GeoSpectrum

George G. Shor, Jr. (1923-2009) passed away on July 3, 2009 at his home in La Jolla, California. Shor was professor emeritus of geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. He began his career at Scripps in 1953 as an assistant research geophysicist. Shore continued working within the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps until his retirement in 1991.

Dr. Shor was world renowned for his work in developing the nation’s fleet of research ships and the creation of the California Sea Grant program. To learn more about his life and his important contributions to the sciences, please visit the Scripps News page.

J. Lamar Worzel, Physicist who Set Man’s Ear to Oceans

A wizardly improviser who guided sub warfare and charting of depths

J. Lamar Worzel, a pioneering geophysicist and engineer who helped shape human understanding of how sound travels through the oceans and who cofounded Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, died Dec. 26. He was 89. He was struck suddenly by a heart attack at his home in Wilmington, N.C., said his son, Howard Worzel, who announced his death.

A frequent sailor in submarines and ships, Worzel improvised complex new measuring instruments out of spare parts and household objects in the 1930s, a time when scientists had only primitive concepts of deep marine seabeds, currents and acoustics. He and colleagues investigated the makeup of sediments in the Atlantic by exploding homemade bombs in the depths and reading the echoes. Their discoveries helped World War II submarines elude enemies, guided Cold War sub detection, and provided tools for charting earth’s crust and climate.

It was Worzel’s longtime boss at Lamont-Doherty, William Maurice Ewing, whose seminal ideas drove early systematic mapping of the world’s oceans in the 20^th century. But it was Worzel’s energy and ingenuity that brought many ventures to fruition, said Dennis Hayes, a Lamont oceanographer who worked under both men.

John Lamar Worzel was born on Feb. 21, 1919, in Staten Island, N.Y., where his father was a real-estate lawyer. Ignoring his given name, his family called him “Lamar,” and scientists called him “Joe”—the latter, after he and fellow physics students at Lehigh University adopted a 1937 pop song that went, “What do you know Joe? We don’t know nothing.”  Ewing, then a professor at Lehigh, took a small gang of undergrads to sea, and Worzel soon became a star.

Working first out of Massachusetts’ Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Worzel and others built instruments that did not yet exist: a camera for snapping photos thousands of feet below the surface, with a coffee-can lid for a flash reflector and a thick diner-style drinking glass for casing; a seismograph that employed a modified Hamilton railroad watch; an oscillograph pushed by a motor from a toy electric train. In order to detonate explosions under deep-sea pressures up to 8,000 pounds per square inch—presumed impossible by experts–Worzel carefully packed explosives into inner tubes, then figured out how make them go off by adapting paper caps from toy cowboy revolvers. “We never allowed ourselves to think that anything we decided to do was impossible,” he wrote in an unpublished autobiography, completed in 2001.

On the brink of World War II, the Navy funded their work, and Worzel and Ewing quickly made fundamental discoveries. One was the existence of “shadow zones”—underwater regions defined by specific combinations of temperature and pressure, in which sounds from the surface—say, a ship’s sonar—refused to travel. With this information, Worzel coauthored a manual that enabled many a World War II sub commander to hide from deadly enemy ships above. Conversely, they identified the “deep sound channel”– a narrow horizontal zone about 3,000 feet down that transmits low-frequency sounds thousands of miles with fantastic clarity, like a natural telephone line. They showed they could blow up a few pounds of TNT off South America, and pinpoint the source on the deep channel from as far off as West Africa. This discovery became the basis of the Navy’s vast Cold War SOFAR (sound fixing and ranging) program and its successors—secret weapons that girded the world with underwater listening devices to identify and track Soviet subs by their engine noise. After the nuclear-powered sub USS Thresher mysteriously disappeared in 1963, an acoustic investigation marshaled in large part by Worzel helped locate the remains, 8,400 feet down off New England. For this, he received a Navy Meritorious Public Service Citation.

In 1948, Ewing and a handful of his grad students including Worzel moved to Columbia University and founded Lamont Geological Observatory (later renamed Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory). Then Columbia president Dwight Eisenhower lured them by agreeing to let them use a Hudson riverfront estate in Palisades, N.Y., newly donated by the Lamont family. Ewing became director and Worzel, deputy. Worzel and his wife lived on the expansive grounds and eventually raised four children there. Frequently covered head to foot in grease from working on machinery, he was occasionally mistaken by visitors as one of the maintenance staff.

