Talk:Walter Munk

message: HIFT and ATOC were shutdown circa 1992. Green Peace kicked up a stink when one of their geniuses did not understand the the various dB scales used in acoustics. Fed Govt of Australia withdrew its participation, and would not allow Heard Is. to be used. The present Hawaiian "Line" experiments are very limited. The project was under the ownership of the US Navy, as the receivers are still classified. After the media outcry/lunacy, the Navy quashed/hid most of the technical reports. Only one brief reference of this history exists, in a Master's thesis online at MIT.220.244.246.49 (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 12:02, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shutdown of ATOC 

message: http://www.crafoordprize.se/events/crafoorddays2010.4.5ce3bd8012d79a5929580004998.html
Would someone who can edit please fix? --Spoofed IP 173.161.195.122 (talk) 17:49, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  New URL for "Crafoord Prize Lecture 2010: The sound of climate change" 

message: The latest additions relating the Spiesberger measurements are not quite
appropriate.  This is a biography of Munk, not Spiesberger.  Munk's long-time
collaborator Worcester has been deleted.  An ONR contract is not a valid
Wikipedia reference.  The Heard Island signals were not unstable, it was
just nine days of data from a moving ship.  I know the origins of these
POVs, however, and I contemplate how to restore the text that was there
before, while acknowledging Spiesberger's contributions.  Bdushaw (talk) 21:00, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I've moved the Spiesberger material over to the article on ocean acoustic tomography where it is better suited.  The "Main article" link should encourage readers to go there.  I note that Spiesberger was Munk's student (or of that group anyways). Bdushaw (talk) 21:40, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spiesberger narrative 

message: Ocean tomography was first investigated by George Veronis in the early 50s. (In fact when going out west to use ENIAC, the light plane he charted crashed.) Veronis was also the fist civilian given access to the North Atlantic array. Wunsch and Munk invented the ATOC Thermometry project in the mid 70s. (In fact, they sat down in Walker Hall and drank coffee all afternoon while coming up with the idea.) Note that the SOFAR channel was know to various militaries from WW1 onwards, but SOFAR did not become widely known until after WW2. I have changed Tomography in ATOC to Thermometry. Their book is called "Ocean Acoustic Tomography".27.33.243.64 (talk) 03:06, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  George Veronis 

message: I've removed these unsourced statements below:
:The propagation mode was the SOFAR channel, being the depth at which the vertical density gradient is greatest. Longitudinal acoustic pressure waves are locked at a depth of some 50m above and below. Both the receiver and transmitter must lie within the SOFAR. The celerity and dispersion are functions of temperature and less so to salinity.
To my knowledge, none of these statements are quite correct.  Perhaps a discussion of how tomography works is in order, however.  Bdushaw (talk) 08:50, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent edits 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Can someone provide a recent citation that supports that he is a Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations Oceanography Chair at SIO? The only article I found that said this is from 2001, before he was an emeritus. I found information that John Orcutt is currently A Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations Oceanography Chair, but it doesn't clarify if this position is held by more than one person at once.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.239.112.44 (talk) 21:01, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I found what I was looking for. In 2014, he himself said that he held that chair position during an interview for the Navy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7DtckkgvWQ 132.239.112.44 (talk) 22:03, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations Oceanography Chair

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thread_title:  External links modified (January 2018) 

message: The claim of being "the first to show rigorously why one side of the Moon always faces the Earth" is dubious. This has been explained much earlier by John Herschel and Nicholas Mercator () and is mentioned by Jules Verne. Brandmeistertalk   18:22, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: These are not explanations as to WHY one side of the moon always faces the earth, or more particularly, why the rotation rate of the moon is always fixed to make this so.  The earlier "explanations" were superficial.  Munk's explanation was the first to be rigorous - why the moon's face was locked towards the Earth.  Bdushaw (talk) 23:28, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: According to this, "The first solution to the riddle of the invariability of the lunar face in which the physics was correct appeared in the Appendix to Nicholas Mercator’s Institutionum Astronomicarum libri duo" (London, 1676, pp. 285–8). So Munk's claim needs further investigation at best - many other lunar phenomena have been known since earlier times. Brandmeistertalk   11:07, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: While I think you are correct that a proper citation for this claim is necessary, a claim from 1676 is...probably not right.  That said, a proper citation has been curiously hard to find - I suspect it lies within the Munk and McDonald book itself, already cited although improperly, which I do not have.  There is this link which lists a contribution to tidal locking as a basis for Munk's National Medal of Science.  There are numerous citations of a popular/news type to support the claim, but a proper scientific article would be better.  Bdushaw (talk) 03:33, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

