Harmon Craig: Stalking Excellence, Leaving Controversy In His Wake

The search had been going on for four days. Crammed into the cockpit of the submersible Alvin—the research vessel used to survey the Titanic—geochemist Harmon Craig and a group of colleagues from Scripps Institution of Oceanography were scouring the Pacific Ocean floor off the island of Hawaii, looking for the crater of Loihi, an undersea hot spot thought to be the volcanic precursor of the next Hawaiian island. At a depth of 1,000 meters, with the darkness relieved only by the Alvin’s sweeping lights, the dead black of the ocean floor suddenly gave way to an unearthly Vista: a softly glowing white crack in a large red mound. From the fissure issued forth a plume of shimmering, bubbly water—a plume so weighted with carbon dioxide that despite its temperature in excess of 700F, the effervescent water actually flowed down the sides of the mound. Surrounding the crater, or caldera, were numerous basalt columns covered by a powdery deposit of rust-red iron oxide. Craig’s first response to this astonishing scene was not scientific, but aesthetic and emotional: “It was like coming on a fairy castle,” he says, “or a painting by Miro.” He and his colleagues had found Loihi. Craig the scientist could have inference, by taking differential water samples from a surface vessel, for example, as previous expeditions had done. But Craig, the adventurer, had to see the caldera with his own eyes. This insistence had cost him several years of waiting—the Alvin is a solidly scheduled submersible. But Craig’s approach to this piece of research was characteristic of a life of restless, hands-on research. Like contemporary scientist/adventurers Robert Ballard, who went down to the Titanic, and Jacques Cousteau, Craig is a throwback to the type of 18th- and 19th-century scientific pioneers—Darwin comes to mind— who could not be confined to labs and libraries, but whose overriding impulse was to get out and see the world they were studying. That same impulse, which has sent Craig plunging two miles down to the deepest of the great ocean trenches, drove him to climb into the caldera of a surface volcano in Ethiopia. It compelled him to drill ice cores in Greenland and to try his hand at predicting earthquakes in China. It got him severely burned at a hot spring in Yellowstone, robbed at spearpoint in Tanzania, and shanghaied by gunboats in Zaire. But it also produced first-rate research results, earned him numerous prestigious awards, and certified him as a seminal scientist—”one of a handful of people who invented the field of modem geochemistry,” says John Edmond of MIT. And it brought him criticism: Craig’s swashbuckling style has not earned him the love of all his colleagues. He is seen by some as a prickly and controversial researcher and is almost constantly at odds with scientific authority, whether it be the directorship of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he has worked for almost 35 years, or the adminis- tration and reviewers for the National Science Foundation. Indeed, he has often found himself pitted against the scientific method itself. Craig is a big, rugged-looking man with salt-bleached hair and a gruff voice. At 61, his impressive vigor is virtually unabated. A nocturnal animal, he shows up at his Scripps lab at two in the, afternoon and often works until the small hours of the morning. He can talk a blue streak (“the fastest mouth in the West,” jokes one colleague), often counterpointing talk of degassing and isotope ratios with quotations from George Bernard Shaw and T.S. Eliot. At work, he seems omnipresent and ultrainvolved,even in what other scientists might consider trivial minutiae. He might, for example, interrupt an important discussion on water-sampling techniques to engage in a 15-minute ar- gument with a technician over the format of a computer printer. “He can be difficult,” says an associate. “He always insists on getting exactly what he wants.” And Craig admits that he is “not tolerant of people who think more slowly than I do.” An avowed generalist, Craig eschews narrow specialization, preferring to paint with the broadest possible brush. In fact, he says he chose geochemistry because “you have to know something about everything, from nuclear cross-sections to photosynthesis.” He decided to investigate isotope ratios because “that allows you to study everything on earth.” A look at his 138-entry list of publications confirms the impression of an almost omnivorous mind. There are entries dealing with topics as diverse as the origin of meteorites, the greenhouse effects of methane, and the disposal of radioactive waste. But isotopes are . the most prevalent elements of his oeuvre. Indeed, they enticed him even at the very beginning of his scientific life: Craig’s career was launched at the University of Chicago, where Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey—the discoverer of heavy hydrogen—was revolutionizing the field, of geochemistry by using isotopes to study a wide variety of natural processes. After flirting for a time with paleontology—”As a kid I loved to study dinosaurs,” Craig says—he fell in with Urey and his colleagues, taking up isotope geochemistry with such energy that his Ph.D. dissertation on carbon isotope distributions in rocks, animals, and hot springs “might,” according to one ob- server, “have been subtitled ‘Carbon and Everything.’ “ In fact, says Yale geologist Karl Turekian, “Craig’s 35-year-old dissertation is still the measure of all subsequent work in the field.” Craig could have stuck to dry land, but a tour in the Navy left him so entranced with the sea, that when offered a position at Scripps in 1955, he took the job at once. At that time, the institution was under direction of the energetic Roger Revelle, and was, Craig says, “an exciting place to be. Revelle used to walk around the halls at night; he’d drop in on people’s labs and sit down and start talking science. Or he’d bang on your door at midnight and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea!’ There was a feeling that the place had a special mission to keep research ships at sea. There were institutional expeditions, in which we’d sail to six or seven different places and measure everything. There were summer expedi- tions for students. The place had a vision, a feeling that we were pushing at the frontiers of science. “But in the last 20 years,” Craig fumes, “we’ve gone downhill. At Scripps, only a handful of people actually take the ships out to do bluewater oceanography. There’s very little emphasis on development of new ideas and, programs.” Craig adds: “For 20 years the primary effort at Scripps has been to keep things running smoothly, There has been no vision, little planning, and no serious effort to recruit the most outstanding scientists.” William Nierenberg, who ran the show during those years and now holds an emeritus position, strongly disagrees with Craig’s assessment of the situation. When asked to defend his tenure, Nierenberg indicated that he would prefer to save his riposte until after he'd seen this article in print. The current director, Edward A. Frieman, defends the institution’s accomplishments but says that Craig is entitled to his opinion. And despite their disagreement on Scripps, Frieman says, “Craig is certainly regarded as one of the foremost researchers in his field.” One thing is certain: If there is any truth to Craig’s characterization of Scripps as an institute adrift— even becalmed—Craig himself seems never to have been long in drydock. Since 1961, he has led at least 18 major research expeditions at sea, and his tenure at Scripps has been studded with groundbreaking research. His measurements established that atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gasses, methane and nitrousoxide, are on the increase. In 1979, he showed that an earthquake near California’s Big Bear Lake was heralded by an increase in the amount of radon and helium gas in nearby hot springs, pointing the way toward a possible tool for earthquake prediction. He discovered that abiogenic (nonorganic) methane is being emitted at ocean floor hydrothermal vents, validating the controversial idea that natural gas can come from sources other than dead dinosaurs. But Craig’s most heralded discovery came in 1969, when he and then Scripps colleague Brian Clarke found that the rare isotope, helium-3, trapped in the inner earth since the formation of the planet, is still being released by undersea volcanoes and by the hydrothermal vents that occur on the sea floor near where the huge oceanic plates meet. Since that discovery, Craig has been aheliwn prospector, aceaseless searcher who sails the world’s oceans—and tramps its islands and continents—measuring ratios of helium-3 to helium-4 at a wide variety of volcanic sites. The greater the amount of helium-3 at a given site, he surmises, the further that site extends down toward the center of the earth. In fact, Craig now thinks that volcanic “hot spots,” like Loihi and Lake Nyos in Cameroon, may actually plunge as deep as 2,000 miles. all the way down to the boundary between the mantle and the core of the earth itself. His avowed research goal, he says, is “simplyto map all the places on earth where helium-3 is coming out.” He is looking at hot spots and volcanoes, above and below the ocean, to correlate heliurn-3 ratios with volcanic activity. “I’m following trails,” he says. ‘I’m looking for windows into the deep mantle.” In an age of ever-narrowing specialization, Craig’s research plan is so broad as to be literally global. But it is precisely the breadth of his approach that has put him at odds with some of the reviewers of his proposals to NSF, which has long funded his lab and his expeditions, at times to the tune of about $1 million a year. To some extent, Craig blames the publicity that accompanied his awards (including the Vet Prize and the Arthur L. Day Award) for his occasional difficulties with the NSF. “The awards are good and bad,” he says. “You get a medal, and everybody’s congratulating you, and it’s a very nice, happy thing. Then you get the reviews back from your next grant proposal, and some are climbing all over you for doing science in the way that you’ve always done it.” To illustrate, he pulls out two reviews of one of his recent NSF grant applications, this one to correl ate helium-3 ratios to heat flow in the African Rift Valley, and to add neon and argon measurements to helium isotope profiles at various volcanic sites. Craig reads from the first review: “I find this difficult to judge. One is justified in. asking where it will all lead.” The other review reads: “Any normal investigation is expected to have an identifiable hypothesis that can be tested. Craig is not being held to this standard. His aim seems to be to travel to every corner of the globe collecting samples for analysis in the hope that something will come of it.” “That’s just the point,’ Craig thunders. “I’m being damned by reviewers who write that I don’t use the scientific method—that is, going in with some nice, carefully outlined hypothesis in which you pretty much know in advance what you’re going to find out and what you’re going to do with the information after you find it. Well, the scientific method is what you learned in My Weekly Reader when you were in grammar school, but no first-rate scientist uses it. I say, if I knew what I was going to find out, I wouldn’t do that study; I would do something else.” Certainly not everyone agrees that Craig’s work is amorphous and unfocused. Award-winning geochemist Julian Goldsmith, who set up the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Chicago, thinks Craig’s work is it not only “imaginative and diverse” but also “intense, thorough, and persistent,” producing an end result that is “rigorously molded.” Craig contends that he is, in essence, being beached by negative reviews from the NSF. “People want me to stay home and write up my data and become some sort of theoretician. Well, I’ve never understood the theoretical oceanographers who work with computers and never go to sea. To me the appeal of science is participating in the adventure—going to. sea, taking the samples, “trying to understand the ocean and wrench truth from the earth. Darwin might have agreed. Bill Lawren is a science writer living in Amherst, Mass.

Harmon Craig: Stalking Excellence, Leaving Controversy In His Wake

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April 1989

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