Table Of ContentJOHN
ISAACS
AND
HIS
OCEANS
by
Daniel Behrman
with
John D. Isaacs
American Geophysical Union
ICSU
Library of CongressC ataloging-in-PublicationD ata
Behrman, Daniel.
JohnI saacsa nd His Oceans/ by Daniel Behrmanw ith JohnD . Isaacs.
13. ClTI.
Includesb ibliographicarle ferencesa nd index.
ISBN 0-87590-769-5
1. Isaacs,J ohnD .- (JohnD ove) 2. Oceanographers(cid:127)UnitedS tates-
-Biography. I. Isaacs,J ohnD . (JohnD ove) II. Title
GC30.I87B44 1992
551.46'0092(cid:127)clc20
[(cid:127)] 90-28177
CIP
ISBN 0-87590-769-5
Copyright1 992A mericanG eophysicaUl nion. Shorte xcerptsm ay
be reprinted in scientificb ooks and journals if the sourcei s
properlyc ited;a ll other rightsr eserved.
Printed in the United States of America
American GeophysicalU nion
2000 Florida Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1 Seaso f Speculation ................... 1
Chapter 2 The Eyes of Isaacs. .................. 12
Chapter 3 A Man of Great HorizontalD epth ......... 18
Chapter 4 ManmadeC ataclysms. ................ 28
Chapter 5 Natural Cataclysms .................. 40
Chapter 6 Water: Fresh and Salt ................. 49
Chapter 7 Deep-SeaM ooringsa nd Skyhooks. ........ 60
Chapter 8 Non-ArchimedeanB odies .............. 69
Chapter 9 The Great Machine .................. 77
Chapter 10 With HeatedB ody .................. 85
Chapter 11 To Bring the Knowledgeo f the Sea ....... 92
Chapter 12 A Stopwatcha nd a Ruler ............. 106
Chapter 13 Are the OceansD ying? .............. 119
Chapter 14 Views From the Sun and Elsewhere ...... 129
Chapter 15 Isaacst he Fisherman. ............... 140
Chapter 16 Isaacst he Engineer. ................ 163
Chapter 17 The Frog in the Cereal .............. 176
Chapter 18 A JoyousM emorial ................ 194
Curriculum Vitae ......................... 205
Bibliography ............................. 207
Index .................................
Foreword
I appreciate having been asked to prepare a foreword for this book, the
story of a friend written by a friend. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, both
subject and author are gone, and I am left with my memories of both. John
Isaacs I knew from the late 1940sw hen we were both at the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography, I as a neophyte oceanographer and he as an equipment
inventor and designer. We had frequent contact during the next 25 years,
particularly with respect to the marine life research in which I was also at least
peripherally engaged. As long as I knew him, he continued energetically and
imaginatively to generate ideas and projects on widely diverse topics. It was
remarkably stimulating and at the same time frustrating to work with John,his
scintillation of ideas was as overpoweringa s was his disinterest in the mundane
details in which we ploddersw ere enmeshed.
Dan Behrman I met under other circumstances,d uring a period in the
early 1960s in UNESCO Paris where he was a staff writer on scientific subjects
and I a fonctionnaire in the Office of Oceanography. Dan discovered the
fascination of oceanographya nd applied his excitement to highlight the new
programs that we were trying to initiate. A major book of his, New World of the
Oceans,w as later devotedt o oceanography. It was in writing that book that he
first met Isaacs, "a big man, well over six feet, with a trim white beard and a full
head of rumpled white hair."
Dan had a saucy writing style, based in large part on personal interviews,
which is highly readable and effective in getting acrosss cientific ideas. Years
later, when I learned that he was going to La Jolla to work with John Isaacs, I
thought it was an ideal pairing of very different but effective talents.
After John Isaacsd ied, the bookw as completedb ut remained unpublished
for several years. I have been keen to have it made widely available, as a
portrait of a remarkable man whose stimulating ideas not only influenced a
generationo f studentsa nd fellow workers in La Jolla but also were
Just as the sea is a
challenget o sciencea s we
now know it, so it is a
challenget o our institutions
as they now exist.
Understandingo f the sea,
and the weldingt ogethero f
fragmented disciplinesi nto
a comprehensives cience,
shouldr eflectu pono ther
sciences, education and our
social institutions.
Education will come to
discover how to nurture and
developa ttributeso f the
intellect still too often
neglected(cid:127)
conceptualizationi,n tuition,
curiosityj,u dgmenta nd
perhaps eveni ntellectual
fervor. With these
exampleso, ur social
sciences will come to
recognizet he necessityo f
assemblingth eir own
disciplinesi nto a coherent
wholef or the guidanceo f
mankind.
