Biographical Memoirs Volume 51 (1980) / Chapter Skim
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William Maurice Ewing
William Maurice Ewing
Pages 118-193
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From page 118... ...
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From page 119... ...
The Royal Society has given permission for the republication.
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From page 120... ...
His daughter Rowena has "such vivid memories of him playing, always standing so straight and tall." Ewing's mother, Hope Hamilton Ewing, was born at Breckenricige, Stephens County, Texas, in ISS2. She was the daugher of Isaac Hamilton of Illinois and Martha Ann Carnahan of Arkansas, ant!
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From page 121... ...
for many years with Ewing at Lamont ant! is now at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where he was, for a while, Chairman of the Department of Geology and Geophysics.
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From page 122... ...
It must have been a hard life, but at the beginning of his third year at Rice he was able to say, in a letter to his parents: "Well, because of the grades ~ made last year, ~ was invited to a banquet of the Houston Philosophical Society .
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From page 123... ...
It was an exciting time, when gravity and seismic measurements were revealing the salt-domes against whose sicles the of! of the Gulf Coast fielcis is trapped.
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From page 124... ...
medium was critical for the seismic investigations of the next twenty years, and it was a fortunate chance that led Ewing so early in this direction. Regrettably, the collaboration with Leet, who was Director of the Harvard seismological station, broke down with bitter feelings on both sides.
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From page 125... ...
He hac! largely founded and was Chairman of the American Geophysical Union's "Committee on the Geophysical Study of the Ocean Basins." He had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted clone and why, as can be seen from the first report of his committee (Field 1933~.
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From page 126... ...
It was decided that the first project would be to shoot as many refraction seismic lines as possible spaced out between Cape Henry on the east coast of Virginia and the edge of the continental shelf 120 km out to sea, where the depth of water was about 100 m This line was to be extended inland by measurements on land between the coast and the outcrop of basement rocks 120 km inland. The start was not propitious; the Coast and Geodetic Survey allowed Ewing and his two assistants (A.
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From page 127... ...
The object of the investigation was to study the nature of the transition from the ocean to the continent. Is the "shelf break," where the sea floor suddenly turns down from the shallow water of the continental shelf to oceanic depths, a fault in the basement, or is it the edge of a rubbish tip of sediments built out from the lane!
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From page 128... ...
All the of! obtained from the sea floor comes from sedimentary basins like that discovered by Ewing.
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From page 129... ...
how complete was the gap in knowlecige represented by the ocean floor. For generations the oceans hac!
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From page 130... ...
After the initial success of the seismic work on the continental shelf Ewing decided that the most important thing to do was to extend the work to deep water. The prize was great: it should be possible to find how much sediment there is on the ocean floor (if the oceans have existed, much as now, through the whole of geological time there shouicl be many kilometers of sediment)
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From page 131... ...
first tried stringing the gear along a steel cable. From the ship the cable led clown to the sea floor where it carried a watertight pressure vessel containing a four-channel oscillograph; further along the cable were four geophones and three bombs Erect by a clock and a battery in the pressure vessel.
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From page 132... ...
. Preliminary work was done in shallow water arounc!
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From page 133... ...
It is perhaps inevitable that institutions such as the Coast and Geodetic Survey and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution should have regarded work on quite new lines as a thing to be fitted in among their regular business. Ship-time for seismic shooting had to be taken from other projects which had already been planned and which were clearly worthwhile.
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From page 134... ...
134 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS lives to a degree which was, perhaps, tolerable for the students but was damaging for Ewing. The work at Lehigh has been described by Woollard: It was a tight little group, and although we worked most nights on instruments or data analysis, and spent most weekends in the field, one night a week was devoted to relaxation.
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From page 135... ...
He went to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where he was a Research Associate from 1940 to 1944. Allyn Vine ant!
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B Arons tells me that security was so tight at Woods Hole that he tract only a vague idea that Ewing's group was working on the same matters as his own.
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In this he differed from many of his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1944 he married Margaret Kidder whom he had met at Woods Hole; they had four chilciren: Jerome, Hope, Peter and Margaret.
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From page 138... ...
The new institution was, rather ocIdly, named the Lamont Geological Observatory. At first it was part of the Geology Department of Columbia University.
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From page 139... ...
Worze! returned from the Royal Society's discussion on "The Floor of the Atlantic Ocean" to find that the Navy had cancellecl an arrangement to supply Lamont with a ship.
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From page 140... ...
SEISMOLOGY A r SEA Early in 1949 Ewing fulfilled a long-felt wish; he got two ships at once (Atlantis and Caryn from Woods Hole)
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From page 141... ...
a universal rule that the ocean floor is quite different from the continents, the Moho is very shallow, and the sub-Moho seismic velocity is usually near the continental value (1955a)
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From page 142... ...
is large. The study of surface waves had been a favorite topic with theoretical seismologists since the beginning of the century.
