Oceanography celebrates 50th

By Sandra Hines
News & Information

Alyn Duxbury became the first-ever undergraduate pursuing a degree in oceanography at the UW in 1951, the year the University first recognized oceanography as a degree-granting department of the College of Arts and Sciences. Duxbury - just like the oceanography students 50 years later who are pursuing degrees today - was given the opportunity to conduct research and go to sea.

The Oceanography Building and research vessel Catalyst were built in the 1930s for UW’s oceanography program. Today the building is sandwiched between South Campus Center and the Fisheries Center.

“The most memorable for me was that I got to live on the research boat, the Brown Bear, in the summer. I’d be standing watch and next to me would be my professors and the graduate students,” Duxbury recalls of expeditions in the Gulf of Alaska, off the Washington Coast and to conduct surveys of Puget Sound. Today’s students get chances to work aboard the UW’s vessel the Thompson, which would dwarf the vessel Bear and is one of the most sophisticated academic ships in the United States.

Just as Duxbury did, some of the school’s current 200 students will have the opportunity to co-author papers in scientific publications before they graduate.

The 50th anniversary of oceanography becoming an academic unit is being observed with an open house for the campus community Friday from 3 to 5 p.m. and for everyone Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The school is on the shore of Portage Bay at the south end of 15th Avenue Northeast and Northeast Boat Street. For information contact the school at (206) 616-5394 or visit the Web site http://www.ocean.washington.edu/openhouse.

The UW had conducted marine science starting as early as 1904 at Friday Harbor but the discipline of oceanography was organized as various laboratories and didn’t offer its own degree at first.

In 1951 Richard Fleming was recruited to lead the faculty that consisted of Thomas Thompson, who was a driving force behind oceanography at the UW in the early years and for whom the UW’s main vessel is named, Clifford Barnes, for whom a smaller vessel is named, and Maury Rattray.

Their research focused on Puget Sound circulation, according to a history prepared by Arthur Nowell, current dean of the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences of which the School of Oceanography is now part. The Puget Sound model built at that time, which has been retooled over the years to take advantage of computer-run systems, will be one stop at this weekend’s open house.

World War II changed funding for oceanographers, students and research. The files on Professor Thompson show that before the war he and his family budgeted 10 percent of his personal income each year to pay for the research expenses of his lab. After the war national security became a concern, Nowell says. The Office of Naval Research, for example, began providing support for oceanography in 1946 and would provide about 90 percent of the outside funding received by the department during the 1950s. Today the school receives $10.5 million a year for research, much of it from the National Science Foundation.

While research has grown, the defining characteristic of oceanography at the UW since its inception has been a focus on the interaction of students at all levels with research, Nowell says.

For that first official freshman 50 years ago, the education and opportunities he got in oceanography became a way of life. Duxbury is a professor emeritus of the school overseeing the seventh printing of the textbook “An Introduction to the World’s Oceans” written by him and his wife.