(cid:127)John D.
Seas of Speculation
On one of the yellow pads where he had been listing topics for possible
inclusion into the book he hoped to write when he retired, John Isaacs left a
short note:
The spangle of existence-A glimpse
between the infinity of two oblivions-
The priceless privilege of the glimpse
As an oceanographer,I saacs availed himself of the privilege. He let his
mind soar on wings of curiosity that can'ied him over the moats of scientific
disciplines. He was trained as neither marine geologist nor physical
oceanographern or marine biologist,b ut he could be any and all. He thought the
study of the oceans was not to be stuffed into such compartments. To
understand the sea, legend and literature were as important as echo sounders
and plankton nets. Only minds ready to entertain possibilities at the brink of
plausibility could hope to grasp anything so far from earthly experience. If they
could make such a leap, then they would be fit to cope with other problems
besetting the planet.
Others made the leap with him. At Scripps Institution of Oceanography
in La Jolla, California, a student of his once said he could no longer enjoy the
colors of the sunset or the play of a running stream without wondering why.
Isaacs obliged one to query and seek explanation along with enjoyment. On top
of the cliffs that verge the Pacific in Ton'ey Pines State Reserve,j ust north of La
Jolla, it is easy to imagine oneself as he might have at the blunted spearhead of
the great western thrust of humanity on the American continent
2 Seas of Speculation
relished melodrama). The sand plume billowing in the sea beyondt he surf zone
leads to speculation. How long will the cliffs last before they, too, join the sand
plume, these bluffs hardly more permanent than a passing observerd espite the
assurances of southern California's final frontiersman, the beachfront clifftop
realtor? A snowfield of foam heaving behind the breakers does not just take
one's mind for a random walk on water (Isaacs loved puns even more than
melodrama). It stirs his sort of inquiries: How doest he roar of surf affect those
sea creatures that depend on sound as we do on light? What do foam bubbles
inject into the atmosphere when they explode? Do the relict highwater marks
on the cliffs indicate that the land has emerged, or do they show where the sea
once stood during a more clement age when no water was locked away in
glaciers and polar icecaps? Will the sea rise again if we melt the ice by burning
fossil fuels to add to the greenhouse effect, or should we burn all the more
merrily to ward off the return of an ice age?
Isaacs constantly asked such questions, postulated theories and stirred
conjecture to brush new details into the picture of the planet and the cosmosh e
was putting together. This sea of speculations urged and swelled in an infinity
of ways. A professor of oceanography at Scripps, part of the University of
California at San Diego, he belonged to the National Academy of Sciences,t he
National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of A(cid:127)s and
Sciences,a rare distinction. Yet he had none of the usual graduate degrees: in
his formal education he never went beyond the bachelor of science degree he
finally acquired at the age of thirty-one. He was largely self-taught as an
oceanographer,l ike many of his generation who experiencedt he sea before they
studied it. Isaacs stepped from the bridge of a fishing boat off the Oregon coast
into his professorial chair at Scripps, which claims to be the world's premier
oceanographici nstitution.
He was something of an institution himself. His dimensionsw ere oceanic:
he stood six feet three, imposing in beam and mien with flowing white hair and
a trim beard. The outpouring of his ideas was on the same scale. They are part
of the folklore of the world oceanographicc ommunity and they were said to have
kept Scripps going for twenty years. He had no qualms about rambling into
another's specialty. Sometimes he was appreciated, often he was resented; he
was never ignored. He managed to spin into a single web the manifold
intellectual pursuits that go under the heading of oceanography. At Scripps and
at scientific get-togethers everywhere, he played this part for more than thirty
years while his audiences wondered what he would come up with next. He was
so very conspicuousb y his absencea t the Joint OceanographicA ssemblyh eld at
Halifax in 1982, two years after his death. Marine geologists, physicists,
biologists,o r chemists told of advancesb ut they spoke to their own kind without
trying to build bridges. Times have changed since Isaacs' prime, when money
chased ideas. Now scientists chase grants and they have little taste for
ex(cid:127)tradisciplinary travel and its meager professionalr ewards. So many potential
Isaacses must beaver away at proposal-writing instead of turning loose their
minds to explore new territory.
