University of Northern Colorado Scholarship & Creative Works @ Digital UNC Earth & Atmospheric Sciences Faculty Publications Earth & Atmospheric Sciences 3-8-2019 Oceanography and Earth's Wicked Problems: In the Tradition of Franklin and Folger's Big Ideas: A Reflective Memoir About Life and Research by Practitioners in the 20th & 21st Centuries William Henry Hoyt University of Northern Colorado, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digscholarship.unco.edu/easfacpub Recommended Citation Hoyt, William Henry, "Oceanography and Earth's Wicked Problems: In the Tradition of Franklin and Folger's Big Ideas: A Reflective Memoir About Life and Research by Practitioners in the 20th & 21st Centuries" (2019). Earth & Atmospheric Sciences Faculty Publications. 1. https://digscholarship.unco.edu/easfacpub/1 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at Scholarship & Creative Works @ Digital UNC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Earth & Atmospheric Sciences Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarship & Creative Works @ Digital UNC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. OCEANOGRAPHY AND EARTH’S WICKED PROBLEMS In The Tradition of Franklin and Folger’s Big Ideas A reflective memoir about life and research by practitioners in the 20th & 21st Centuries By William Henry Hoyt, Ph D Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences University of Northern Colorado Greeley, CO 80639 Frontispiece: SAILING SCHOOL VESSEL SSV WESTWARD, Sea Education Association, Woods Hole, MA. William Hoyt was Chief Scientist for Cruise W-156, Key West – Bermuda - Rum Cay - Key West, March to May, 1998 (photo by the author). “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean.” -Arthur C. Clarke 1 Table of Contents. Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………3 Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………….4 Foreword………………………………………………………………………………………………5 Chapter One: Lakes and Rivers: The Early Years…………………………………..9 Chapter Two: College: Introduction To Franklin and Folger…………………12 Chapter Three: Blue Water and Deep Marine Geology…………………………22 Chapter Four: Coastal-Marine Geology: University of Delaware Years….29 Chapter Five: Coral Reefs—“The Canary in the Coal Mine” (1980s)……….48 Chapter Six: Global Oceans & Globalism—Emergence of Sea Education & Earth Systems Education (1990s)……………………………………………………………64 Chapter Seven: Stresses on Oceans—Heat, Acid, and Anoxia (2000s)…….73 Chapter Eight: Earth’s Future Threats—Wicked Problems and Solutions (2010s)…………………………………………………………………………………………………..81 Afterword………………………………………………………………………………………………92 References Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….93 Appendix A—Harrison Award Citation and Retirement Comments……….100 Appendix B—SSV Westward Cruise Prospectus and Reports………………...107 2 Acknowledgements You’d think after I’d written acknowledgements for three degrees and countless papers and presentations that it would be easy to do so. It isn’t. There are many hundreds of people who have had their own part in encouraging the writing of this book of ideas and memoirs. Most would discount their part in contributing at all to this venture or forget that they even encouraged me. But in the broadest sense, that is the meaning of community—we should never discount the effect we may have on others! My “every day” community over the last 50 years has been all the faculty and student colleagues I have seen almost all the days in the last half-century. Cruises on various ships, consulting projects, and grants gave me ship-mates and many others to work with. And without family, I would not even exist, or have any chance at a meaningful life…..more on that in the Foreword. In a very real sense, David Winslow Folger started this book idea. He was assigned as my academic advisor in the Geography & Geology Department at Middlebury College in 1973. Sadly, he passed away in 2017 from pancreatic cancer, way before his time. His infectious smile, endearing wit, and scientific acumen are sorely missed. You can glean all of that from his picture (Figure 1)! Figure 1. Dr. David Winslow Folger, enjoying a good chuckle in his office at Woods Hole, MA (photo from his obituary). Dr. Folger took an immediate interest in me when I took his oceanography course, even though my grade on the midterm turned no heads! At least I knew that his experience in the Navy, in the oil industry, and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was well worth my utmost attention! So, I trudged into his office to seek help. It was only later that I learned of his Nantucket roots, and his descent from whaling Captain Timothy Folger. Timothy was the cousin of Benjamin Franklin and was the person who co- authored the 1769 Chart of the Gulf Stream with Ben. 3 