University of Illinois Alumni Association

By Mary Timmins

Mother, mother ocean, I have heard you call.
– Jimmy Buffet

 

Avery prepares to board the Knorr, one in WHOI’s world-ranging fleet of research vessels. Of global warming and climate change, she said: “It’s going to take all of us pulling together to come up with solutions, and I think that science will be part of that understanding.” (Photo courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution )

From the Colorado mountains to the Massachusetts seashore is one awesome sail – 2,000 miles in distance and 5,400 feet in altitude, a transcontinental career zip trek that landed Susan Rykala Avery, MS ’74 ENG, PHD ’78 LAS, at sea level on Cape Cod last February to assume captaincy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. With nearly 1,000 scientists, staff and students and a multi-million-dollar research portfolio, WHOI is widely regarded as the premier institution of its kind in the world, dedicated to study of all aspects of marine science and engineering and, through a joint program with MIT, to the education of marine researchers. Until this winter, a woman had never before been its president and director.

Neither had an atmospheric physicist.

“Certainly, the ocean was in my subconscious somewhere along the way,” said Avery, who came east from a quarter-century on the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Now, to have it right in front of me is – wonderful, actually.”

But terrible, too. In a time of fever shifts in the global temperature, the weather is the thing to watch, and germane to Avery’s appointment is the idea that the Earth’s oceans are her atmosphere.

“I jokingly tell people that the planet is going to respond as a planet,” Avery said. “It doesn’t say, ‘Oh, gee, I’d better throw this at the atmospheric scientists and I’ll do this for the oceanographers and I’ll do this for the hydrologists and land ecosystem people.’

“It’s, I think, one of the challenges for the scientists – and one where, I think, we can add some perspective – connecting all these sciences together to understand the system that we have.”

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.
– Arthur C. Clarke

Seventy percent of the surface of the globe is flooded with water, a liquid skin that robes the doppelganger of our geosphere, where a 35,000-mile spine of peaks known as the Mid-Ocean Ridge roams over uncharted continents and undulates through the world’s five oceans. Earth’s farthest regions are way below, at depths that near 7 miles, a quarter more than the height of Mount Everest. In some places, the ocean floor gives upon spots where tectonic plates grumble at one another and hot liquid spews from the interior. At the surface, water collides with sky in the ongoing explosion of waves, winds, tides and clouds that is the Earth’s atmosphere. Between, lie layer upon layer upon layer of temperatures and salinities and percolations of gas; of shifting shoals and changing shorelines, currents and eddies; of fat-wrapped sea mammals and fish seemingly designed by Peter Max and surrealistic corals, all creature whose lives have always been lived in peril, but never more than in these environmentally pressured times.

“We’ve only really explored about 3 to 5 percent of the ocean,” Avery said. “We might know more about the moon and Mars.”

My soul is full of longing
For the secret of the Sea …
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Not all that long ago, Woods Hole was just a wee fishing village, at once picturesque and nondescript, in an out-of-the-way spot on the ocean side of Cape Cod. Named for the channel whereby fishing boats and sail craft exchange the sheltered waters of Buzzards Bay for the swank sound around the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Woods Hole has, over the past century, evolved into the uber-command center for research of Earth’s oceans. The town billets the Marine Biological Laboratory and the National Marine Fisheries Service (both of which predate WHOI), a U.S. Geological Survey science center, the Sea Education Association and the Woods Hole Research Center, all of which revolve with gravitational urgency around WHOI. Locally pronounced as “hooey” (about as far from accurate as an acronym will ever get) and internationally revered, WHOI was established as a private, nonprofit research and higher education facility in 1930 – with considerable help from the Rockefeller Foundation – and has long set an example to the world in the breadth and depth of its oceanographic research.

In 1986, Alvin, the institute’s charismatic deep-water submersible, conveyed the first manned expedition down to explore and photograph the wreck of the RMS Titanic, inert under more than 12,000 feet of dead-cold polar water in the North Atlantic. In early 2007, WHOI marine biologist Tim Shank had a conversation with NASA astronaut Suni Williams – an exchange remarkable for the fact that he was in Alvin at the time, 2 miles under water, and she was 200 miles above the Earth, orbiting on the International Space Station.

Publications both general and scholarly document activities that range from a graduate student measuring seismic echoes in Samoa to down-swaddled scientists fishing equipment from a welter of Arctic ice to archaeological investigations at the bottom of the Mediterranean, where amphorae and other artifacts are flung across the sea floor in the scatter-pattern of an old, old shipwreck. Foremost among WHOI’s pending projects is an Ocean Observatories Initiative – currently well along in the National Science Foundation funding process – to create systems of buoys, cables and roving underwater vehicles that will allow scientists to study currents, the sea floor, ocean eco-systems and the interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere.

“The talent here,” said Avery, “is incredible.”

