Walter Munk

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Walter Munk (2010)

Walter Heinrich Munk (born October 19, 1917 in Vienna , Austria ; † February 8, 2019 in La Jolla , California ) was an American oceanographer and geophysicist of Austrian origin. He was a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, part of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

biography

After his youth in Austria, Munk was sent to school in New York by his family in 1932 . He should pursue a financial career in a bank with business ties to his family. His parents, Hans Munk and Rega Brunner, were divorced in his childhood. His maternal grandfather, Lucian Brunner (1850–1914), was a Viennese banker. Before 1938, his stepfather Rudolf Engelsberg (1889–1954) was General Director of the Austrian Saltworks and Section Council in the Ministry of Finance.

Munk worked at the bank for three years and studied at Columbia University . He hated banking and left the company to attend the California Institute of Technology , where he graduated from the BS in 1939 . He applied to Scripps. The new director of Scripps, the well-known Norwegian oceanographer Harald Ulrik Sverdrup , accepted him as a PhD student, but advised him that he was not aware of any vacancies as an oceanographer for the next ten years.

On June 20, 1953, Munk married Judith Horton. She has been an active contributor to Scripps for decades, making significant contributions to architecture, campus planning, and the renovation and reuse of buildings. Judith Munk suffered from poliomyelitis and died on June 19, 2006. Almost five years later, in June 2011, he married Mary Coakley.

Munk acquired American citizenship in 1939 after Austria was annexed to the German Reich. He reported to the US Army mountain troops . This was unusual; the other young men from Scripps joined the Navy as reservists . Munk was eventually exempted from military service to take on defense-oriented work at Scripps. He joined some of his colleagues from Scripps at the US Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory, where they developed methods for amphibious warfare. Their methods have been successfully used in surf forecasting for the Allied landings in North Africa, the Pacific and D-Day in Normandy.

research

Munk received his MS (Diploma) in 1940 and his PhD ( Ph.D. ) in Oceanography from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1947 . Upon graduation, Scripps hired him as an Assistant Professor of Geophysics. In 1954 he became a full professor.

After World War II , Munk helped analyze currents, mixing and water exchanges at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific , where the US was testing nuclear weapons . He advanced research on the relationship between wind and oceanic circulation , for which he coined the now common term “wind driven gyres”.

In the 1950s, Munk dealt with the fluctuations in the rotation of the earth . He observed irregularities caused by geophysical processes, such as the exchange of momentum between oceanic currents and the solid earth, and between the polar ice caps and the oceans. Munk was a co-initiator of the Mohole Project (1957–1966), a deep drilling project into the earth's crust.

In 1963, Munk led a study that showed waves from the winter storms of the southern hemisphere traveled thousands of miles and across all oceans. In order to follow the path and the decrease in wave packets during the northward migration, he set up measuring stations on a great circle from New Zealand to Alaska and measured the pressure fluctuations on the sea floor. This work also led to the development of the Garrett-Munk spectrum , a formulation of a canonical form of the wavenumber spectrum of internal waves to describe the internal dynamics of the sea in the free ocean.

In 1968 he became a member of the JASON Group , a committee of scientists that advises the US government.

Since 1975, Munk and Carl Wunsch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been promoting the development of ocean acoustic tomography. This work finally led to the ATOC experiment (Acoustic Thermography of the Ocean Climate) in the Pacific, with which the temperature changes due to global warming were to be determined over a large area . According to the original concept, acoustic signals were to be sent from a sound source at Heard Island in the Indian Ocean , which were to be received in the Atlantic to the Bahamas and in the Pacific to the California coast. Because of concerns about the endangerment of marine mammals, the experiment was scaled down to the North Pacific.

Awards and memberships (selection)

Sweden's King Carl XVI. Gustaf presents Munk with the Crafoord Prize (2010)

Publications

  • WH Munk, Gordon JF MacDonald : The Rotation of Earth. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960.
  • WH Munk, P. Worcester, C. Request: Ocean Acoustic Tomography. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963, ISBN 0-521-47095-1 .
  • W. Munk: The circulation of the oceans. In: Scientific American. 193, September 1955, pp. 96-104.

literature

Web links

Commons : Walter Munk  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary Notice: Walter Munk, World-Renowned Oceanographer, Revered Scientist. In: ucsd.edu . February 8, 2019, accessed February 9, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Sound measurement reveals water temperature
  3. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. Walter H. Munk at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on July 18, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Munk, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Munk, Walter Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American oceanographer and geophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 2019
Place of death La Jolla , California