In the light of hindsight, Isaacs' presciencei s uncanny. He was among the
first to recommend that high-level radioactive wastes be buried deep in the
sediments of ocean basins where, so the theory of plate tectonics tells us,
Seas of Speculation 3
will slumber undisturbed for millions of years. Identifying such sites has
becomea cottage industry for marine geologists. In 1959 Isaacs saw a presage
of climatic change on the scale of the Pacific Ocean and the entire planet in the
appearance of unusually warm water off the California coast. This was a
change similar in kind if not degreet o the great E1 Nifio event of 1982-83, but
Isaacs reached his conclusionw ithout benefit of satellites and computers, using
only his eyes and mind. When his baited deep-sea camera caught pictures of
animals on what had been considered lifeless bottom beneath the desert of the
central Pacific, he wondered if perhaps the desert was not all that deserted.
Conventional food chain theory could not explain how so little life on top could
support so much below. The search for an answer still goes on. Biologists
suspect that their long-standing measurements of marine plant productivity
may be ten times too low, with the differencea ccountedf or by plants less than a
millionth of a meter in size, too small to be taken by the filters in their nets.
Among his infinity of ideas was a hydrogen breath heater for divers to
stave off coldb y warming their breathing mixture instead of their suits. Only in
1985 did it take unexpecteds hape as a lightweight device to fight hypothermia
in cold regions and on high mountains. It is one of the few children of his brain
to tu(cid:127)m into anything marketable, a goal quite remote from his concerns.
Outside oceanography,I saacs was equally adept at spotting future trends.
His was almost a lone voice crying out in the late seventies against Smokey the
Bear and the anti-fire crusade in national forests. Now it is recognized, despite
the outcry over Yellowstone in 1988, that fire is essential if animals, including
Smokey's kin, are to survive and if the forests are to stay healthy. He was a
precursor of the current controversyb etween evolutionists and catastrophists.
Isaacs looked to sudden, unexpected events as the principal engine of change,
whether the hurricane that upsets the ecology of an estuary or the giant
meteorite that may or may not have led to the demise of the dinosaurs. No
matter that his hunches could not be proved; suchj umps got the specialist out of
his comfortabler ut. Long before the present furor over the quality of education,
Isaacs wondered why bright young scientistsj ust out of graduate school could
not be convinced to spend a year or two leading high school students into a
scientificv ocation,t hereby prefiguring a program now operating in thirty-three
states. He was one of the fathers of the California Sea Grant program, the
largest of its kind in the country, and he took such goodc are of his offspring that
it survived all attempts by the Reagan administration to starve it of funds.
Isaacs saw Sea Grant as a way to bring oceanographyt o smaller universities
and those who make their living on or near the sea. He was an elitist, which
isn't rare these days, but he thought that noblessed amn well doeso blige, which
is truly rare.
Some of Isaacs' wildest ideas have been tamed by time. In 1949 he
suggested towing an Antarctic iceberg north to supply water to southern
California and other coastal deserts. The size of what can be transported by
water, he maintained, is limited only by the thinking of man, that timorous land
dweller. It was many years before his proposal got farther than the Sunday
supplements. With a hotter, drier climate predicted for the western United
States in the 1990s if and when the greenhousee ffect takes hold, something at
least this drastic will have to be done to save irrigated agriculture there.
4 Seas of Speculation
there is the possibility of the western Antarctic ice shelf slipping into the Ross
Sea. Somewhere on a cloud, Isaacs must be figuring on a yellow pad how to use
that ice gradually before it swamps us.
Among Isaacs' ideas, a few were truly outrageous; he prefen'ed to risk
ridicule or failure rather than take small, sure steps to a modest goal. He had a
marine mind that could conjure up large effects from a multitude of small
causes. He once theorized that cars pushing against the atmosphere were
responsible for an increase in tornadoesi n the United States, a suggestiont hat
certainly got the attention of the meteorologicalp rofession.
Looking at the ocean'sw aves from one standpoint, he saw a reservoir of
renewable energy and a way to drive a ship, slowly but fuellessly; from another,
he thought he could tame them with a floating moveableb reakwater that used
their strength against them. He decried the energy that must be used to desalt
seawater; reversing the problem, he estimated the energy that must be released
when fresh rivers meet the salt sea. It worked out to be similar to their
hydroelectric potential. He went on with his calculations to show that the
salinity of the salt domes in which oil is trapped is a potential source of energy
greater than the oil itself.
He had encountered life in the sea as a fisherman, first as a small boy at a
beach and later commercially. As an oceanographer,h e set out to learn more. A
trawl he devised brought new speciesu p from midwater; then he sent cameras
and fish traps to the bottom as free vehicles with no lines to the surface. The
cameras came back with evidence of teeming roiling life, eyelessh agfish and
monster sharks at depths onceb elieved barren.
