"Walter Munk was a globally renowned oceanographer who helped ensure the safety and success of Allied beach landings during the Second World War by devising ways to forecast the waves. Decades later he came to fire what became known as the “sound heard around the world” – an underwater emission that reached across oceans – in an attempt to gain a greater understanding of climate change. The scientist, who has died aged 101, was long associated with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego. Munk was one of the most celebrated oceanographers of his era – a scientist who devoted nearly 80 years to unravelling such questions as where waves begin, why they may break violently or wash ashore gently, how sound travels thousands of miles through water, and what information that journey might reveal about the global ecosystem. His genius lay in divining the interlocked patterns beneath the seeming clutter and chaos of the world’s oceans, according to Joshua Horwitz, who profiled Munk in his 2015 book War of the Whales. “He was revered in equal measure by surfers and navy admirals for his oracular ability to predict when far-off waves would break on beaches.” Much like the surfers of popular imagination, Munk found a home on the beaches of California, where he had fled to avoid a life on Wall Street. Born in Vienna to an affluent banking family, he had come to the United States in the early 1930s to attend a boarding school in New York and to carry on the family profession. But he soon discovered he despised banking, bought a convertible and set out for the west coast. He abandoned finance for science, eventually landing at Scripps, where he apprenticed himself to the director, Harald Sverdrup, a leading oceanographer of his day. In 1938 Nazi Germany annexed Austria and accelerated a campaign of antisemitic persecution. Dr Munk, whose family had Jewish roots, became a US citizen and served briefly in the army before beginning what would be his seminal research for the navy. Munk credited Sverdrup with playing a leading role in the development of wave forecasting, which military strategists used in the planning of the amphibious landing on north Africa in 1942, the Normandy invasion in 1944, and throughout the Pacific. New Scientist magazine credits Munk with saving “countless lives by helping the Allied military determine when troops could make amphibious landings without being swamped by big surf hundreds of metres from a hostile shore”." www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/walter-munk-oceans-oceanographer-waves-d-day-landing-anzio-allied-second-world-war-a8776256.html?fbclid=IwAR0C-govg1_cHGCLdw3aV0ciyD1aEBh4GqwIGQrD6NkVNQqsaqFEyQVP_Gg
