Walter Munk, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Walter Munk

American oceanographer

Date of Birth: 19-Oct-1917

Place of Birth: Vienna, Austria

Date of Death: 08-Feb-2019

Profession: physicist, university teacher, oceanographer

Nationality: United States, Austria

Zodiac Sign: Libra


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About Walter Munk

  • Walter Heinrich Munk (October 19, 1917 – February 8, 2019) was an American physical oceanographer.
  • He was a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla.
  • Born to a prominent Austrian family, in 1932 Munk was sent to school in the United States at age 14.
  • Abandoning a New York banking career, Munk obtained a scientific education at the California Institute of Technology and his doctorate from Scripps.
  • During World War II, Munk and his doctoral advisor Harald Sverdrup developed methods for predicting surf conditions on beaches, saving countless lives during allied landings in North Africa, the Pacific, and Northern Europe.
  • After the war, Scripps grew from a small biological station to a major research institution.
  • Munk and his wife Judy were active in developing the Scripps campus and integrating it with the new University of California, San Diego. One of the first to bring statistical methods to the analysis of oceanographic data, Munk's work is noted for creating fruitful areas of research that continue to be explored.
  • These areas include surface waves, geophysical implications of variations in the Earth's rotation, tides, internal waves, deep-ocean drilling into the sea floor, acoustical measurements of ocean properties, sea level rise, and climate change.
  • In a 1991 experiment, Munk and his collaborators tested the ability of underwater sound to propagate from the Southern Indian Ocean across all ocean basins.
  • The aim was to use the acoustic signals to measure changes in broad-scale ocean temperatures.
  • The experiment was criticized by environmental groups, who expected that the loud acoustic signals would adversely affect marine life.
  • Munk was a member of the JASON think tank, and he held a Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations Oceanography Chair.
  • Munk died at age 101 in La Jolla, California.

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