Eugenie
Clark, whose childhood rapture with fish in a New York City aquarium
led to a life of scholarly adventure in the littorals and depths of the
Seven Seas and to a global reputation as a marine biologist and expert
on sharks, died on Wednesday at her home in Sarasota, Fla. She was 92.
The
cause was lung cancer, her son Nikolas Konstantinou said.Long before
“Jaws” scared the wits out of swimmers, Dr. Clark rode a 40-foot whale
shark off Baja California, ran into killer great white sharks while
scuba diving in Hawaii, studied “sleeping” sharks in undersea caves off
the Yucatán, witnessed a shark’s birth and found a rare six-gill shark
in a submersible dive off Bermuda.
Eugenie Clark, Scholar of the Life Aquatic, Dies at 92
Photo
Eugenie Clark in 1951.Credit
The American Museum of Natural History
Dr.
Clark was an ichthyologist and oceanographer whose academic
credentials, teaching and research posts, scientific activities and
honors filled a 20-page curriculum vitae, topped by longtime roles as a
professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Mote Marine
Laboratory in Sarasota.
She
also wrote three books, 80 scientific treatises and more than 70
articles and professional papers; lectured at 60 American universities
and in 19 countries abroad; appeared in 50 television specials and
documentaries; was the subject of many biographies and profiles; made
intriguing scientific discoveries; and had four species of fish named
for her. Over the years, Dr. Clark made more than 70 deep dives in submersibles, once to 12,000 feet.Credit
Tak Konstantinou
Ms.
Clark was born in New York City on May 4, 1922, to Charles Clark and
the former Yumico Mitomi. Her father died when she was 2. Her mother
worked in Lower Manhattan, and when the girl was 9 she began leaving her
on Saturday mornings at an aquarium near the Battery. Fascinated,
Eugenie persuaded her mother to buy her a 15-gallon tank and kept fish,
toads, snakes and a small alligator at home.
She
graduated from Bryant High School in Queens and Hunter College, where
she majored in zoology, and earned a master’s degree at New York
University.
After
doing research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the
University of California, San Diego, she was a research assistant at the
Museum of Natural History in New York and returned to N.Y.U., where she
earned a doctorate in 1950, focusing on fish reproduction.
Jack Fahland/St. Louis Globe Democrat
Barry Commoner in 1971 at Washington University in St. Louis. He believed pollution, war and inequality were related issues.
Barry Commoner, a founder of modern ecology and one of its most
provocative thinkers and mobilizers in making environmentalism a
people’s political cause, died on Sunday in Manhattan.
Dr. Commoner was a leader among a generation of scientist-activists who
recognized the toxic consequences of America’s post-World War II
technology boom, and one of the first to stir the national debate over
the public’s right to comprehend the risks and make decisions about
them.
Raised in Brooklyn during the Depression and trained as a biologist at
Columbia and Harvard, he came armed with a combination of scientific
expertise and leftist zeal. His work on the global effects of
radioactive fallout, which included documenting concentrations of
strontium 90 in the baby teeth of thousands of children, contributed
materially to the adoption of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
Dr. Ride, a physicist who was accepted into the space program in 1978
after she answered a newspaper ad for astronauts, flew on the shuttle
Challenger on June 18, 1983, and on a second mission in 1984. At 32, she
was also the youngest American in space. She later became the only person to sit on both panels investigating the
catastrophic shuttle accidents that killed all astronauts on board —
the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the Columbia crash in 2003.
Dr. Ride was finishing studies at Stanford University — she had degrees in
physics and astrophysics (and also English) — and looking for a job
when she saw NASA’s advertisement. She looked at the qualifications and
said, “I’m one of those people,” she told The New York Times in 1982. She applied, and made the cut. “The women’s movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming,” she said.
How many other astronauts have degrees in English?
She received bachelor’s degrees in physics and English in 1973 (her
specialty was Shakespeare), a master’s degree in physics in 1975 and a
Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1978, all from Stanford. Her graduate work
involved X-ray astronomy and free-electron lasers.
Dr. Ride told interviewers that what drove her was not the desire to
become famous or to make history as the first woman in space. All she
wanted to do was fly, she said, to soar into space, float around
weightless inside the shuttle, look out at the heavens and gaze back at
Earth. In photographs of her afloat in the spaceship, she was grinning,
as if she had at long last reached the place she was meant to be.
It is my considered opinion that one can learn a great deal from obituaries, they being a sort of clearinghouse of people of disparate disciplines and walks of life. This is a perfect example.
Jack Oliver, whose studies of earthquakes provided convincing proof that Earth’s continents are constantly moving, died last Wednesday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 87. The idea of continental drift, that Earth’s crust is slowly shifting and moving, had been proposed by the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener in 1912, but most of the scientific community regarded it with skepticism and often derision through much of the 20th century.
In 1968, Dr. Oliver, Dr. Isacks and another former graduate student of Dr. Oliver, Lynn Sykes, wrote a paper, “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics,” that put together earthquake evidence from around the world that made a convincing case that continental drift — now called plate tectonics — was indeed occurring.
John Ertle Oliver was born Sept. 26, 1923, in Massillon, Ohio. In high school, he played on Massillon’s championship football team, which was coached by Paul Brown, who went on to become a Hall of Fame coach of the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals in the National Football League.
In his 1998 autobiography, “Shakespeare Got It Wrong: It’s Not ‘to Be,’ It’s ‘to Do,’ ” Dr. Oliver indulged in a fondness for limericks, interspersing them between chapters. Here is one: The youth wondered what he should be. His prof said, “You’re missing the key. Life’s not to be, but to do. Pick a task, follow through. You’ll live ever after most happily.”
