Insightful, Scholarly, and Synthetic: Eville Gorham and the Chemistry of Surface Waters

“Encyclopedic” and “exciting” are not often used to describe the same scientific paper , but that was my reaction upon reading Eville Gorham’s paper on the factors influencing the chemistry of surface waters (Gorham 1961) as a graduate student in the 1970s. It remains my reaction to re-reading it today, for at least the third time. In his paper, Eville sought to explain the enormous differences in chemistry that occur among lakes and rivers across the world. Among many factors, he identified the importance of atmospheric deposition as often representing a major contributor to differences in water chemistry, and further identified human activity as sometimes being a substantial component of atmospheric deposition. In describing the role of human activity, he built upon his earlier work that first identified acid rain as an important phenomenon (Gorham 1955, 1958). All right, so that topic would not be exciting to everyone, but to a Ph.D. student studying the regulation of streamwater chemistry in New England and of necessity the role of human activities (atmospheric deposition and the legacies of past land use) in shaping that chemistry (Vitousek and Reiners 1975, Vitousek 1977), it was a revelation. A couple of years later after I completed my Ph.D., Eville wrote to my advisor and collaborator Bill Reiners (a former colleague of his at the University of Minnesota) with queries and some disagreements. I then re-read his 1961 paper and realized how closely I had been following Eville’s approach—how the original parts of my work had come about through use of a research design that Eville had suggested, how he had recognized the likely importance and potential magnitude of mechanisms that Bill and I had developed as the core of my dissertation. Because of his approach to us, and his generosity in suggesting that we write a review of the topic together, rather than simply publishing a critique, I then had the opportunity to work on a manuscript with Eville and Bill (Gorham et al. 1979) that explored issues of mutual interest. When I received the invitation to write for The Paper Trail on a publication that had influenced me, it was easy to select this one. I then got in touch with Eville and asked him how his 1961 paper came to be. There is some information on this topic in his own inaugural contribution to The Paper Trail (Gorham 2014); among others, he cites the influence of the Berkeley soil scientist Hans Jenny (Jenny 1941), whose work also later influenced me substantially. In his response, Eville said (among other things) “After publishing several papers on the chemistry of both lakes and precipitation (which included his foundational work on acid rain), I thought that I had read enough and done enough to review the subject, in which I was greatly encouraged by Preston Cloud....” He further noted what he calls the role of chance and serendipity in his research career—a topic on which he has written compellingly (Gorham 2012), but to my mind not entirely convincingly. I don’t doubt that chance has played a major role in his career, as it has for most of us, but I believe that by focusing on chance he plays down the role of the breadth of his scholarship, his own enormous curiosity, and above all his drive to make sense of the world. He quotes Pasteur’s comment “Chance favors the prepared mind”; and few minds are prepared as well as Eville’s. What makes a >50-year-old paper—in a field for which we now have powerful techniques like Sr isotopes, which in some cases allow us to trace the influence of atmospheric deposition vs. rock weathering