3 days ago
The Blue Marbles Project: Walter Munk (2018)
<div>Walter Munk's brilliant scientific "failures" and pursuit of daring exploration have changed the way we understand our Blue Planet. His work in oceanography pioneered our modern understanding of tides, ocean circulation, and surf forecasting. In 1942, Munk worked with Scripps Oceanography Director, Harold Sverdrup and the Pentagon on the prediction of surf conditions in support of planned allied amphibious landings in North Africa. Together they developed a wave prediction method that was applied successfully to an allied landing in Oran, North Africa. This wave prediction method would become the foundation for wave forecasts now made daily worldwide.<br /></div> <div> <br /></div> <div>Munk was at the San Francisco Public Library for a special screening of Eliana Alvarez Martinez’s film “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4181658/">The Spirit of Discovery</a>,” a documentary that follows Munk, at 96, as he goes in search of a species of “flying” devil fish that bears his name. <br /></div> <div> <br /></div> <div>To learn more about Munk’s storied career, visit <a href="https://waltermunkfoundation.org/"> https://waltermunkfoundation.org/</a></div> <div> <br /></div> <div> <a href="https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/research-highlight-scripps-and-science-behind-d-day-landings">https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/research-highlight-scripps-and-science-behind-d-day-landings</a></div> <div> <br /></div> <div>#WayforwardMachine (2026) - <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260120205925/https://nautil.us/the-man-who-delayed-d-day-237811/">Nautilus: “The Man Who Delayed D-Day: The eminent oceanographer Walter Munk reflects on science and war.” (2020)</a></div> <div> <div> <br /> “When Dwight D. Eisenhower was planning the invasion of Normandy, he made sure to check with Walter Munk and his colleagues first. Munk had come to the United States from Austria-Hungary to work as a banker before switching to oceanography, eventually making major advances in the science of tidal and wave forecasting. He was a defense researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1944 when his team calculated that the seas on June 5 of that year would be so rough that a delay was in order. The invasion would happen on the following day.”</div> <div> <div> <div> <br /></div> <div> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20251213070917/https://cyprus-mail.com/2025/08/10/europe-is-breaking-its-reliance-on-american-science">Reuters News Service: Europe is breaking its reliance on American science (2025)</a> - “European governments are taking steps to break their dependence on critical scientific data the United States historically made freely available to the world, and are ramping up their own data collection systems to monitor climate change and weather extremes, according to Reuters interviews.</div> <div> <div> <br /></div> <div>The effort – which has not been previously reported – marks the most concrete response from the European Union and other European governments so far to the US government’s retreat from scientific research under President Donald Trump’s administration.</div> <div> <br /></div> <div>Since his return to the White House, Trump has initiated sweeping budget cuts to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies, dismantling programs conducting climate, weather, geospatial and health research, and taking some public databases offline.“</div></div> <div> <div> </div></div></div></div></div>
Thank you @miriamgoldstein for sharing the Scripps article link about Walter Munk. Important waves of history on #1bluemarble 🌊 🌊 🌊
imgsnp.co/lgxv7
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