Remembrances of Walter C. Pitman III, by Steven Cande
Walter Pitman had an enormous influence on my scientific career. He hired me in late August of 1970 as a research assistant with the understanding that I would go out on the R/V Conrad a few months later to oversee the acquisition of magnetics data, about which I knew nothing, relieving John LaBrecque who was currently on the ship. After working at Lamont in the fall of 1970, then spending nearly seven months on the Conrad, I decided to continue on as a grad student under Walter’s guidance. I defended my thesis in December of 1976 and stayed on at Lamont as a research scientist until1992 when I accepted a teaching position at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. During the years that I was at Lamont I talked with Walter a lot, particularly in the later years when we shared rides driving to and from Manhattan where we both lived. We were good friends.
To understand why I was so grateful to Walter I need to first explain my situation when he hired me in August of 1970. I had graduated from Yale in June with a major in geology and geophysics but I had no plans to go to grad school or to continue in the field. It was the height of the Vietnam war and a very depressing time. I spent the summer working as an aid for my senior thesis advisor who taught a summer field course in ecology in Woods Hole. As the end of the summer approached I realized I had to get serious about finding a job for the fall. I decided to take a trip to NYC to see what I could find; as I came up on New Haven on my way to NY, on the spur of the moment I decided to swing by the Geology Department at Yale and see who was there. I ran into one of my former professors, Jim Walker, who had gotten his Ph.D at Lamont a few years earlier, and I told him that I was feeling lost and looking for a job. He told me that scientists at Lamont often hired young people to go out on one of Lamont’s ships and he offered to make a phone call. He went into his office and came out a few minutes later and told me that he had called Lynn Sykes and Lynn had told him that Walter Pitman was looking for someone to go out on the R/V Conrad. The next day I had an interview with Walter at Lamont and, shortly thereafter, he offered me a job as a research assistant.
When I started at Lamont a couple weeks later, Walter had me read several classic papers on plate tectonics including his 1966 paper on the Eltanin 19 profile and his 1968 paper on the magnetic polarity timescale. I was very impressed. Although I had learned about continental drift, plate tectonics and seafloor spreading in general at Yale, I had never read or even heard about the type of research that Walter was doing with magnetics data at Lamont (in fact I had barely heard of Lamont). It was a whole new world. He also suggested that for a research project I should look at the shapes (or, more specifically, the skewness) of magnetic anomalies. He pointed to a recent paper by Fred Vine who had looked at the shapes of 60 million year old anomalies in the North Pacific and showed that their skewness indicated the Pacific plate had drifted northwards by 20° or so. Walter wanted me to expand on this research and do the same thing for data from the South Pacific. I worked on this problem for the next couple of months, but it didn’t work out well. The South Pacific data suggested that the Pacific plate had moved southwards, not northwards. I showed the results to Walter and we looked at each other with puzzled expressions.
By then it was early December of 1970 and it was time for me to go out to sea on the Conrad and relieve John LaBrecque. Being at sea for an extended period of time was a unique experience. Before I left, Walter told me it would teach me how to deal with boredom. I found that I quickly got seasick when the weather turned bad, which it did on day one since we sailed from Cape Town and were headed to the Southern Oceans. I also learned that staring at the horizon would do wonders for nausea. Basically I was a watch stander. My tasks included digitizing all of the magnetics data as it came in and creating a database of digitized data points on punch cards. When the magnetometer acted up I was supposed to fix it but I knew so little about the system that I usually ended up turning to the gravity technician, who had been trained in the Navy, for help. By the time I got off the ship the following summer I had sailed about halfway around the world and seen a lot of ocean floor data.
Before leaving for the Conrad I had decided that I wanted to continue to work with Walter and I applied to grad school at Columbia. I was accepted while I was at sea and I started taking courses in the fall of 1971. Walter suggested that for a science project I should continue looking at the shapes of anomalies. I did and by December of 1976 I had published five papers which made up my Ph.D. thesis.