… at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature …
– Herman Melville

Though geography and geology set them far apart, Woods Hole and Champaign-Urbana share the affinity of both being little places disrupted and reshaped by vast eruptions of knowledge and information. So, too, WHOI resembles the University of Illinois in the enormous and, frankly, bewildering extent of the research it hosts.

Structures help make sense of such things, of course. Administratively, WHOI’s five departments house studies in biology, chemistry, geology, physics/engineering and oceanography. Four interdisciplinary institutes focus on different aspects of ocean science, with a fifth for fundraising.

Physically, WHOI is shaped by the data collection and engineering that are at its soul. Craft from its formidable fleet of ships and boats are variously, endlessly dispatched to near places and far ends of the world’s watery vastness, with current project locales ranging from shipping lanes near Boston to the ocean off New Zealand. At such sites, scientists deploy technologies traditional as buoys and space-age as robotic gliders that run on thermal energy, in quest of insights into the endless questions science asks of the sea.

The best answers inhabit a realm one step beyond research, where knowledge is shared and collaborations are formed. Craig Taylor, MS ’71 LAS, PHD ’73 LAS, a microbiologist at Woods Hole for 30 years, explained that, for example, the toxic algae blooms known as “red tides” – periodic poisoners of clams and other New England shellfish – are rendered destructive as much by temperatures and tides as by their own molecular biology. Likewise the paradigm-shattering microbes that live at the black edge of physical extinction on deep-sea thermal vents can only be truly understood in terms of the unique chemical and geologic conditions that create them.

Collaborations among scientists across two or more disciplines are now “a necessity,” observed Taylor, because “no one person” can address the complexity of such phenomena.

Which brings matters back to why an atmospheric physicist is heading up an oceanographic institute.

There is tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
– William Shakespeare

The flagship from which Avery commands the resources of WHOI is a mile and a half out of the village of Woods Hole on the institute’s 3-year-old Quissett Campus, in a handsome, oversized old summer home. Tucked away on the building’s second floor, her office is curiously landlocked, though oyster ponds lie not far distant. A bank of windows contemplates the treetops and looks down a slope of wild greenery. Fitted with a large desk and much larger conference table, her white-walled, two-room suite is a comfortingly regular, geometrically predictable setting that is not very like a cabin in a ship but is not unlike it, either.

The course that brought her to this post has been one of long flights and sudden tacks. Having started out at the U of I as a graduate student in physics, in which she majored as an undergraduate at Michigan State, Avery became the first student to win a doctoral degree from Illinois in atmospheric sciences – another of the firsts that stud her career. Marv Geller, a professor who helped establish the atmospheric sciences program at Illinois and who now teaches at Stony Brook University, recalled writing a recommendation for Avery in which he predicted that her skill with people would carry her well beyond the considerable success promised by her academic ability. “I take great pride in my prescience,” he said.

In 1982, she and her husband, electrical and computer engineer James P. Avery, PHD ’78 LAS, joined the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her accomplishments there ranged through a slew of publications, an array of grants, awards and fellowships and a panoply of honors, as well as various administrative assignments. One job posted two more barrier-breakers to her résumé, as both the first woman and the first engineer to direct CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Avery led CIRES for a decade, beginning in 1994, and the institute’s ongoing collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proved germane to her work and life. She became engaged in efforts focusing, she said, on “how climate variability and climate change impacts water in the interior West” – research that continues to bring together scientists, economists, policymakers and stakeholders to discuss how to share this essential and ever scarcer resource.

If water issues are enormous in the Rockies, they can be nothing other than oceanic on the East Coast. “The ocean is the ‘memory’ of climate system,” Avery said. “It’s got the heat capacity. It’s got, in a sense, a storage capacity – our knowledge of the past climates and the boundary conditions for the current climate. And I think that the atmosphere is kind of the messenger of the climate system.”

The surface warming of the oceans feeds into currents, winds, clouds and sunlight that each create and amplify changes in a massive, chaotic, imperfectly understood system. So too with carbon dioxide, which the ocean absorbs, stores and releases, acting as a vast bladder whose capacity for processing greenhouse gases could be approaching its limit.

“In a sense,” Avery observed, “the ocean is part of the missing link in the carbon budget.” One proposed experiment now under debate by the world scientific community would “fertilize” the oceans with iron so as to draw more carbon out of the air. Could this massive (and scary) proposition work? “We don’t know,” she said. “We don’t know. We don’t know.”

Whatever Avery’s presence in the handsome office near the oyster ponds in Massachusetts means, it’s not about some magical/metaphysical balm for planet Ocean – a system visibly upset by the pressures of planet Earth’s burgeoning and often heedless civilization. No formula yet found in the universe can neutralize global warming, the best solutions to which remains widespread research and collective response.

What Susan Avery does bring to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is profound familiarity with what water and weather mean to this planet, backed by the ability to work with smart people from other disciplines to build greater understanding. “Susan has the velvet touch with the strength behind it to advance toward this interdisciplinary vision of the strengths of Woods Hole,” observed her UI adviser, Marv Geller.

And that’s huge.

Kind of like the ocean.