Chapter 7
Reflections of an
Equatorial
Oceanographer
DENNIS WILSON MOORE
My career as an oceanographer began in the summer of 1958, after I finished my
first undergraduate year at Harvard. I was a math major, but had managed to line up
a job with Brackett Hersey at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI),
working on sound transmission data. I spent the summer playing data tapes on a big
Ampex tape recorder, driving an analog output device that drew lines on a strip chart
recorder. The strip charts were analyzed by using a planimeter to measure the area
under the curve, which was proportional to the amount of sound energy received by
a hydrophone used to collect the original data.
At the end of the summer I left for Bangkok, where my father was to spend
the year teaching at Chulalongkorn University. I was on leave from Harvard, and
spent the year teaching English. This included teaching at the Hydrographic Office
of the Royal Thai Navy, where they were preparing for the arrival of oceanographers
from Scripps to conduct the NAGA expedition. During the year the Office of Naval
Research (ONR) liaison from WHOI came through Bangkok, and told me about a
WHOI cruise that was taking place in the Mediterranean Sea the following summer.
Dennis Wilson Moore, Leader of the Ocean Climate Research Division, Pacific Marine Environmental
Laboratory.
101
Reflections of an
Equatorial
Oceanographer
DENNIS WILSON MOORE
My career as an oceanographer began in the summer of 1958, after I finished my
first undergraduate year at Harvard. I was a math major, but had managed to line up
a job with Brackett Hersey at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI),
working on sound transmission data. I spent the summer playing data tapes on a big
Ampex tape recorder, driving an analog output device that drew lines on a strip chart
recorder. The strip charts were analyzed by using a planimeter to measure the area
under the curve, which was proportional to the amount of sound energy received by
a hydrophone used to collect the original data.
At the end of the summer I left for Bangkok, where my father was to spend
the year teaching at Chulalongkorn University. I was on leave from Harvard, and
spent the year teaching English. This included teaching at the Hydrographic Office
of the Royal Thai Navy, where they were preparing for the arrival of oceanographers
from Scripps to conduct the NAGA expedition. During the year the Office of Naval
Research (ONR) liaison from WHOI came through Bangkok, and told me about a
WHOI cruise that was taking place in the Mediterranean Sea the following summer.
Dennis Wilson Moore, Leader of the Ocean Climate Research Division, Pacific Marine Environmental
Laboratory.
101