Starting in the early 1950s, Worzel arranged to obtain a series of research vessels—the first, a modest schooner powered partly by sail–that crisscrossed the oceans on a wide variety of missions. These made Lamont a global powerhouse in marine research. Worzel perfected a system to efficiently remove cores of sediment from depths of over 12,000 feet, and the institution assembled the world’s largest collection of such samples. He initiated the use of satellite navigation in research ships. One of his most important advances was his design of a system that could take precise measurements of earth’s gravity field from surface vessels; because constant rolling and pitching on ships upset readings of previous instruments, up to now it had been possible to take the scientifically vital readings only in the still depths inhabited by subs. Worzel and his colleagues helped site the Hudson River’s Tappan Zee Bridge by mapping the riverbed’s structure with seismic signals.

Worzel’s unstoppable drive and uncanny mechanical knack sometimes infuriated others. One night at Woods Hole, about to depart for sea lacking some basic hand tools, he broke down the door of a colleague’s workshop with a fire axe, and helped himself. More than once, he walked up to a technician who had been trying for days to fix a piece of broken equipment, made the gadget work in a few minutes, then walked away. “He got to be known as a cocky, and sometimes grumpy character,” said Hayes. “But that was just a surface effect he liked to present. He was very generous–a really good guy, and an outstanding scientist.”

In the late 1960s, violent student protests against the Vietnam War forced many universities, including Columbia, to halt secret military work. Worzel felt that “as citizens of our country, if we had skills that were of use … it was our duty to make them available,” so he and colleagues founded a nonprofit corporation, the Palisades Geophysical Institute, which continued classified Navy work outside of Lamont. Simultaneously, he kept his academic posts. Worzel served as the corporation’s president over three decades.

In 1972, Worzel and Ewing left Columbia together, for the University of Texas, Austin. When Ewing died two years later, Worzel succeeded him as director of the university’s Institute of Geophysics. He retired in 1979.

Although much of Worzel’s work originated with the military, he and others pursued it for many peaceable uses. Pictures from the early deepwater cameras were the first to overturn the notion that ocean abysses were lifeless. Thousands of gravity measurements conveniently taken from surface ships helped chart the deep crustal structure of the earth, including features like continental margins. These measurements eventually helped prove the overarching modern theory of plate tectonics that control the surface of the earth—which Worzel for a time pooh-poohed, until confronted with growing evidence compiled in part using his own techniques. Much of the Navy’s surveillance technology was declassified in the 1990s; acoustic techniques have since been used to study ocean biology, underwater earthquakes and volcanoes, and to find archeological artifacts. Since sound travels faster or slower in water depending on its temperature, techniques pioneered by Worzel and his coworkers have also proved key in studying the oceans’ interaction with climate.

In 1967, Worzel and his Lamont friend Robert Gerard coauthored a paper in the journal Science proposing a green energy scheme with a distinctly 21^st-century outlook. They proposed that tropical nations use windmills to pump chilly water from the ocean deeps into giant containers along shore. Brushed by warm, humid breezes, the containers would act like iced-tea glasses on a summer day, condensing copious fresh water on their surfaces, for drinking and farming. The nutrient-rich ocean water would be recycled to feed aquaculture lagoons.

In 2002 the Palisades Geophysical Institute decided to disband, when Worzel and others felt its basic research was being applied too directly to weaponry. Its carefully husbanded surpluses, built up over the years, were used to endow at least $10 million in professorships and grants for young geoscientists at Columbia, Woods Hole, the universities of Texas and Memphis, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Worzel retired to Wilmington, N.C., but was active to his last moments, said Howard Worzel; among other things, he was studying string theory. In addition to Howard, a retired photographic scientist in Phoenix, Ariz., Worzel is survived by his wife of 67 years, the former Dorothy Crary; daughter Sandra Lee Browne, a business owner in Toronto; son Richard Worzel, a bestselling author and futurist in Toronto; son William, who runs a drug-testing lab in Ann Arbor, Mich.; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Courtesy of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Dr. John S. Shelton, recipient of the 1993 AGI Outstanding Contribution to the Public Understanding of the Geosciences Award, passed away on July 24, 2008. A geologist and a pilot, Shelton was well respected for his ability to capture earth science on film. As an educator, Shelton was passionate about teaching his students. In addition to the AGI Award, he also received the National Association of Geoscience Teachers “Neil Miner Award” for “exceptional contributions to the stimulation of interest in the earth sciences.” The first public exhibit of 33 of his large-format photographs, “Aerial Portraits of the American West”, is now on display at the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park, CA.

