The life and loves of Scripps icon Walter Munk

Oceanographer Walter Munk
Oceanographer Walter Munk — Mike Lee

Walter Munk got into marine science more than 70 years ago through a side door.

He was smitten by a girl whose grandparents lived in La Jolla so he moved from Cal Tech in Pasadena and talked his way into a summer job at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1939. One thing led to another and a young Austrian man destined for a career in banking ended up becoming one of the 20th century’s top scientists.

“Our romance ended, but my romance with Scripps has gone on,” said Munk, 92.

He recently returned from Sweden, where he accepted a major international science award called the Crafoord Prize. In addition, the San Diego City Council is expected to declare Tuesday “Walter Munk Day” to honor “the world’s greatest living oceanographer.”

If Munk stays true to form, he will accept it with dry wit.

When asked whether he’s been at Scripps his whole life, Munk’s favorite answer is “Not quite yet.”

Question: What happened after your job at Scripps ended?

Answer: The next summer, I asked (Scripps director) Harald Sverdrup if I could become his student. He spent an eternal 10 seconds answering it, saying “I can’t think of a single job that will open up in the next 20 years in oceanography.”

I said, “I’ll take it.”

After that, (oceanography) sort of blew up, partly because of anti-submarine warfare. For a while I was offered two jobs every year.

Question: Do you wish you would have started your career today? You would have had enormously more technical capacity than you did in the 1940s, right?

Answer: I have nightmares that I have to do my Ph.D. over again. It’s much tougher (today). There’s much more competition. ... I went into an age when it was very simple to be successful. We now have 250 students at Scripps and I was the only student for some years. I was the student body. We voted unanimously on all matters.

Question: Your career was mainly centered on the use of acoustics in the ocean?

Answer: No, I really didn’t do any acoustics until (the late 1970s). I worked on other problems. I came into (oceanography) during the war. I worked on predicting ocean waves for amphibious landings and that was successful. It started with our landings in northwest Africa, and then Normandy and then the whole Pacific Theater of war, which was brutal and the landings were very difficult. ... We played a significant role in helping win it.

Question: So you were really dealing with predicting wave patterns and tides?

Answer: Those are two separate subjects. Tides, of course, had been predicted for years. Waves had never been predicted. I am sure of that. The way you do it is you start with weather maps, you compute the dimensions of the waves at the end of a storm ... Then you have to allow for the fact that a storm might be many many thousands of miles away from you and you try to calculate the decay as the waves travel.


