102
Dennis Wilson Moore
I sent a telegram to WHOI and asked to join the cruise. They said OK, and offered me
$250 per month, which was what I had earned the summer before. So I left Bangkok
in May 1959 and made my way to Athens to join the R/V Chain cruise number seven.
I got on the Chain in early June and got off in Woods Hole in mid-August. Memorable
stops along the way included La Spezia, Monaco, Barcelona, and Bermuda. While
we were at sea I stood watch in the top lab 8 hours a day, mostly operating the echo
sounder and occasionally helping record thermistor chain data. Earl Hays was on
the cruise with a new instrument called a sound velocimeter, built by the National
Bureau of Standards. I helped him with the sound velocity profiling work and the
analysis of the data, which was all done by hand. The WHOI oceanographers had
recently realized that by putting a pinger on the bottom of a lowered instrument, and
monitoring the profiling from the echo sounder, they could tell how far off the bottom
the instrument was. This technique was developed and refined on this cruise. After
the Chain returned to Woods Hole I lived aboard for another couple of weeks, until
it was time to return to Harvard.
I continued my study of mathematics but I was already thinking seriously about
being an oceanographer. I applied for a summer fellowship at WHOI for the following
summer, and was fortunate to receive one. I was assigned to work with Claes Rooth,
and we both sat in Al Woodcock’s lab on the second floor of the Bigelow Laboratory.
Andy Ingersoll was there as well. He and Woodcock had been doing laboratory studies
on the bursting of air bubbles at the sea surface, and the resulting jet formation that
expelled small water droplets into the atmosphere. Claes and I were supposed to
find a theory for that process, but made little progress. The main reason was that
Woodcock’s lab was directly across the hall from the small lecture room where the
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) course was being held for the second time. There
were a couple of empty spaces in the room, and Claes arranged for us to occupy them
as informal auditors. Louis Howard was the principal lecturer, and other lectures
were given by Wilhelm Malkus, Henry (Hank) Stommel, Melvin Stern, and Joanne
Malkus . The students included Dick Lindzen, Joe Pedlosky , Bill Holland, and Bob
Blandford, among others. For me it was a challenging summer, because I was still an
undergraduate and had not yet studied partial differential equations. I learned a lot in
a hurry, but not in a very systematic way. Much of what I was exposed to only made
sense some years later. A lot of the course focused on thermal convection, and Henry
Stommel produced the Great Seal of the GFD course, featuring the dragon with a fire
under its tail and a block of ice on its head.
By the end of the summer I was determined to be a theoretical oceanographer.
I returned to Harvard for my senior year as a math major, and applied for graduate
school. I applied to Harvard in Applied Mathematics, and Scripps in Oceanography.
Henry Stommel was on the Harvard faculty at the time, and when I asked his advice
he said, “Why don’t you stay at Harvard and learn all the applied math George Carrier
and his colleagues can teach you?” So I decided to stay at Harvard.
I started graduate school in the fall of 1961 and originally worked with Henry
Stommel. One memorable project was a study that I did while taking his oceanography
Dennis Wilson Moore
I sent a telegram to WHOI and asked to join the cruise. They said OK, and offered me
$250 per month, which was what I had earned the summer before. So I left Bangkok
in May 1959 and made my way to Athens to join the R/V Chain cruise number seven.
I got on the Chain in early June and got off in Woods Hole in mid-August. Memorable
stops along the way included La Spezia, Monaco, Barcelona, and Bermuda. While
we were at sea I stood watch in the top lab 8 hours a day, mostly operating the echo
sounder and occasionally helping record thermistor chain data. Earl Hays was on
the cruise with a new instrument called a sound velocimeter, built by the National
Bureau of Standards. I helped him with the sound velocity profiling work and the
analysis of the data, which was all done by hand. The WHOI oceanographers had
recently realized that by putting a pinger on the bottom of a lowered instrument, and
monitoring the profiling from the echo sounder, they could tell how far off the bottom
the instrument was. This technique was developed and refined on this cruise. After
the Chain returned to Woods Hole I lived aboard for another couple of weeks, until
it was time to return to Harvard.
I continued my study of mathematics but I was already thinking seriously about
being an oceanographer. I applied for a summer fellowship at WHOI for the following
summer, and was fortunate to receive one. I was assigned to work with Claes Rooth,
and we both sat in Al Woodcock’s lab on the second floor of the Bigelow Laboratory.
Andy Ingersoll was there as well. He and Woodcock had been doing laboratory studies
on the bursting of air bubbles at the sea surface, and the resulting jet formation that
expelled small water droplets into the atmosphere. Claes and I were supposed to
find a theory for that process, but made little progress. The main reason was that
Woodcock’s lab was directly across the hall from the small lecture room where the
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) course was being held for the second time. There
were a couple of empty spaces in the room, and Claes arranged for us to occupy them
as informal auditors. Louis Howard was the principal lecturer, and other lectures
were given by Wilhelm Malkus, Henry (Hank) Stommel, Melvin Stern, and Joanne
Malkus . The students included Dick Lindzen, Joe Pedlosky , Bill Holland, and Bob
Blandford, among others. For me it was a challenging summer, because I was still an
undergraduate and had not yet studied partial differential equations. I learned a lot in
a hurry, but not in a very systematic way. Much of what I was exposed to only made
sense some years later. A lot of the course focused on thermal convection, and Henry
Stommel produced the Great Seal of the GFD course, featuring the dragon with a fire
under its tail and a block of ice on its head.
By the end of the summer I was determined to be a theoretical oceanographer.
I returned to Harvard for my senior year as a math major, and applied for graduate
school. I applied to Harvard in Applied Mathematics, and Scripps in Oceanography.
Henry Stommel was on the Harvard faculty at the time, and when I asked his advice
he said, “Why don’t you stay at Harvard and learn all the applied math George Carrier
and his colleagues can teach you?” So I decided to stay at Harvard.
I started graduate school in the fall of 1961 and originally worked with Henry
Stommel. One memorable project was a study that I did while taking his oceanography