Isaacs liked to take a simple mechanical principle and bring it up to
cosmic dimensions. The angular momentum in the slingshot David used to fell
Goliath could be applied in a rotating hose to bail out a rowboat or to pump
water for a Third World farmer with a windmill contrived from perhaps three
old oil drums. Or else, it might maintain a long cable in outer space,a literal
sky hook to lift cargoes and passengersi nto orbit. Such a cable, he hinted,
might be a way to get useful energy out of the rotation of the earth. There were
no limits to his oneiric engineering.
Isaacs never courted easy popularity as an alarmist. He regarded the
ocean not as a pristine natural environment easily defiled by man but as the
greatest of deserts that could only welcome a careful yet massive introduction of
our organic wastes. He regarded the problem as a sea-being might: terrestrial
creatures bury and hide their wastes, the animals of the ocean eat and drink
theirs. Isaacs saw in the landsman's repulsions a law of the sea. Landsmen's
sentiments can be misplaced there as well. The public hue and cry that led to
the Marine Mammals Act and tuna fishermen protecting the porpoise
amounted, in Isaacs' eyes, to ordaining that farmers preserve coyotes. Besides,
porpoises and other marine mammals do not play the ocean'sg ame. They
nurture and guard the young they bear alive insteado f tossingt hem as eggsa nd
larvae into the sea's foodp ool where adult sardinesm ay feed on the offspringo f
the barracuda (as if rabbits were eating tiger cubs).
The military appreciated Isaacs't urn of mind. Their problemsa ppealedt o
his love of games, particularly chessa nd its fearsomed erivative, Kriegspiel, in
which the player cannot see his adversary'sp ieces. With gusto, Isaacs turned
Seas of Speculation 5
the Navy's minesweeping problems, defending against the unexpected or
creating it. Manmade or natural, cataclysmsa ttracted him. He had measured
the effects of nuclear explosionsi n the Pacific from the first Bikini test onwards.
They led to more ideas: an early suggestionf or nuclear-excavated harbors on
the sort of coast where he had nearly lost his life as a shipwrecked fisherman;
later, to his plea to entomb nuclear wastes far below the deep sea bottom.
I first met Isaacs at Scripps in 1967. Finding him was not that easy. His
dual role as professor of oceanography and head of the Marine Life Research
Group brought so many people to his door that he often worked at home, letting
his imagination flourish along with the hundreds of trees and shrubs that he
and his family had planted on their thirteen-acre domain in Rancho Santa Fe,
described by a local magazine as a rustic castle. When I did meet him in his
office, I had a chance to note the titles on the bookshelf closest to his desk: The
Cornpleat Angler by Izaak Walton, The Outline of History by H. G. Wells, The
Devilfs Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, Rogetfs Thesaurus, Textbook of
Toxicology, Applied Fluid Mechanics, Paleontology of the Marine Tertiary
Formations of Oregon and Washington, Marine Boring and Fouling Organisms,
The Voice of the Dolphins by Leo Szilard, and Eight Great Tragedies. A
dartboard was hanging on.the wall oppositeh is desk.
I gave up on the books and tried to guess the purpose of the dartboard.
"Decision-making," Isaacs said, trying to be helpful. I asked how he could stay
interested in so many subjects. "There'sn othing unusual about that. Any boy's
mind works the same way. As children, we are interested in everything. A boy
looks at nature and asks questions. For a long time, scientists did the same.
They were men of the world, interested in many things. They tried to put them
together, they looked at people and nature. Then, in the last 150 years, they
became impressedb y the so-called scientific method. They strove for certainty
by analysis-maybe people fixed on certainty when they grew dubious about
their gods. They becameh ighly skilled specialists in taking things apart. After
nearly two centuries of analysis, we are now baffled by the task of putting even
moderately complex things together."
Isaacs had long prefigured the cmTent trend, nay rush, away from the
Cartesian reductionist approach to science and towards a holistic view of the
universe-except that he might not have talked about it in such terms. He was
as suspiciouso f buzz words as he was of intellectual bandwagons. He tried to
get his ideas across in language a farmer or fisherman could understand (not
that he always succeeded). They had been the first to teach him about the land
and sea, and he thought such people could be good teachers. Formal education
offered little hope for putting the human race back on the right track. "Every so
often, I am depressedw hen I see a big fruit orchard. They want an orange that
ships well and sells in a grocerys tore. Some seedlingsm ay have the capacity to
produce fruit like the nectar of the gods, but the growers decapitate them and
graft them onto a useful product. God knows what potentials are hidden
beneath the ground, never to fruit. The education of human beings is being
carried on commerciallyi n the same way: it seekst o replicate the people of the
past with reasonable improvements. But where are the new varieties? Let
many of the seedlings grow, even if nine-tenths of them are wizened." At
