Munk, Walter

Walter Munk, in full Walter Heinrich Munk, (born October 19, 1917, Vienna, Austria—died February 8, 2019, San Diego, California, U.S.), Austrian-born American oceanographer whose pioneering studies of ocean currents and wave propagation laid the foundations for contemporary oceanography.

The child of a wealthy family, Munk was born and raised in Vienna. He moved to Lake George, N.Y., in 1932 to attend boarding school, as his parents hoped to prepare him for a career in banking. He worked in banking for several years but grew dissatisfied and left to take classes at Columbia University. After earning a bachelor’s degree (1939) in physics from the California Institute of Technology, Munk convinced Harald Sverdrup, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, Los Angeles, to give him a summer job. By 1940 he had earned a master’s degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and by 1947 had completed a doctorate in oceanography at Scripps. After graduation Scripps hired him as an assistant professor of geophysics. He became a full professor there in 1954 and was made a member of the University of California’s Institute of Geophysics.

Distressed by the1938 occupation of Austria by Germany, Munk had applied for U.S. citizenship and enlisted in the U.S. Army prior to completing his doctorate. From 1939 to 1945 he joined several of his colleagues from Scripps at the U.S. Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory, where they developed methods related to amphibious warfare. Their method for predicting and dealing with waves was carried out successfully by the Allied forces on D-Day (June 6, 1944) during the Normandy invasion. In 1946 Munk helped to analyze the currents, diffusion, and water exchanges at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, where the United States was testing nuclear weapons. Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, he spent a portion of 1949 at the University of Oslo studying the dynamics of ocean currents. Throughout the 1950s Munk studied the effect of geophysical processes on the wobble in Earth’s rotation, publishing the seminal results in The Rotation of the Earth: A Geophysical Discussion (with G.J.F. MacDonald, 1960).

In 1959 Munk began campaigning for the creation of what would become the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) at Scripps. He directed the institute until 1982. Munk worked on the Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment (MODE) from 1965 to 1975; it resulted in significant improvement in the accuracy of tide prediction. Waves Across the Pacific, a 1967 documentary, depicted his study of how waves generated by storms in the Southern Hemisphere travel through the rest of the world’s oceans. In 1968 he became a member of JASON, a panel of scientists who advised the U.S. government.

Beginning in 1975, Munk had begun experimenting with the use of acoustic tomography, which uses sound waves to generate images of water. This culminated in the 1991 Heard Island experiment, in which sound signals were transmitted from instruments 150 metres (492 feet) below the ocean’s surface to receivers around the world. The project used the speed at which the signals transmitted to measure the temperature of the water. He cowrote the definitive volume on the subject, Ocean Acoustic Tomography (1995). Munk was named Secretary of the Navy Research Chair in Oceanography in 1984 and continued to research the implications of global warming for the oceans as part of the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) project from 1996 to 2006.

Munk was the recipient of the Royal Astronomical Society’s 1968 Gold Medal and the American Geophysical Union’s 1989 William Bowie Medal, among others. He became the first recipient of the annual Walter Munk Award, given in his honour by The Oceanography Society and several naval offices, in 1993. In 1999 he won the 15th annual Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences for his work in physical oceanography and geophysics; he became the first in his field to be honoured with this award.