Longtime supporter and Past President of AGI, Dr. Edward C. Roy, Jr., passed away November 9, 2007.

Dr. Roy received both his B.S. in 1961 and Ph.D. in 1964 in paleontology and sedimentary geology from The Ohio State University. After receiving his degrees, he worked at Shell Oil until 1966 when he became Assistant Professor of Geology at Trinity University. He achieved rank of Professor in 1977. Roy also served Trinity as Dean of the Division of Sciences, Mathematics, and Engineering, and as Vice President for Academic Affairs. In 1999 Roy became the Gertrude and Walter Pyron Distinguished Professor of Geology. At the time of his death, he was Professor of Geology Emeritus and was working part time in the Department of Education.

Dr. Roy served AGI as president in 1997, was a trustee for the AGI Foundation, and was awarded the Ian Campbell Medal and the Heroy Distinguished Service Award in 2003 by the Institute.

In addition to his involvement in AGI, Dr. Roy was active in a large number of science and professional organizations including the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Geological Society of America, and SEPM.

Dr. Roy spent a large part of his career championing earth science education. He was appointed Chair of the Texas Earth Science Task Force by the Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency. With his tireless dedication, earth science is now available to Texan high school students.

Dr. Robert Ridky, National Education Coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey said “Ed Roy was a professor’s professor, contributing unselfishly to advance the geosciences and geoscience education. Even after so-called “retirement,” this true gentlemen and concerned colleague worked tirelessly to re-establish earth science to its important role in the Texas curriculum. He had the professional ability and personal instincts to see the larger purposes and requirements necessary to advance one’s discipline. Such characteristics are never in abundant supply; he will be sorely missed and most fondly remembered by all of us who were privileged to know and work with him. In the most enduring of tributes, his legacy lives on in students who, because of his efforts, continue to have the opportunity to study one of the most exciting, unifying and critically important areas of science.”

He is survived by his wife, Carol Jean and their children, MaryBeth Marsh, Christine Lammert, Edward C. Roy III, and grandchildren, Nicholas, Kaitlyn, Travis, and Megan

When University of Chicago professor Joseph Victor Smith was a boy on his parents’ farm in the north of England, he would pull away from his farmwork, look at the moon and wonder why part of it was white and part was black.

Years later, Smith found himself conducting tests on Apollo 11 lunar samples. In early December 1969, the answer to his boyhood question about the moon’s colors dawned on him. The white material was rock enriched with feldspar. The black

material was basalt, solidified lava. Smith realized that feldspar crystals, being lighter than basalt, probably floated to the highland areas of the moon when the planet was a ball of molten lava. The moon’s crust must have been extensively melted, Smith concluded, in a series of catastrophic meteorite impacts.

“There had to have been tremendous collisions. There’s no way the moon could have got where it was without melting. This was heresy in those days,” Smith said in a 1999 interview, recalling prevailing theory of 1970. His model of a “hot moon” has gained increasing support over the cooler models and had led to a greater understanding of the origins of the universe.

Smith was the Louis Block Professor Emeritus in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, where he taught and conducted research from 1960 to 2003. He died of pneumonia at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston on April 6, aged 78, after a five-year battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Smith had a longstanding concern for the environment and the
preservation of the Earth. Since the 1980s, he had drawn attention to threats to the human race presented by Earth-colliding asteroids, comets and other natural hazards-in a series of articles and conference presentations. In 1982, in accepting the Roebling Medal from the Mineralogical Society of America, he argued that society must shift funds from “war machines” to science, and work toward an understanding that “we all belong to one human race, and must learn to live in peace on this planet.”

In 1998, he organized a National Academy of Sciences colloquium on “Geology, Mineralogy, and Human Welfare.” At the time of his death, he was completing a manuscript titled “Living Safely,” which was part-memoir of his life as a farmer’s boy and research scientist, part-environmental treatise.