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From page 143... ...
A series of papers by Ewing and Frank Press, starting in ~ 949, took up the theory of surface waves using more realistic models of the ocean floor than hac! been user!
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From page 144... ...
What was neecled was, in a sense, an improvement in the echo sounder with more power and a lower frequency to give penetration into the sediments beneath the ocean floor. Ewing hacT tried to observe such reflections as early as 1935 but had not obtainer!
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From page 145... ...
'TOPOGRAPHY AND SEDIMENTS OF THE OCEAN FLOOR Seismology was Ewing's first love, but he and his students pursued many other lines of investigation with an equal enthusiasm. The most basic too!
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From page 146... ...
Daly (1936) had suggested that during the Pleistocene ice ages, sediment was stirred up by waves breaking on the exposed continental shelf and that the muddy water ran down the slope eroding the canyons.
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From page 147... ...
that there was coarse and apparently recent sediment at the foot of the slope and pointer! out that long lengths of some of the cables had been carried away and buried, most people were convinced of the reality of turbidity currents as the carriers of the sediments of the abyssal plains.
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From page 148... ...
central to the development of tectonic theory. It was a result of Ewing's policy of keeping any ships he could get going back and forth across the ocean measuring anything that could be measured, collecting anything that could be collected, and not worrying too much about anything except getting to know the ocean floor.
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From page 149... ...
almost inexhaustible mine of information about the floor of the deep sea. A related investigation concerned the particles suspencled in the ocean water which might be expecter!
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From page 150... ...
It was, however, Ewing who first got the bandwagon rolling and whose example led to the surveys of Mason and Raff off the coast of California which revealed the zebra-like pattern of magnetic lineations (for the pre-1960 history of magnetic measurements at sea see Bullard and Mason, 1963~. SEA-FLOOR SPREADING AND PLATE TECTONICS By 1960 the general nature of the sea floor had, in large measure through the work of Ewing and his colleagues, become clear.
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From page 151... ...
in other directions, particularly in paleomagnetism, a considerable head of steam was accumulating which, in the early 1960's, ripped apart what had become the establishecl views of most geologists, at any rate in the northern hemisphere. The critical questions were: what is occurring along the central valley and why are the ocean floors so young (no sediments ogler than 150 Ma hacl been found but many samples of all younger ages)
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From page 152... ...
He talked on "Shape and Structure of Ocean Basins." ~ waited, fascinated, for him to commit himself on these matters, but he said very little about them ant! in the publisher} account (196Ig)
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From page 153... ...
, some matters of general principle, such as the lack of variation of heat flow across the ridge (there is, in fact, a variation of the expected kind; Ewing [1966m] used a considerable body of Lamont data but, because of the high probability of damag~ng the equipment, had taken none in or close to the central valley; he ignored results from workers elsewhere)
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From page 154... ...
The problem is of long standing and has two aspects: first, why has there been a series of ice ages and interglacials during the past two million years and at various earlier periods anti, second, why are such groups of ice ages separated by intervals of perhaps 100 Ma with no ice ages? Ewing believed that the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean is unstable and subject to occasional melting (for the mechanism of the instability see 1956g)
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From page 155... ...
The seconc! half of Ewing and Donn's theory is that the occurrence of ice ages depends on the pole being situated in an ocean and that polar wandering and continental drift will cause this to occur intermittently at intervals of the orcler of 100 Ma.
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From page 156... ...
, another series on microseisms (l 94Sa, ~ 952l,m, ~ 953f, ~ 9561, ~ 957c) , three papers on the propagation of elastic waves in ice (} 934b,c, ~95~f)
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From page 157... ...
In June 1972 Ewing moved back to his home state of Texas and became Cecil and Ida Green Professor at the Marine Biomedical Institute of the University of Texas (now the Marine Science Institute) at Galveston.
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From page 158... ...
For this purpose the Ida Green was fitter! with the latest 24-channel seismic equipment with digital recording.
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From page 159... ...
of the Seismological Society of America; and Vice-President of the Philosophical Society of Texas (197319741. He was, for a time, on the National Academy of Sciences committee responsible for the ill-fated Mohole project and took a large part in its enormously productive successor the Deep Sea Drilling Project, of which LamontDoherty was one of the five founding institutions.
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From page 160... ...
160 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS teacher, not in the formal sense of being skilled in classroom instruction, but in the way he could teach by example how to discover things. He snent much time at sea making things 0 1 work, untangling greasy cables, looking at records, and deciding what to do next.
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From page 161... ...
To have made it so was one of Ewing's achievements. I wrote the original version of this notice in 1975 while Hitchcock Professor at the University of California at Berkeley and while Doherty Professor at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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From page 162... ...
