the extraor-
dinary contributions
that such innovators
have made.

Henry Stommel
has been the "Cook
and the Captain bold,
and the Mate of the
Nancy Brig" in this
field, and the coupling
of the "Captain" and
the "Cook" in this
citation is as apt as it
is felicitous and
appropriate.
Oceanography has
been fortunate among
the sciences to have
Stommel (who might
have been a cloud

physicist, or even a paleobotanist, for example) as the leader who, in the
post-war period, more than any other person, established the entire
field as a major scientific field of substance, importance, and, in addi-
tion, just generally an endeavor of good scholarship, good fun, and
good fellowship, as exemplified in all cases by Henry Stommel himself.
The National Medal of Science could not be awarded to a worthier sci-
entist, or to one who has contributed more at all levels and in every area
within a major field of scholarship.

Sincerely,

Harmon Craig

Professor of Geochemistry

Henry Stommel

receives the National

Medal of Science from

President George Bush.

129

Sixtieth

On September 28, 1980, friends and colleagues from around the world gathered at the Nimrod Club in

Falmouth, Massachusetts, to celebrate Henry Stommel's 60th birthday. The photo above shows Hank

arriving at the Nimrod. Matt Stommel is in the doorway, and Chickie Stommel is at right.

Around the birthday table, from left, are Koji Hidaka, representing his Japanese colleagues, Hank, Marjory

Wunsch, Carl Wunsch, Jule Charney, and Chickie Stommel. Countries represented included the US,
Canada, England, France, Germany, Sweden, and Australia. Dennis Moore brought the leis from Hawaii.

130

Henry Melson Stommel

September 27, 1920-January 17, 1992

B.S. Yale University, 1942
M.A. (Honorary), Harvard University, 1961
Ph.D. (Honorary), Goteborg Universitet, 1964
Ph.D. (Honorary), Yale University, 1970
Ph.D. (Honorary), University of Chicago, 1970

Instructor in Mathematics and Astronomy, 1942 to 1944, Yale University
Research Associate, 1944 to 1960; Physical Oceanographer

(non-resident), 1960 to 1978; Senior Scientist, 1978 to 1992,

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Professor of Oceanography, 1960 to 1963, Harvard University
Guest Lecturer, 1969 to 1970, Laboratoire d'Oceanographie Physique

du Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France
Professor of Oceanography, 1963 to 1978, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Affiliations and Awards

Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi

Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1959

Member, National Academy of Sciences, 1961

Sverdrup Medalist, American Meteorological Society, 1964

Albatross Award, American Miscellaneous Society, 1966

Fellow, American Geophysical Union, 1972

Henry Bryant Bigelow Medal, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 1974

Foreign Member, Soviet Academy of Sciences, 1976

Maurice Ewing Award, American Geophysical Union, 1977

Rosenstiel Award, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1978

Alexander Agassiz Medal, National Academy of Sciences, 1979

Huntsman Award, Bedford Institute of Oceanography, 1980

Bowie Award, American Geophysical Union, 1982

Grand Prix d'Oceanographie de Monaco, 1982

Membre d'Honneur, Societe de Geographic, Paris, 1983

Crafoord Prize, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1983

Foreign Member, The Royal Society, London, 1983

Foreign Associate, Academic des Sciences de Paris, 1984

Albert Defant Medal, German Meteorological Society, 1986

National Medal of Science (USA), 1989

Research Interests:

General circulation of the ocean, Gulf Stream, Kuroshio, eddy dynamics, equatorial
currents, deep-water convection, planetary flow patterns, historical data, climate,
Indian Ocean and the monsoons

Author or co-author of 138 scientific papers, 12 books, 40 nonrefereed publications, and 24
technical reports and miscellaneous publications >

131

A fund
honoring the memory of

Henry Melson Stommel

has been established

to endow
the atlas collection

of the
MBL/WHOI Library.

Maps were one of Hank Stommel's

abiding fascinations. He often sought out

cartographers on foreign visits to add to

his knowledge and his collection of maps.

His interest in cartography and his

appreciation of history came together in

his 1984 book, Lost Islands, which details

the appearance, disappearance, and

reappearance of nonexistent islands

on various maps.

Contributions to this endowment fund
may be addressed to:

The Development Office

Fenno House

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole, MA 02543

Henry Stommel

Oce auo gvMplver

MBL/WHOI
Library

In AAemoriam

This bookplate, featuring an image

Henry Stommel often used on his own

printing press, will be placed in volumes

purchased with the endowment fund.

The Starbuck
Essays of

Henry Stommel

*

As the contributions to this volume attest,
Hank Stommel was a wonderful human

being as well as a major contributor to
oceanography. George Veronis wrote that
he "understood the human condition and

the value of humor in coping with life."

Using the pen name Starbuck, Hank

wrote more than 70 essays for the

Falmouth, Massachusetts, newspaper

The Enterprise, mainly in the mid 1980s.

Collected in this volume, published by

Stommel's friends and colleagues, they are

thoughtful considerations of Falmouth

and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institu-

tion events and personalities and unique

observations on life from an unusually

observant man.

Proceeds of the volume's sale will augment the

Henry Melson Stommel Fund
established to endow the atlas collection of the

MBL/WHOI Library.
To order, complete and send the coupon below.

W

Please address orders to:

The Research Librarian

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Woods Hole, MA 02543

(508-457-2000, ext. 2865)

Please send me copies of The Starbuck

Essays of Henry Stommel @ $15 each plus
$2 postage and handling per copy.

Payment method: Q MC Q Visa
Q Check enclosed (payable to WHOI)

Name

Address

Telephone

Card Number

Expiration Date

Cardholder's name

132

M ,?k '5H .l LIBRARY

WH lfl3G Y

o

Henry Stommel in his office in 1979.

PURIEUSE

Henry Stommel designed this logo for INDEX, a late-1970s

program that focused on the monsoonal currents of the

northwestern Indian Ocean. The name La Curieuse was

drawn from a charter vessel Stommel and colleagues used

for a time out of the Seychelles. (The real La Curieuse was

said to be marginally more suited for oceanographic

research than the one depicted on the logo.)