Henry William Menard

Henry William Menard (around 1980)

Henry William Menard (born December 10, 1920 in Fresno , California , † February 9, 1986 in La Jolla , California) was an American geologist and oceanographer . He was an influential marine geologist in the United States and an early proponent of plate tectonics , and he did much to enforce it through his marine geological research.

Menard studied geology at Caltech with a bachelor's degree in 1942 and a master's degree in 1947, interrupted by military service in World War II as an aerial photograph evaluator in the South Pacific . In 1949 he received his PhD in marine geology from Harvard University . He then went to the US Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego in the Ocean Floor Study Group, and ocean floor geomorphology became his main research area in the 1950s. In 1955 he became an Associate Professor of Geology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego . In 1961 he was given a full professorship there and, apart from two breaks, stayed there for the rest of his career. There he was involved in many oceanographic expeditions. In 1965/66 he was a year consultant in the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the US President in Washington, DC and from 1978 to 1981 he was director of the United States Geological Survey . In 1981 he was back at the Scripps Institution.

From the 1950s on, Menard and his colleagues opened a diving and consulting company for marine research, which among other things advised ATT on the laying of underwater cables. In 1968 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences , in 1975 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1985 he received the William Bowie Medal from the American Geophysical Union .

Fonts

"Marine Geology of the Pacific," McGraw Hill 1964
"Anatomy of an Expedition", McGraw Hill 1969 (Nova Expedition records 1967)
Science: Growth and Change, Harvard University Press 1971 ISBN 0-674-79280-7
"Geology, Resources, and Society. An Introduction to Earth Science", Freeman, San Francisco 1974 ISBN 0-7167-0260-6
Edited by Ocean Science. Readings from Scientific American, Freeman, San Francisco 1978, ISBN 0-7167-0013-1
"Islands", Scientific American Library, Freeman, San Francisco 1986 ISBN 0-7167-5017-1
Editor with Jane Schreiber: Oceans, our continuing frontier , Del Mar 1976
"Ocean of Truth: A Personal History of Global Tectonics," Princeton University Press 1986 ISBN 0-691-08414-9