99-101. (Reprinted 1951; copies of this now declassified report may be found at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.)
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From page 163... ...
Navy Distinguished Public Service Award, 1955 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Member, 1951 Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Letters, Foreign Member (Section for Sciences) , 1956 American Geophysical Union, William Bowie Medal, 1957 Argentine Republic, Order of Naval Merit, Rank of Commander, 1957 Society of Exploration Geophysicists, Honorary Member, 1057 American Philosophical Society, Member, 1959 American Institute of Geonomy and Natural Resources, Inc., John Fleming Medal, 1960 Columbia University, Vetlesen Prize, 1960 American Geographical Society, Cullum Geographical Medal, 1961 Dickinson College, Joseph Priestley Award, 1961 Rice University, Medal of Honor, 1962 National Academy of Sciences, John l.
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From page 164... ...
Associate, 1973 Houston Philosophical Society, Member, 1973 National Medal of Science, 1973 Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists, Honorary Member, 1973 First Sproule Lecturer, University of Alberta, 1973 Distinguished Achievement Award for the Offshore Technology Conference, May 1974 American Geophysical Union, Walter H Bucher Medal for 1974 HONORARY DEGREES Sc.D., Washington and Lee University, 1949 Sc.D., University of Denver, 1953 Sc.D., Lehigh University, 1957 Sc.D., University of Utrecht, 1957 Sc.D., University of Rhotle Island, 1960 Sc.D., University of Durham, 1963 Sc.D., University of Delaware, 1968 Sc.D., Long Island University, 1969 Sc.D., Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1969 Sc.D., Centre College of Kentucky, 1971 LL.D., Dalhousie University, 1960
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From page 165... ...
Velocity of elastic waves in granite. Physics, 2: 16(~73.
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From page 166... ...
Vine. Deep sea measurements without wires or cables.
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From page 167... ...
51 :1821-40. 1941 Deep sea seismic methods and bottom photography.
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From page 168... ...
Ewing. Seismic reflections from beneath the ocean floor.
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From page 169... ...
i. Presentation of the Day medal to William Maurice Ewing (with his reply)
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From page 170... ...
Turbidity currents and sediments in the North Atlantic.
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From page 171... ...
Seismic refraction measurements in the Atlantic Ocean. Part VI: Typical deep stations, North America basin.
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From page 172... ...
Ewing. Earthquake surface waves and crustal structure.
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Crustal structure and surface-wave dispersion. Part IV: Atlantic and Pacific Ocean basins.
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From page 174... ...
Seismic refraction measurements in the Atlantic Ocean. Part VII: Atlantic Ocean basin, west of Bermuda.
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From page 175... ...
Ewing. Seismic-refraction measurements in the Atlantic Ocean basins, in the Mediterranean Sea, on the midAtlantic Ridge, and in the Norwegian Sea.
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From page 176... ...
Study of shear-velocity distribution in the upper mantle by mantle Rayleigh waves.
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From page 177... ...
Biological and geological observations on the first photograph of the Arctic Ocean creep-sea floor. Limnol.
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From page 178... ...
Landisman. Shape and structure of ocean basins.
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From page 179... ...
Ewing. Reflection profiling in and around the Puerto Rico trench.
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From page 180... ...
1. Wisconsin sea level as indicated in Argentine continental shelf sediments.
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From page 181... ...
Crustal structure of the mid-ocean ridges 4. Sediment distribution in the South Atlantic
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From page 182... ...
Crustal structure of the mid-ocean ridges 5. Heat flow through the Atlantic Ocean floor and convection currents.
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From page 183... ...
Vine. Early development of ocean bottom photography at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Lamont Geological Observatory.
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From page 184... ...
Mouzo. Ocean bottom photographs in the area of the oldest known outcrops, North Atlantic Ocean.
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From page 185... ...
Solid earth and oceanic tides recorded on the ocean floor off the coast of northern California.
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From page 186... ...
Sutton. The Apollo passive seismic experiment.
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From page 187... ...
Apollo 11 passive seismic experiment.
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From page 188... ...
d. The late Cenozoic history of the Atlantic basin and its bearing on the cause of the ice ages.
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From page 189... ...
Turbidites of the Hatteras and Sohm abyssal plains, western North Atlantic.
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From page 190... ...
Ewing. Suspended particulate matter in the deep waters of the North American basin.
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From page 191... ...
Moonquakes and lunar tectonism results from Apollo passive seismic experiment. In: Proceedings of the third lunar science conference, ed.
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From page 192... ...
Lunar structure and dynamics-results from the Apollo passive seismic experiment.
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From page 193... ...
Lammlein. Results from the Apollo passive seismic experiment.
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