Roger Revelle, Founder of UCSD, Is Dead at 82 : Science: The renowned oceanographer helped put forth the theories of global warming and plate tectonics.
SAN DIEGO — Roger Revelle, the internationally renowned oceanographer who warned of global warming 30 years before greenhouse effect became a household term, died Monday of complications related to a heart attack. He was 82.
Revelle, who is credited as the man who brought a University of California campus to San Diego, was visiting his doctor at UCSD Medical Center last week when he suffered cardiac arrest. He remained in critical condition until 1:20 p.m. Monday, when he died with his wife and four children at his bedside, according to Nancy Stringer, a university spokeswoman.
In February, 1990, Revelle had triple coronary bypass surgery and a heart valve replacement at the medical center. But the professor emeritus had recovered well from that surgery and gone back to work.
“The family is grateful for the last year and a half of life my father enjoyed due to the extraordinary and humanitarian care received at UCSD Medical Center,” Revelle’s son, William Revelle, said in a statement Monday.
Around the country, Revelle’s colleagues and friends lauded him as a visionary who embraced many disciplines and had a knack for applying science to everyday human problems.
“He was quite a statesman about science,” said Clark Kerr, a former president of the University of California, who worked with Revelle to establish UCSD.
Ever modest, Revelle once said he was “not a great scientist. I am an initiator. . . . Maybe I’m not (as) good at ending things.”
When it came to getting something off the ground, however, Revelle was king.
In San Diego, he is best known as the major force behind a long and difficult struggle to persuade the UC Board of Regents to build a campus in La Jolla in the late 1950s.
He also is credited with turning the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from a small marine research station into the largest facility of its kind in the country.
Around the world, Revelle was recognized as a pioneer in more than one scientific field. Known for his broad interests--deep-sea exploration, atmospheric science and population biology, to name a few--Revelle became an oceanographer during an era in which nearly every dive brought an exciting discovery, several of them his.
During the late 1950s, Revelle and another researcher wrote a paper about the effects of carbon dioxide on the climate, a key element in the global warming theory. Other studies in which he participated are linked to the modern geological theory of plate tectonics.
But, in addition to his scientific achievements, Revelle is remembered for setting an inspiring example.
“For him, science had no seams. He did not recognize the boundaries of disciplines,” said James Arnold, a professor of chemistry at UCSD whom Revelle recruited from Princeton University in 1960. “He was a humanist. For him, science was always in the service of humanity, to relieve suffering, to make human lives better--that . . . made him the international figure that he was, setting the example that some people were able to follow.”
To those who knew Revelle, the selfless way he applied himself to science was characteristic of his gentle manner.
Conspicuously tall but unassuming in demeanor, the 6-foot-4-inch scientist spoke softly, choosing his words with care and giving credit to others before himself. Once lauded as one of the world’s foremost scientists-statesmen, he still called his secretary “Boss.”
“He was a wonderful, friendly person,” said John Knauss, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who was a graduate student of Revelle’s. “He was always called Roger--by the janitors, the graduate students, everybody.”
Roger Randall Dougan Revelle was born in Seattle but soon grew to consider himself a Californian. He was raised in Pasadena, and earned a degree in geology from Pomona College in Claremont in 1929 and began his graduate work at UC Berkeley.
Attracted by the idea of “being a sailor and a scientist at the same time,” Revelle switched from geology to oceanography in graduate school. “In geology you have to climb cliffs a lot, and I was scared of heights,” he once said of the career change.
In 1931, having transferred to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, he married Ellen Virginia Clark, a La Jolla native and member of the prominent Scripps publishing family. She is a grandniece of Ellen Browning Scripps and Edward Willis Scripps, for whom the institution is named.
In 1936, when he received his Ph.D in oceanography, he was one of only five Scripps graduates that year. He became an instructor there, and a dozen years later was promoted to professor.
During World War II, Revelle served in the Naval Reserve, first in San Diego and then as officer in charge of the oceanographic section of the Bureau of Ships. Having participated in the creation of the Office of Naval Research, he headed its Geophysics Branch from 1946 to 1948.
His projects there included measuring the oceanographic effects of Operation Crossroads, the 1946 atomic bomb tests on Bikini Atoll.
In 1948, Revelle returned to Scripps as associate director. From 1951 to 1964, he was director of the facility. During that period, he supervised several expeditions that revealed startling facts about the ocean floor.
One study of how heat flowed under the sea led Revelle and his colleagues to suggest that molten earth was moving under a thin layer of bedrock. That discovery was linked to the theory of plate tectonics, the idea that the surface of the Earth is composed of giant, continent-size plates that drift around the globe.
Also during this period, Revelle first became concerned about the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
In 1957, he and another Scripps researcher, Hans Seuss, wrote a paper sounding the alarm: Although microscopic organisms on the ocean’s surface absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, they wrote, the ocean was not going to bail out the human race. Revelle would later acknowledge that he was the “granddaddy” of the theory of global warming.
Walter Munk, a professor at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps, recalled this research as Revelle’s legacy.
“For Roger, one scientific idea led to another. . . . Typical of this was the greenhouse effect, which he really invented, which he was the first to sense was happening, to consider the implications,” Munk said in a 1990 interview. “If it weren’t for him getting the carbon dioxide observation started . . . there would be significant differences today at the highest levels of world governments” in terms of how they approach global warming.
From 1958 to 1961, Revelle was a strong advocate for establishing a UC campus in San Diego. His approach was a novel one: to build a university from the graduate level down. He established the School of Science and Engineering, of which he was dean, and simultaneously built a group of undergraduate colleges.