Richard T. Whitcomb dreamed up techniques that made supersonic flight possible and innovations that endure on passenger jets today.
Mr. Whitcomb, who died Oct. 13 at age 88, solved a problem that had bedeviled aviation engineers, whose designs couldn't achieve supersonic flight even though they seemed to have enough power. Increased wind resistance at speeds approaching the speed of sound was the problem. Engineers took to calling it the "sound barrier."
Mr. Whitcomb's solution was to taper the airplane's fuselage in a manner he often likened to a Coke bottle, which dramatically reduced drag. Within three years of Mr. Whitcomb's discovery in 1951, U.S. Air Force interceptors were flying at supersonic speeds.
It was the first of three revolutionary advances Mr. Whitcomb designed. Another was a new and more efficient wing shape used today on nearly all passenger jets. And he designed "winglets" -- small drag-reducing vertical panels found at the wing-tips of many commercial jets.
"I think he was the most significant aeronautical engineer operating in the second half of 20th century," says Tom Crouch, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "His fingerprints are on every jet plane flying today."
Although he did much to define modern flight, Mr. Whitcomb never learned to fly.
Martin A. Pomerantz (1916-2008) Posted Saturday, November 15, 2008 at 12:12 PM
REMEMBERANCES, WSJ, November 14, 2008 Martin A. Pomerantz [1916-2008] Astrophysicist Turned Antarctica Into Hot Spot for Astronomy Research By STEPHEN MILLER
By bringing astrophysical research to Antarctica, Martin A. Pomerantz fostered what he called "astronomy on ice."
"Almost single-handedly, he recognized the value of one of the world's most remote and inhospitable places as an ideal place to study the physical origin of the universe and other complex astrophysical phenomena," says Karl A. Erb, director of the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs, which supports U.S. scientific efforts on the Earth's southernmost continent.
Today, Antarctica supports a thriving international community of scientists who watch stars, study cosmic rays and dark energy, and capture elusive neutrinos with tubes drilled more than a kilometer into the ice. The continent offers astronomers the clearest skies on Earth. A permanent hole in its magnetic field allows exotic particles from space to reach terrestrial detectors.
Dr. Pomerantz, who died Oct. 25 at age 91, used the 24 hours of daylight during the Antarctic summer to make high-altitude, 100-hour observations of the sun impossible anywhere else on Earth. From the data he compiled, he confirmed that the sun oscillates every five minutes, rather like a bell: "This great musical instrument," as he described it to the New York Times in 1981.
In turn, the NY Times article referes to an earlier Times article published on 18 February 1992, quoting Dr. Pomerants.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Pomerantz was alone trying to drum up interest from peers and funding agencies to erect telescopes in Antarctica. "People wrote in books such things as, 'Why would anybody be stupid enough to go to Antarctica when you could be in Hawaii and then go to the beach in the afternoon?' " Dr. Pomerantz told the American Polar Society's oral-history project in 2000. (A major observatory complex is at the peak of Mauna Kea.)
A former journalism student at Syracuse University who converted to science after taking a "physics for poets" class, he was hired in 1938 by the Bartol Research Foundation, then at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
He began balloon investigations of cosmic rays, highly charged particles that enter the Earth's atmosphere from outer space. He traveled to northernmost Canada, Peru and India to release balloons into the upper atmosphere and collect data.
His doctoral thesis included the unexpected finding that the sun's magnetic field was far less intense than was believed.
During World War II, he was lent to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he researched radar. Back at Bartol, he became an expert on the structure of the Earth's magnetic field, which is sometimes depicted as a bar magnet stuck through the Earth's axis but is, in reality, far more complex.
Dr. Pomerantz was named director of the Bartol Foundation in 1959, just as new research possibilities in Antarctica were opening. In 1960, he installed a cosmic ray detector at McMurdo Station, the U.S. research center on the Antarctic coast. Later, he would set up a detector at the South Pole and conduct experiments there himself during summers -- 26 in all.
Life in Antarctica could be scary and bracing, he recalled. He suffered from insomnia -- "big eye" in South Pole parlance -- enduring uncomfortable sleeping quarters where "you had to put the beer in just the right place so it would not freeze. It would freeze on the floor and it was terribly hot above." But the camaraderie was great and he later said that one of his lifetime regrets was never having spent the winter at the remote South Pole station.
Frustrated that he couldn't persuade astronomers or funding agencies to commit to putting telescopes at the South Pole, he bootlegged some of his cosmic ray grant money in 1979 to set up a solar telescope. The resulting 100-plus hours of continuous solar observations set a new standard for helioseismology -- the study of "sunquakes" and the sun's internal structure. Within a few years a slew of new astronomy projects were under way at the South Pole.
Explaining how Dr. Pomerantz was able to highjack the funds needed for his solar study, Stuart Pittel, the current director of what is now the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware, says "Martin did things the way he wanted to and there was nobody to tell him no."
Dr. Pomerantz retired in 1990. Already possessed of many tributes, he contemplated retiring to a typical senior scientist's role. But he also had a yen for business and partnered with his son, Martin A. Pomerantz Jr., to open a Nissan car dealership in Georgia. "He really threw himself into it," says his daughter, Jane Anne Staw.
In 1994, he proudly attended the dedication of the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory at the South Pole, the main research facility at the U.S.
Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Earlier, a part of the Antarctic continent was dubbed the Pomerantz Tableland.
