Seventy Years of Exploration in Oceanography Part 6 pps

8.4 Heard Island 59

Fig. 8.2 Walter arriving at Heard Island on Australia Day (26 January 1991)

were demolished. One was left lying on the sea floor. When I am asked, what is

the longest you have ever had a source in the water, I say fifteen years and getting

longer by the day. It was during the storm that I suddenly recalled that thirty years

earlier we had drawn a crude weather map centered on some distant uninhabited

island called Heard Island [85] (Fig. 8.3). The information came from tiny wiggles

in a spectrum of waves recorded off San Clemente Island. And now we were here,

where the swell begins.

The captain tried to cheer me up, “We had been told that the equipment could with￾stand any imaginable sea state. And we have gone to some length, to some discom￾fort, to test this statement.” When I reported to Roger Revelle back at Scripps he

responded, “I wish I were with you, and then again I’m glad I am not.” After the

storm abated, RV Cory Chouest beat her way westward to Capetown. One day out of

Capetown, we made a landfall on Prince Edward Island calling on a meteorological

contingent who had not had an outside contact for 14 months. (Among them were

two professional sharp shooters with orders to eliminate the wild cat population that

was eating the local birds.) Access was up a cliff via exposed rope ladders. On the

way back a member of our scientific party refused to climb down; she had to be low￾ered by rope. I slipped returning to the boat and was saved from falling overboard

by Elmer S. Hindman III of the Corey crew who grabbed the collar of my jacket.

Hasselmann: Did you learn something worthwhile?

Munk: I think so. The Journal of the Acoustic Society of America (JASA) devoted

the entire October 1994 issue (95:4) to “The Heard Island Papers; a contribution to