page_title: Alan J. Faller
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Alan J. Faller / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Alan Faller near Resolute Bay
context_page_description: Alan Judson Faller is an American meteorologist / oceanographer specializing in small oceanic and atmospheric circulation. He is the son of the Olympic runner Fred Faller.
context_section_description: In 1949, Faller took a one-year sabbatical from his studies at MIT to spend a year in the arctic (at the Resolute Bay weather station) collecting atmospheric data with weather balloons. While there, he and an associate discovered a cairn on Griffith Island, marking what appeared to be a grave. As a result of Faller's notice to a Canadian archeologist, it was later discovered through research that this was the grave of an officer on HMS Resolute, buried there in 1850 during the Resolute’s first search for Sir John Franklin and pursuit of the Passage.
  After returning to MIT and completing his Sc.D., Faller was a researcher at WHOI from 1954 to 1963. From 1963 to 1989 he was a professor at the University of Maryland in the Institute of Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics. His research was critical in the understanding of Langmuir circulations. and two instabilities of Ekman boundary layers.
caption: Alan Faller at the cairn on Griffith Island near Resolute Bay
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