Charlie Yentsch

Trying to be an Optical Oceanographer – Short Bio

My childhood, into young adult years, was spent intrigued by the marine fossils captured in the ancient sea limestone of the Kentucky hillside and diving for abalone off the California coast near Redondo Beach. Then came WWII; I served and received the GI Bill for Education.

Looking back, I first became interested in biological optics when I was in graduate school in marine biology at Florida State University in Tallahassee and later at the Department of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle and Friday Harbor. Looking for a more formal training in oceanography, I applied and was accepted as a doctoral candidate in the UW Department of Oceanography.

My Florida State University experience was under the direction of phycologist and naturalist Harold Humm. Fellow students were George Grice and Sylvia Earle who both helped me gain knowledge of the marine ecology of Florida. When I entered the UW program I began to realize how underprepared I was in the physics, chemistry and the mathematics required for understanding classical oceanography. Fortunately I had a gentle entrance under Dick Fleming who had asked me to be responsible for the plankton-productivity effort for a salmon migration study. This involved light/dark bottle measurements of oxygen change, chlorophyll, and light scatter among other parameters. The stations were located throughout the Gulf of Alaska thus rough seas most of the time. Bottles of preserved specimens began to accumulate. I began to question my career choice. Back on campus my class work and my attitude improved, largely due to a course given by Wayne Burt. In short, he explained radiative transfer using a blackboard and a Beckman DU spectrophotometer, the instrument that would become my workhorse for the measurement of chlorophyll.

Shortly thereafter Francis Richards who was visiting UW from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, offered me a job at WHOI. I thoughtfully gazed up at the jars of withered plankton and said “yes!”

At the time WHOI was nothing like a university. It functioned more like a club with specific duties of membership. Once I moved to WHOI Bill Richardson stepped into my lab while I was working on an old flying spot galvanometer hooked up with a photovoltaic cell. Bill, having skills in optics, helped me build a fluorometer for measuring small amounts of chlorophyll --which was eventually replaced by the Turner series. Fluorometric chlorophyll is somewhat a standard in oceanographic labs, research vessels and ocean sensors. At the dock was the backbone: the research vessels Atlantis, Chain, and the Crawford. Most of the members spent considerable time at sea. I was too shy to ask who was financially supporting all of this, yet I did wonder who was paying my salary?

My first insight was in a harborside hangout with Fritz Fuglister, Val Worthington and Columbus Iselin, then director. Our getting together was an after-work ritual. In an informal discussion, Columbus informed me that I should stop seeking NSF support as this created an imbalance to the institution’s budget. I was perplexed. After Columbus left on the ferry to go to his home on the Vineyard, I asked Fritz what he had meant by that comment. He did not know, but after a bit he related that Columbus was an ONR Code #2196 man and that the institution was run almost entirely by monies from the US Navy.

Things began to change. Grants and contracts gained an important role in the support of research at WHOI. The emphasis tended to erode the old communal interdisciplinary framework that characterized the early institution. I don’t mean to single out WHOI – this restructure occurred to all the major oceanographic centers. Strangely only a few featured Ocean Optics. It took the launching of the ocean color satellite sensor to change this. Why? The broad answer was that the academic power in the ocean sciences was traditionally held by physical oceanographers. Hence the role of ocean color in ocean science was never clear. The best optical techniques were developed by the Danish scientists led by N. Jerlov, G. Kullenberg and N. Hoerslev.

In my opinion the closest US Laboratory to the Danish group was the Scripps Institution of Oceanography with Gif Ewing and the Visibility Laboratory led by S. Duntley with colleagues R. Austin, K. Baker, T. Petzold, R. Smith, J. Tyler and K. Voss. It was a sad day when upon the closing of this laboratory at Point Loma the university reported that the lab had to be closed because it did not fit into the university strategy.

When I left Woods Hole I vowed to set up a laboratory environment where people had the freedom to pursue the research questions as they wished. This eventually gave rise to the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine. I’m proud to claim that at Bigelow I have had day-to-day colleagues such as S. Ackleson, W. Balch, J. W. Campbell, J. Cullen, J. Goes, R. Guillard, P. Holligan, P. Matrai, C. Mazel, D. Phinney, M. Sieracki, R. Spinrad and C. M. Yentsch.

With the advent of the satellite, the big question was and remains today, how do we resolve the time and space dilemma of sampling properties of the world’s ocean including optical processes? Yet how different things are today. Everyone is running on all cylinders in the proposal/grant/reporting cycle just to keep funded. Students enter graduate school as co-authors on peer-reviewed publications and in some cases they have written proposals to grant and contract agencies for their graduate school funding; others undertake student loans. Hopefully the joys of doing good science will somehow persevere.