Walter Pitman, prototype of the Lamont man
“The pity of it, Iago, o Iago, the pity of it, Iago”. When Bill Ryan let me know that the Memorial Symposium for Walter was going to be virtual, this lamentation of Othello invaded my mind! What a pity for Walter, a man of communication, who loved so much human contact. Is it possible to celebrate Walter Pitman virtually? For you, I do not know. For me, I feel uncomfortable and shortchanged.
The message I wanted to give to this symposium is very simple. Walter was a true “Lamont man” of the Maurice Ewing time. He was first and ever a data man, the kind of data you acquire yourself with your hands, with all your body, all your ingeniousness, team work, anywhere at sea, but especially where nobody had been to collect them. The world ocean was wide open and one knew so little. The Lamont men had to go and put all their energy in weeks of hard labor at sea to bring back the precious data that they would immediately process themselves. They did not know what the data would reveal. These data were part of the fog of unknown that they were trying to dissolve. Speculations on the data might come later. And that will be fun. But the job was to get the data and to process them. It did not matter that one did not know the use of collecting single track magnetic anomalies. Serious people devised systematic dense surveys and frowned on this kind of un-programmed haphazard scientific planning. The ship was going there. You had to collect whatever you could collect.
And then came the divine surprise of the magical profile that Walter brought back from the Eltanin cruise in the southern Pacific Ocean! This type of surprise was the bounty that Lamont people were after. Suddenly, coming out of this tedious trove of data accumulated in a routine way, would emerge the unexpected, what nobody would ever imagine. The magic profile displayed the extraordinary symmetry about the ridge crest that one could not even have dreamed of. Nobody had ever imagined that such symmetry could exist on Earth. And there, Walter really got excited. He started full steam, building on this unique insight. The key to unlock the organization and history of the world ocean had been found. That immediately became clear to him. But as a typical Lamont man, his first reflex was to share his discovery and insight and integrate it within a new team work. Team work for collecting the data, team work for processing it, team work for interpreting it. This was Lamont.
Deciphering the ages of the oceans introduced Walter to the history of the Earth. He discovered the extraordinary excitement of reconstructing the past of our planet with new solid data that provided a completely new insight. This part physicist, part engineer developed a taste for geology buoyed by the enthusiasm of John Dewey and the association with Bill Ryan that would become an important new development in his intellectual journey. This led to a plate tectonic look to the alpine system, a landmark in this immense domain.
He had begun discovering that the oceans played a key role in the evolution of the continents. It is not surprising then that he moved to the most obvious interactions of the oceans with the continents, which are the changes of sea level. Starting from the most hidden cause of sea level change, totally ignored at the time, which was the proposal by Jim Hayes and himself that the intensity of spreading could modulate the change of level of the ocean by changing the average depth of the ocean. He then moved to the causes of the rapid modulation of the rising and regressing shore lines related to the glaciation-deglaciation effect on the volume of the sea. It is no surprise then that next would come the interpretation of the massive flooding event around the Black Sea as “the Noah’s flood”, that Bill Ryan and himself published in a highly popular book, moving from science for scientists to science for everybody and anybody.
Throughout his intellectual journey, Walter collected recognition of his work in the form of numerous prizes and medals. But scientific success did not change his approach of life. In a sense, it was an aside to his life of bubbling discoveries always made in a context of friendly cooperation looking to life as something you build with others. He thus became the living proof that Lamont men are not just men of hard labor. They are men who have learned how to cooperate to enlarge their intellectual horizon and enrich the world of their discoveries built on solid data accumulated through hard work.
Good bye, Walter. You indeed were a true Lamont man.
Xavier Le Pichon
Collège de France