Walter was a remarkable mentor. In order to explain this, I need to describe the situation at Lamont in the early 1970’s. Compared to other oceanographic institutions, Lamont was in a unique position with lots of geophysical data from all oceans of the world. This was due to the foresight of Maurice Ewing, Lamont’s founder and director during the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s. He believed in collecting all types of data, even if it wasn’t obvious what it would tell you, and he believed it should be collected everywhere. When plate tectonics broke open in 1966 with Walter’s groundbreaking interpretation of the Eltanin 19 profile, Lamont was scientifically in a unique position to take advantage of the discovery. In just a few years Lamont scientists had written papers on all aspects of plate tectonics including plate motions in all of the major oceans. When Walter suggested that I look at the shapes of anomalies there was a gigantic untapped set of global data waiting to be analyzed.
The other unique aspect of Lamont in the early 1970’s was that there was a large group of very talented younger scientists, grad students, recent graduates, and visiting scientists who were eager to work with each other. For me that meant there was Walter’s other grad student John LaBrecque, Neil Opdyke’s student Dennis Kent, Manik Talwani’s student Yngve Kristoffersen and the visiting scientist Hans Schouten. With offices close to one another (Hans Schouten was my office mate, John LaBrecque had the office next to mine, Dennis Kent was upstairs, Yngve Kristoffersen downstairs) we interacted a lot.
When I started as a grad student in the fall of 1971 Walter was still incredibly busy pumping out the initial great papers of plate tectonics including a classic paper with Manik Talwani on the relative motions of Africa, North America and Europe (the key to the geology of the Alps!), a paper on the global distribution of Mesozoic anomalies with Roger Larson (the age of the rest of the ocean basins!), another classic paper on the implication of spreading rate variations for sea level changes with Jim Hays, and a global magnetic lineation map with other members of the magnetics group. This made for a very exciting office environment in which there were maps and plots and ideas and visitors all over the place. But it also meant that Walter did not actually have time for focusing on the topic that he had suggested for me – looking at the shapes of anomalies. When I looked back at it a little later I realized that my scientific interactions with Walter were actually few and far between, especially when compared with some of the other grad students who were having fairly frequent meetings with their advisors, sometimes every week. For me (and I believe for John LaBrecque), this was not the case.
However, I soon realized that a scientist who knew a lot about the theoretical aspects of anomaly shapes, which Walter really didn’t know too much about, was sitting at the desk next to mine. Walter had paired me up with a young visiting Dutch scientist, Hans Schouten, who had recently finished writing his thesis on, well, the theoretical aspects of anomaly shapes. Working with Hans (who was working on a classic paper with Keith McCamy in the seismology group) led eventually to two papers that explained the reason the shapes of the anomalies in the South Pacific disagreed with the anomaly shapes in the North Pacific. This work attracted Dennis Kent who had a great idea that addressed the anomaly shape puzzle (and formed the basis of another paper). And since John LaBrecque was next door and also working on anomaly shapes, we ended up collaborating on our own paper. While all of this was going on I sometimes felt that my relationship with Walter could be characterized as a case of benign neglect. But later I was extremely grateful to Walter for letting my career unfold the way it did because I realized that I had learned a lot more than most students did about how science really works.
This brief description of my grad school days doesn’t fully express the importance of Walter to my career. Walter was always there for me. When I felt stuck and thought that he might be able to shed some light on a problem, I could just walk into his office and ask him for his opinion. He would usually come up with some good ideas for things to try. Perhaps most importantly Walter created an enormously exciting place to work on scientific problems. He was always telling stories, usually with a lot of humor. These stories might be about things that happened during his time at sea on the Vema or during his early days at Lamont. Other stories would be about the reactions of scientists at Lamont and elsewhere to his Eltanin 19 discovery (Maurice Ewing was very skeptical of Walter’s interpretation as was Ewing’s deputy director Joe Worzel, just to name two people). Or they might be about his time in the army in the early 1950s or in college, or, really, anything. He was a great storyteller.
One of the great things about Walter is that you could see that he felt there was much more to life than just science. Administrative meetings and administrative positions were not important but friendships were very important. This was another lesson I took to heart. In the 1980s Walter and I oftened carpooled between the City and Lamont because we lived near each other in Manhattan. We had fascinating discussions and we became good friends. After moving to San Diego I missed seeing Walter but I would visit him every time I made a trip back to NYC. He truly had a profound influence on my life.