Columbia University New York, N.Y. 10027 Office of Public Information (212) 854-5573
To help commemorate its 50th anniversary in 1999, Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has commissioned an oral history project to record the collective memory of the scientific institution that has revolutionized our understanding of the earth.
The project will be conducted by another of Columbia's pioneering post-World War II research institutions, the Columbia Oral History Research Office, the world's first oral history program and now the world's largest.
Announcing the project, John C. Mutter, Lamont-Doherty's interim director, said: "As an institution, Lamont hit the ground running in 1949, driven by a mission to learn about every component of the earth, from its inner structure to its oceans and atmosphere, and to understand all the processes that combine to create and maintain the planet we live on. With every breakthrough propelling us forward, we've rarely looked back. Our anniversary is a fitting occasion to preserve the recollections of people who participated in an unprecedented era of exploration and discovery in the earth sciences."
Lamont scientists invented modern instruments and techniques to monitor earthquakes, probe earth's interior structure, investigate the seafloor and track ocean circulation. They dispatched the only two ships to log more than a million miles of oceanographic research, collecting crucial data that confirmed the revolutionary concept of plate tectonics. They discovered the world-circling mid-ocean ridges, seafloor spreading and seismically active zones at the boundaries of earth's great crustal plates--all of which fundamentally changed our view of the ocean floor as a static, featureless terrain to a dynamic realm of unimagined complexity and beauty.
In subsequent decades, Lamont scientists spearheaded an ongoing revolution in understanding global climate change and the ocean's role in regulating it. They pinpointed the orbital shifts that paced the earth's ice ages; discovered the global system of ocean currents called the Great Ocean Conveyor, and created the first computer model that could successfully predict El Niño.
Ronald J. Grele, director of the Oral History Research Office, said: "The history of Lamont is the history of some of the most profound scientific developments of our century and includes many colorful and forceful personalities. This project will secure unique opportunities for future scholars to examine the social, intellectual and institutional frameworks in which breakthrough science has been done. Equally exciting for us is the chance to work with another research center of the University."
During the three-year project, which begins this fall, interviews will be taped with an array of former and current Lamont scientists, technicians and staff and then will be transcribed and archived.
Among the first to be interviewed will be Henry Kohler, captain the R/V Vema, Lamont's first research vessel and the first ship to log more than 1 million miles of oceanographic research; Marie Tharp, who with Bruce Heezen discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and created the first comprehensive map of the world ocean floor; Charles Officer, who in 1949 helped pioneer seismic techniques that revealed the deep structure of the ocean floor, and Alma Kesner, who was purchasing supervisor when she retired in 1980 after a 24-year career at Lamont.
Conducting the interviews will be Ronald E. Doel, a historian of 20th-century science, specializing in astronomy and the earth sciences. As a natural component of the research, Dr. Doel will seek out personal correspondence, laboratory notebooks and other artifacts. The American Institute of Physics will help maintain and preserve materials that are uncovered or donated.
"The history of geophysics is poorly known to historians of science and many scientists alike," Dr. Doel said. "Until recently, many journalists and historians have focused their attention on such highly visible fields as physics, molecular biology and genetic engineering. One of the most important outcomes of this project will be to illuminate the emergence and significance of earth and environmental sciences after World War II."
In the 1940s, Columbia geology professor Maurice "Doc" Ewing and a small group of students and associates initiated pioneering research in seismology and marine geophysics on Columbia's campus in New York City. In late 1949, Ewing and colleagues moved their operations to a 125-acre estate in Palisades, N.Y., donated to Columbia by the widow of the late financier Thomas Lamont in 1948--the same year that the Columbia oral history project was established.
Well-known Columbia historian Allan Nevins started the oral history movement to counter what he viewed as a critical loss of important source material in every field as people at the forefront of social change died without leaving memoirs, diaries or letters--a problem exacerbated when telephones replaced many written communications. Using another new technology, the tape recorder, the oral historians set out to obtain, through recorded interviews with key individuals, a fuller record of their participation in political, economic and cultural life. Columbia's Oral History Research Office is now the oldest and largest program of its kind in the world.
Once considered an interesting but tangential method of documentation, oral history has become a basic historical tool. More than 2,500 scholars a year consult Columbia's collection, and more than 1,000 books have been written using its interviews, which may be consulted both on tape and in transcription. The collection now contains more than 7,000 taped memoirs and more than 600,000 pages of transcript. While a large part consists of biographical memoirs, many projects focus on specific topics and experiences, including student movements in the 1960s, the American crafts movement, the history of philanthropy, the science of hematology, popular arts, social welfare and business history.
Dr. Doel received the Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 1990. He was a historian at the American Institute of Physics from 1989 to 1993, where he expanded the Center for the History of Physics's oral history program to include the field of geophysics. He has received a National Science Foundation research grant for a book on the rise of academic geophysics in America from 1920 to 1970 and is writing a chapter on "Earth Sciences and Geophysics" for the forthcoming book, Science in the Twentieth Century.
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