Smith wrote more 400 scientific articles that were published in journals including Science, Nature, Journal of Geology, Scientific American, and Proceedings of the International Seminar on Nuclear War. He also was author of Geometrical and Structural Crystallography, published by Wiley, and a three-volume scientific reference series on feldspar minerals.

“Feldspars are the most abundant, most important minerals in the crust of the Earth, and Joe Smith was the world authority on those minerals,” said Robert Clayton, the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Chemistry and Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. Smith also studied an industrially important mineral group called zeolites, volcanism in east Africa, and lunar geology, said J. Barry Dawson, Professor Emeritus of Earth Science at the University of Edinburgh. “A very multifaceted man was Joe,” Dawson said.

For much of his career, Smith served as a consultant to Union Carbide Corporation and UOP for his zeolite expertise. Smith helped industry harness zeolite as molecular sieves to improve the yield of gasoline from oil and produce environmentally friendly, phosphate-free detergents.

In the early 1970s, Smith collaborated with Dawson, who was then at the University of St. Andrews, in analyzing the composition of rocks and minerals brought to the Earth’s surface from the upper mantle, the layer below the outer crust. Their studies identified the first sample of diamond in garnet lherzolite, a solid rock from the mantle. Their work showed that diamond formation was not connected with volcanic activity, which geologists had previously assumed.

Smith also was a scientific entrepreneur in the development of scientific instruments, Clayton said. At the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the early 1950s, Smith built an X-ray generator out of junk equipment and chicken wire. When he arrived at the University of Chicago in 1960, he immediately built an electron microprobe for the Department of Geophysical Sciences.

“Now every geology department has to have an electron probe, and the department here was one of the first to get it,” Clayton said. “He was a real pioneer in developing the instrument.” Smith was also a pioneer in championing the careers of women scientists, whom he believed were unfairly underrepresented in science.

As a visiting physicist and consultant to Brookhaven National
Laboratory in New York since the mid-1980s, he helped develop a
microprobe for precision X-ray analysis of experimental samples. And in the early 1990s, Smith organized a multi-institutional,
multi-disciplinary group of scientists to found the Consortium for Advanced Radiation Sources-CARS-to use the Advanced Photon Source in their research. The U.S. Department of Energy’s APS at Argonne National Laboratory provides the most brilliant source of X-ray beams for research in the Western Hemisphere.

Reflecting Smith’s broad interests, CARS embraced the geophysical sciences, soil and environmental science, structural biology, chemistry and materials science. Smith directed CARS from its founding until 1993.

Smith was born July 30, 1928, in Derbyshire, England. Raised on a farm in the Peak District of Derbyshire, he won a scholarship to Cambridge University. There he received a B.A. with first class honors in natural science, in 1948, and a Ph.D. in physics in 1951. Smith married his wife, Brenda Wallis, at St. Mary’s Church, Crich, Derbyshire, on Aug. 31, 1951.

He began his research career at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, in 1951, returning to teach at Cambridge in 1954. From 1956 to 1960 he was a faculty member at Pennsylvania State University, where he began his seminal research on feldspar minerals. He joined the University of Chicago faculty as a full professor in 1960 at the age of 32.

Smith received many honors during his career, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, and was awarded the Geological Society of London’s Murchison Medal and the Mineralogical Society of America’s Roebling Medal and MSA Award.

He was an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science,
American Geophysical Union, Geological Society of America,
Meteoritical Society, Mineralogical Society of America and The Royal Society of London. He also was an Honorary Fellow of the Geological Society of London and of the Mineralogical Society of London.

He stayed connected to his native England, spending three months every year in Derbyshire when his daughters were young. “He never forgot his place of birth, and returned each summer to help with the hay-making,” Dawson recalled. “He was exceptionally loyal to family and friends.”

Professor Smith is survived by his wife, Brenda Smith, formerly of the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, now of Brookline, Mass., and two daughters, Virginia Smith, Brookline; and Susan Werther, Madison, Wisc.; and four grandchildren: Katie, John and Meg Hitchcock-Smith, and Jessica Werther.

He will be buried in Crich, Derbyshire in June. A memorial service will be held at Bond Chapel at the University of Chicago later this year.

Bradford Washburn, founder and former director of the Boston Science Museum, cartographer, photographer, author, and mountaineer passed away at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts on January 10, 2007 at the age of 96.

