Ted Moore (2 parts)

PART 1

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This transcript is based on a video-recorded interview deposited at MarE3, JAMSTEC (Yokosuka, Japan).

The transcripts of the research project Oral Histories of Scientific Ocean Drilling are polished representations of oral conversations, and are intended solely for the purpose of preserving and documenting personal accounts and memories. They are not a literary product, and are not intended to exhibit literary qualities.

The primary goal of this transcript is to capture the spoken words and memories of the interviewee as accurately as possible. Minor editing and polishing works have been performed to enhance clarity and readability while maintaining the authenticity of spoken discourse, including non-standard grammar, inconsistencies, repetitions, and pauses.

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Please cite the interview as:

Interview of Theodore C. Moore Jr. by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2024 February 25, virtual. [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): I am Beatiz Martinez-Rius, postdoctoral researcher at JAMSTEC. Today is February 25 of 2024 and I’m in a virtual meeting with Ted Moore. Thank you very much. I would like to ask you about your name, affiliation and current role.

Ted Moore (TM): My name is officially Theodore C. Moore Junior, but everybody calls me Ted and I am presently an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan Department of Environmental Sciences.

BMR: It’s really a pleasure. First of all, all I would like to ask you, where did you grow up and how was your childhood like?

TM: I grew up in the university town of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I think it was a time when parents did not hover over their children in helicopters, watching them do everything. I was pretty free to do what I wanted, but I had a lot of chores at home. I was born in 1938, so I was aware of the Second World War and even participated in collecting scrap metal and that sort of stuff for the war. It was a time that changed the world. I went on to grammar school and high school, at the public schools in Chapel Hill.

I really enjoyed my high school years, looking back on it, although I don’t think I really sensed it that at the time, it was my first exposure to thinking about the marine world. I mean, North Carolina does have a beaches, but that wasn’t a big influence. I read a book called A half mile down by William Bebee. He took a pressure vehicle on a wire, lowered him half mile down in the ocean, and looked at the things that he would see, and it was fascinating. A totally different world. So that was the first thing. And then the second thing was a requirement by my English teacher, to write a paper on something. I don’t remember the specific requirements. But I ran across a National Geographic article on ocean plankton. And I went into that part of the study for my paper. It was mainly an exercise how to organize a paper with reference, etc. So those were the two things that introduced me to marine world. And then, as I neared graduation from high school, one of my teachers put me up for a fellowship that would have paid for my college career. Very lucrative, let’s say, and very competitive. I had an interview for this, face to face. I remember thinking, well, you know, North Carolina has a lot of coastline, a lot of different marine environments, the offshore bars, the sounds, all sorts of marine things. I told them how this interested me and I thought it important for the state of North Carolina. