American Philosophical Society
Member History

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1Name:  Dr. Walter H. Munk
 Institution:  Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego
 Year Elected:  1965
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  105. Physical Earth Sciences
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1917
 Death Date:  February 8, 2019
   
 
Walter H. Munk was a brilliant scholar and scientist who was considered one of the greatest oceanographers of his time. His principal interests included global acoustics, greenhouse warming, tides and the air-sea boundary. Dr. Munk received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. for work at the Scripps Institution, which he has been affiliated with throughout his career. During World War II, Dr. Munk and Harald Sverdrup, then the director of Scripps, developed a system for forecasting breakers and surf on beaches, a technique of crucial importance in military amphibious landings. During the 1946 testing of nuclear weapons at Bikini Atoll in the southern Pacific Ocean, Dr. Munk participated in analysis of the currents and diffusion in the lagoon and the water exchange with the open seas. In 1963, he led a study of attenuation in ocean swells generated in Antarctica, measuring fluctuations with pressure sensing devices lowered to the ocean floor. Measurements also were made at six Pacific Ocean locations and from FLIP, the Floating Instrument Platform, developed at Scripps. In 1969 he began measuring tides in the deep sea, using highly sophisticated pressure-sensing instruments that were dropped to the ocean floor and retrieved by acoustic release. Dr. Munk also played a leading role in developing new methods for tracking long-term changes in climate associated with global warming as part of the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) project. The idea behind ATOC is to send sound signals from underwater speakers and track how long it takes them to reach receivers moored to the floor of the Pacific thousands of miles away. Because sound travels faster in warmer water than cooler water, a long-term series of tests that recorded increasingly faster travel times indicates that the ocean is warming. Dr. Munk received numerous honors for his work, including membership in the National Academy of Sciences (1956) and the Royal Society of London (1976). He was a Guggenheim Fellow three times and was awarded the Arthur L. Day Medal, the Sverdrup Gold Medal and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, among other honors. In 1999 he received the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences for his fundamental contributions to the field of oceanography and in 2010 he was awarded the Crafoord prize. At the end of his career he was Research Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Walter H. Munk died on February 8, 2019 in the La Jolla section of San Diego at the age of 101.
 
Election Year
1965 (1)