Washburn had a love of mountains, photography and education. With those passions he became the first person to climb seven North American peaks. He created maps and discovered climbing routes that are still used today. Most notably, Washburn led a team of scientists who, using global positioning system measurements, revised the height of Mt. Everest to 29,035 feet, seven feet taller than originally thought.

He was an adventurer who photographed mountain peaks from leaning out the side doors of single-engine planes and using a 53-pound camera. His photos from those precarious positions went on to be used in map making, art exhibits, and books.

Washburn graduated from Harvard University in 1933 and in 1960 received his master’s degree in cartography from Harvard. He was the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates and awards, including the American Geological Institute award for Outstanding Contribution to Public understanding of Geology in 1996. To honor his legacy of educating people on the beauty and power of mountains, the museum of American mountaineering in Golden Colorado will be named after him when it opens in the winter of 2008.

Washburn is survived by his wife, Barbara, who shared his passion for mountains, as well as his three children, nine grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

Dr. Rhodes W. Fairbridge, one of the first geoscientists to discuss climate change, passed away on November 8, 2006 at the age of 92.

Dr. Fairbridge, a geologist at Columbia University had been a supervising editor for the “Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences,” aimed at graduate students and which continues to be used as a reference. In addition to the important work he completed for the “Encyclopedia”, he is best known for the research that he was a part of on coral reefs and shorelines to study the effects of climate change upon them. He developed the Fairbridge Curve, which is a record of changes in sea levels over the last 10,000 years that showed periodic changes against a trend of rising sea levels.

Fairbridge was born in Pinjarra, Australia and received his undergraduate degree from Queen’s University in Ontario and his master’s from Oxford. He received his Ph.D. in geology in 1941 from the University of Western Australia. After that, he taught at Western Australia and the University of Illinois before becoming a professor of geology at Columbia University in 1955.

On September 24, 2006, William B. Heroy, Jr. passed away in Durham, North Carolina, where he and his wife, Dorthoy, lived in retirement. Bill served as President of the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man (ISEM) at Southern Methodist University, from 1971 to 1981. He succeeded his father, ISEM’s Founding President, William B. Heroy, Sr.

Bill majored in geology, earning a B.S. from Dartmouth College in 1937 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1941. He worked in the southwest for Texaco during World War II, and then joined the Geothechnical Corporation in Dallas, where he worked from 1945 to 1965, advancing to President of the company. Geotech was bought by the Teledyne Corporation in 1965 and Bill continued there as a senior executive until he resigned to accept the position of Vice President and Treasurer of Southern Methodist University in 1969.

Bill was always active in civic and professional affairs, having served in leadership roles in Dallas Geological and Dallas Geophysical Societies, numerous committees of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, as longtime Treasurer of the Geological Society of America, and as President of the American Geological Institute.

Bill’s career touched many lives and many institutions and left each the better. He believed very strongly in “paying back” to society and he contributed generously of his time and efforts wherever he was asked and where he felt he could make a difference.

ISEM ANNOUNCES HEROY MEMORIAL GIFT. The Institute for the Study of Earth and Man at Southern Methodist University is pleased to announce the receipt of a gift from Jack Hamilton in memory of William B. Heroy, Jr. The gift is to initiate the Heroy Geoscience Student Support Fund in the Institute. In making the gift Hamilton said, “This gift is intended to recognize Bill’s lifelong commitment to the geosciences and his understanding of the importance of financial support in preparing geoscientists of the future! It is certainly my hope that this initiating gift will grow through the support of Bill’s many friends.” Jack Hamilton was a longtime associate of Bill Heroy in the senior management of The Geotechnical Corporation and then in the Geotechnical Division of The Teledyne Corporation. Hamilton is also a Trustee of the ISEM. In accepting the gift Dr. Louis L. Jacobs, ISEM President, said, “This gift is indeed a fitting way to commmemorate Bill Heroy’s life and contributions and we at the Institute are deeply grateful. We share Jack Hamilton’s hope that the fund will grow and thus enable it to support a growing number of students in the geosciences.”

Contributions to the Heroy Geoscience Student Support Fund may be made to The ISEM Foundation, in care of Dr. Louis L. Jacobs, ISEM at SMU, Box 0273, Dallas, TX 75275-0274 and indicate that the contribution is for the Heroy Fund.