Oceanographer aided D-Day landings and understanding of climate change

Walter Munk, who has died aged 101, was a world-renowned oceanographer who helped ensure the safety and success of Allied beach landings during World War II by devising ways to forecast the waves, and who fired what became known as the underwater ‘‘sound heard around the world’’ in search of greater understanding of climate change.

He died at his home in San Diego, California, from pneumonia, his wife Mary said.

Long associated with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, Munk was one of the most celebrated oceanographers of his era – devoting nearly eight decades to unravelling such questions as where waves begin, why they may break violently or wash ashore gently, how sound travels thousands of kilometres through water, and what that might reveal about the global ecosystem.

His ‘‘genius lay in divining the interlocked patterns beneath the seeming clutter and chaos of the world’s oceans’’, Josh Horwitz, who profiled Munk in his book War of the

Whales, wrote in an email. ‘‘He was revered in equal measure by surfers and navy admirals for his oracular ability to predict when far-off waves would break on beaches.’’

Much like the surfers of popular imagination, Munk found a home on the beaches of California, where he had fled to avoid a life on Wall Street. Born in Vienna to an affluent banking family, he had come to the United States in the early 1930s to attend a boarding school in New York and to carry on the family profession. But he soon discovered that he despised banking, bought a convertible and set out for the West Coast.

He abandoned finance for science, eventually landing at Scripps, where he apprenticed himself to the director, Harald Sverdrup, a leading oceanographer of his day.

In 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria and accelerated a campaign of anti-Semitic persecution. Munk, whose family had Jewish roots, became a US citizen and served briefly in the army before beginning what would be his seminal research for the navy.

Munk credited Sverdrup with playing a leading role in the development of wave forecasting, which military strategists used in the planning of the amphibious landing on North Africa in 1942, in the Normandy invasion in 1944 and throughout the Pacific.

The publication New Scientist credited Munk with saving ‘‘countless lives by helping the Allied military determine when troops could make amphibious landings without being swamped by big surf hundreds of metres from a hostile shore’’.

Later in his career he attracted wide attention, and some controversy, by using ocean acoustics to measure ocean

Walter Munk, in response to being called the ‘Einstein of the oceans’.

Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz temperatures, and thus to better understand climate change.

‘‘Munk had an idea,’’ Enric Sala, a marine ecologist and National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, wrote in an email, describing an experiment Munk led near Heard Island, in the southern Indian Ocean, in 1991. Understanding sound travels faster in warm water than in cold water, Munk sent low-frequency sounds through the ocean. Even the test signal was detected in Bermuda.

‘‘I still can’t believe that happened,’’ he told the San Diego Union-Tribune years later. ‘‘We hadn’t even started the main experiment.’’

Through the experiment, Sala said, Munk ‘‘was able to prove at such large scales for the first time that different oceans were warming at different speeds’’. Such acoustic tests encountered some opposition from marine biologists who feared they might interfere with migratory patterns of whales and other animals.

For his work’s wide-ranging nature and applications, Munk was dubbed the ‘‘Einstein of the oceans’’, a comparison he rejected. ‘‘Einstein was a great man,’’ he once told the

Union-Tribune. ‘‘I was never on that level.’’

Walter Heinrich Munk was born to a father who served for a time as chauffeur to Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. Years later, in an interview with the New York Times,

Munk recalled his father had ‘‘the only RollsRoyce in Vienna’’.

He attended the California Institute of Technology, where he gained a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1939 and a master’s in geophysics in 1940, and the University of California at Los Angeles, where he received a doctorate in oceanography in 1947.

After the war, Munk provided scientific support for nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll. ‘‘It’s stunning; it’s horrible,’’ he told the Associated Press years later. ‘‘It’s not dark, it’s quite white. You see the boiling and the water vapour above you, like a curtain coming down all around you.’’

Throughout the Cold War and beyond, he served with the Jasons, a group of scientists advising the US military.

Munk’s honours included the National Medal of Science, bestowed on him by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, and a 1999 Kyoto Prize in basic sciences. –

‘‘Einstein was a great man. I was never on that level.’’