Like his ancestors, Dave Folger thought of big problems—some of which we now call “Wicked Problems”. Despite Dave’s intensity, he was never too busy to laugh at a good joke, or to cut the diesel engine on Lake Champlain to hear the Canada Geese flying south for the winter. He would stop by the student lab after his mile swim (!!) just to talk. We were always glad to see him in the basement, where we stored “soft cores and sludge”. There was always a competition with the hard rockers upstairs—above decks. I never would have made it to Folger’s oceanography class if it were not for the scintillating teaching of Dr. Brew Baldwin in the geochemistry of earth materials class at Middlebury College. Of all the great teachers I have had, Brew topped them all. At Dave Folger’s suggestion, I journeyed south to the State University of New York at Albany for a master’s degree with Dr. P. J. Fox. A colleague of Folger’s from Lamont Geological Observatory, Jeff Fox taught me a myriad of important lessons, including fostering in me a life-long joy with distance running. It was with Jeff that I wrote my first NSF grant covering blue-water oceanography; Dr. Fox still has his hand in deep sea marine geology, in unravelling the geological history of the oceans. My first major scientific presentation on which I was first author was on deep marine turbidites-at an AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists) meeting in Washington, D. C. Having enjoyed research in lakes and deep “blue water” oceanography, for a Ph D I returned to my coastal upbringing to study coastal geology with Dr. J. C. Kraft at the University of Delaware. When I went to interview there, Chris Kraft took me on a plane flight of the coast to survey recent storm damage. With the offer of a DuPont Fellowship to write Sea Grant proposals, and a great group of faculty and graduate students from around the world, it was an offer too good to turn down. From Chris I really learned to write grants because I had lots of practice; and all his students knew how to have a good time doing field work! I learned tons from each and every one of those graduate students. Dedication This book is dedicated to the memory of Victor J. Mayer, Ph D (Figure 2). His understandings of interconnectedness of Earth’s systems and his mentoring during the early stages of my academic career inspired me to continue the work he so passionately pursued at The Ohio State University and overseas in his Fulbright awards in Japan and Korea. If Dr. P. J. Fox and Dr. J. C. Kraft taught me how to write grants, Dr. Vic Mayer taught me how to perfect proposals. By the time I started working with Dr. John Moore on grants with the Poudre Learning Center and the University of Northern Colorado starting at the turn of the century, we were set up for a great run. Ray Tschillard, Director of the Poudre Learning Center, was and still is the Clydesdale of the bunch, and a wrestler! That’s meant to be a compliment, Ray Figure 2. Victor J. Mayer (b. 1933- d. 2011) shown here in a 1970 photo. I don’t think he wore a tie after 1990, ever! (Photograph is from the Journal of Geological Education). 4 Foreword I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep the night of March 18th, 2018. With the arrival of Fiona Catherine Lazear, I had just become a Grandpa! That’s the night this book idea began to take shape. Strange how major life events seem to spawn others, seemingly unrelated. Or are they unrelated? Certainly, the arrival of the first grandchild reminds me that I’m not a “spring chicken” anymore. It is fair to say that recording my life history and that of oceanography for my family and my colleagues is an important motivation to write this book. That is needed on two counts: my immediate ancestors did not write their life history down for anyone to read, and oceanographers today may likewise fail to understand their roots. But there are larger reasons to write this tome. Where do big ideas come from? How do we conceive them? Do they matter for the future habitation of humans on this planet? The first two questions are largely beyond the scope of this book, but the third one will be addressed at some length in the ensuing chapters. Here in the foreword, I take a moment to take a stab at the first two questions in the context of my ancestors and genealogy. I suspect that most of us owe more to previous generations than we realize. The last Hoyt I know of to write a book on the history of the Hoyts was David Hoyt (Hoyt, 1871). That was a 620-page tome. I also suspect that our very future depends on our ability to formulate and solve the problems posed by the big ideas. Many of them have now earned the moniker “Wicked Problems” because they are complex and have no solutions within easy reach of a single discipline.