text: A brief review of this section by a knowledgeable associate suggests it has general problems.  For example, the moon does have a fluid core.  See: this  I suggest a general rewrite, but I don't yet know how to do it.  The subject (Rotation of the Earth) is one of Munk's major accomplishments.  Bdushaw (talk) 22:46, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

text: I've thought about it, and I am inclined to just simplify and trim down the section until we can sort out the story.  The book "Rotation of the Earth" is a well-recognized, classic review monograph on the subject.  Bdushaw (talk) 00:17, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd agree on trimming, also because citing Munk's article alone runs into WP:INDEPENDENT. Brandmeistertalk   10:44, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

text: I've been editing the article for a week now, with particular attention to the supporting citations, and I have yet to find a good reference supporting the assertion about tidal locking.  I have one inquiry pending (but not much hope).  I tentatively conclude that Brandmeister was correct to challenge the assertion, and, further, suspect the entry may be either one of those "monkey wrench" entries that some people are wont to make, or someone making the entry particularly carelessly.  I haven't the energy to go back in the record to determine when it was first made and who made it.  The text is still in the article, commented out, but perhaps after a suitable waiting period, we might delete it altogether.   The incident may be another lesson on how erroneous entries made into Wikipedia propagate throughout the internet, until the erroneous articles are used to support the original erroneous entry! Bdushaw (talk) 22:43, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tidal locking 

message: There seems to be some confusion about the title of Munk's 1986 Bakerian Lecture.  I've added a citation to a paper in PhilTransRoySoc that seems unequivocable, but there is also this link to the Royal Society webpage on Munk that has the title "Acoustic Monitoring of Ocean Gyres".  (Could he have given a talk on one topic, but written about another?) Bdushaw (talk) 07:41, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bakerian Lecture title 

message: I've mostly wrapped up my contributions for this round.  There are a few tasks I list here, should anyone like to pick them up:  (1) The lede needs development - it should be a very brief summary of the article in its entirety. (2) The Personal life section needs some work.  I've thought about adding a new Career section for JASON and the Navy chair, etc. (3) There needs a new section under Research on internal waves (!) and the Garrett-Munk spectrum.  The influence of John Tukey for statistical knowledge/ideas should be mentioned. Bdushaw (talk) 01:32, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  To do list 

message: An editor indicated that the statement in the lede The experiment was criticized by environmental groups, who expected that the loud acoustic signals would adversely affect marine life. had undue weight.  An interesting question.  Firstly, the controversy was a major phase in Munk's career - the controversy began during the HIFT experiment and continued during ATOC - perhaps spanning 10-15 years.  I included the statement partly because most of the general public who know about Munk likely learned about him as a consequence of the incident.  There would be a good case to include a separate section on the issue, but that would perhaps indeed be undue weight, it is a difficult issue to support with citations, and it is a Pandora's Box of a Can of Worms - the issue has been highly politicized.  The article now includes several citations to the news reports on the incident in the tomography section. Bdushaw (talk) 08:03, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: It feels like that instead of like 3 sentences of content in the lead -- this might be one. I.e. something like, "Though well regarded for his science, some of Munk's later research into underwater acoustics led to controversy among environmentalist who described it as disrupting marine mammals." --- but the current coverage is way out of proportion to the amount of coverage elsewhere in the article and skews the interpretation of him. Sadads (talk) 13:45, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting - you were referring to the previous three sentences.  Munk's interest in acoustical measurements spanned 40 or more years!  The three sentences in question refer to ocean acoustic tomography, which is described by that section in the article.  Indeed one of Munk's books was on that topic.  Perhaps the resolution is to rewrite those sentences in some way to indicate that better.  (Your proposed text is ... right out ... with all due respect!) Munk had a great pride in the HIFT experiment - indeed the Walter Munk Medal was engraved with a global figure of the experiment. Bdushaw (talk) 21:14, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

text: I've revised the lede per the above, though I am uncertain of the text I wrote.  Perhaps just a first draft.  Bdushaw (talk) 11:27, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Munk and the marine mammal controversy