He would later reflect that, among his original goals for UCSD, was to make it “fully involved with the world . . . neither an ivory tower nor a citadel of learning, but rather a cathedral in the heart of the human city. And, like a cathedral, it would be constantly building and changing, never completed or closed.”
Boosted by the nation’s post-Sputnik interest in science and education, Revelle was successful in building such a place. Remembered as a “master recruiter,” he stopped at nothing to lure distinguished faculty members, often inviting sought-after candidates on the East Coast to visit La Jolla during the winter.
In 1957, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, which would later award him its Agassiz Medal for outstanding achievement. Revelle was cited for promoting understanding of oceanic processes and the geology of the sea floor, as well as for “the stimulus he has given, through his research and special efforts, to the advance of scientific oceanography throughout the world.”
But, when the UC regents passed over Revelle for the post of UCSD chancellor, the disappointed scholar changed course, taking a leave of absence and channeling his energies away from the natural sciences and toward the social ones.
From 1961 to 1963, he occupied the newly created post of science adviser to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, a job that turned his attention to the problems of poverty in developing countries.
President Kennedy appointed him head of a panel working to help increase agricultural productivity in West Pakistan, where farmers battled the debilitating effects of salt in the soil. And, in 1963, he was one of four international advisers who gathered in Beirut to organize national scientific efforts in North Africa and the Middle East.
In 1963, he began a brief stint as the University of California’s dean of research. Two years later, in a gesture some characterized as a token “gold watch,” the first of UCSD’s four colleges was named after Revelle.
By that time, however, Revelle had headed east, to Harvard University. There, he founded and headed the Harvard Center for Population Studies, where he conducted major research on land, water and energy resources as related to population and potential economic development.
What to others was a radical career move, to Revelle seemed perfectly natural, friends recalled.
“If he went from being a professor of oceanography here to population dynamics at Harvard, that did not seem unusual or remarkable to him,” said Arnold, the UCSD chemistry professor. “He thought everyone should be like that.”
Reflecting on those years, Revelle once said that the first thing he learned was that the most popular conceptions of population control were “nonsense.”
“The real population problem in the world is poverty,” said Revelle, who was a vocal supporter of keeping abortion legal.
“Poor people have no control over their lives,” he said. “As people become more prosperous, they are more interested in the quality of their children, not just the quantity.”
Fascinated by what he called “the technology of resource use,” he said that poverty results not from a lack of resources, but from unsophisticated ways of using them.
“It’s possible that we could meet the material needs of the human population throughout the world . . . if we have the right kind of technology,” he told an interviewer in 1989. But the fact that “a lot of the scientific effort (is) going into military development is absolutely scandalous. . . . In scientific terms, it makes me ill to think about it--all these poor bastards working on military problems instead of real problems.”
In 1975, after 11 years based at Harvard, he began splitting his time between Harvard and UCSD. Eventually, in 1978, he returned to Scripps permanently.
At a time when the field of oceanography was expanding rapidly, Revelle is credited with putting Scripps at the forefront. He recruited scientists and championed interdisciplinary approaches to the marine sciences. He built up the Scripps fleet, converting former military ships into research vessels.
“We know less about the ocean’s bottom than the moon’s backside,” he once said.
But, as he pushed for intensive research, he also stressed the broad-based appeal of his chosen discipline.
“Oceanographers are just sailors who use big words,” he was heard to say. “Oceanography is fun.” He always found it comforting, he once said, to be “a good long ways from land in a rather small boat.”
In recent years, he humbly maintained that he was not educated enough to tackle the modern rigors of the science he had done so much to promote.
“I was never very well-educated,” he told an interviewer last year after President Bush awarded him the National Medal of Science. “Geologists in those days didn’t get much physics or mathematics. . . . I claim that oceanography is a young man’s game--not because it’s physically demanding, but because it requires a lot of mathematics now.”
Often described as a philosopher as well as a practitioner of science, Revelle was not a religious man. He once said that his first college geology course had ruined him for religion.
“I don’t really believe in God, I am sorry to say. I’d like to. It would be so comforting . . . to rest in the arms of Jesus and all that,” he said in 1989. “I don’t think any geologist can be very religious. Basically, if he were religious, it would be to believe in a god who is not very skillful--God, the Great Experimenter, most of whose experiments turn out badly.”
He continued: “Evolution is just one damn mistake after another, culminating in some very complicated organisms, ourselves included. And it’s not ended yet. Unfortunately, we’ve developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.”
Especially in recent years, Revelle and his wife had become well-known for their philanthropy, joining other benefactors in saving the San Diego Symphony from bankruptcy in 1986.
In 1988, at the age of 79, he led a fact-finding trip to study famine in Africa.
Until his death, he continued to teach one undergraduate course at UCSD, meeting with students during office hours and spending much of his time answering his correspondence. He told friends he felt lucky to have lived a long, full life.
In a typically modest fashion, Revelle said he had borrowed the “ideal” approach to life, work and death from the famed anthropologist Margaret Mead.
“She said, ‘I’m quite certain I’m going to die, but I’m equally certain I’m not going to retire,’ and she was working right up to a month before her death,” he said a decade ago, when he was 72. “She was a tough old lady.”
Revelle is survived by his wife, three daughters, one son, 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Thursday at La Jolla Presbyterian Church, 7715 Draper Ave. In lieu of flowers, the family has requested contributions to UCSD’s Foundation for the Revelle Scholarship Endowment Fund.
