Page 38 - 2016Spring

Robert C. Spindel
Postal:
Applied Physics Laboratory University of Washington Seattle, WA 98105 USA
Email:
spindel@uw.edu
Peter F. Worcester
Postal:
Scripps Institution of Oceanography University of California at San Diego La Jolla, CA 2093-0225 USA
Email:
pworcester@ucsd.edu
Walter H. Munk: Seventy-Five Years of Exploring the Seas
During a career spanning 75 years, Walter Munk has made seminal contributions to acoustical oceanography, underwater acoustics, physical oceanography, and geophysics.
Some people think there is more than one Walter Munk and with good reason. Acousticians know the Walter Munk who is one of the inventors of ocean acoustic tomography and ocean acoustic thermometry, or the Walter Munk who quantified the effects of ocean internal waves on acoustic propagation, or the Walter Munk of the canonical Munk sound-speed profile. Oceanographers know the Walter Munk who, with Christopher Garrett, devised the Garrett and Munk formulation of the ocean internal wave spectrum (Garrett and Munk, 1972), or the Walter Munk who did pioneering research on ocean tides, tsunamis, and surface waves. Geophysi- cists know the Walter Munk who studied the Earth’s wobble and spin and who, with Gordon McDonald, produced a classic monograph on the subject (Munk and MacDonald, 1960), or they know the Walter Munk who was one of the initiators of the 1962 MOHOLE project to drill into the Earth’s mantle.
Walter did not begin to work on underwater sound until the early 1970s after he had made seminal contributions in many other fields. When he was in China in 1978 as the chairman of the first US Oceanographic Delegation, he was asked if it was his father who had worked on ocean waves, or did he have a relative with the same name who worked on tides? When he tried to assure them that both were his early work, they were hard pressed to believe him because, they said, the Walter Munk they knew worked on acoustics! More than one person who has met him has thought that he, Walter Munk, was the son of the Walter Munk. One of us (RS) was a victim of the delusion. RS had used Walter’s elegant work (with Chip Cox) on the slope of ocean waves, estimated by observing the sun’s glint off the water (Cox and Munk, 1954), in his doctoral research. Like many students reading pa- pers by famous authors, he naturally assumed that the author had long ago passed on. So when RS first met Walter in the mid 1970s he thought he was meeting Wal- ter Munk’s son!
Walter H. Munk was born on October 19, 1917, in Vienna, Austria, a country with no coastline, far from the ocean, yet he has spent much of his life in, on, and study- ing the sea. He was sent to the United States at age 14 to finish high school at an upstate New York preparatory academy. After graduation, he was apprenticed to a financial firm that his grandfather had founded. Apparently, to our good fortune, economics was neither Walter’s love nor his forte. He left the firm after three years, and it collapsed a year after that. Then, in his own words: “Somehow I talked my way into Cal Tech and graduated in 1939 in Applied Physics.” Because the girl he was seeing at the time vacationed in La Jolla, he took a summer job at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Although the romance ended, it was here that his life long passion for the sea was born and ultimately his interest in ocean acoustics. Scripps is where he has spent his entire career.
36 | Acoustics Today | Spring 2016 | volume 12, issue 1 ©2016 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.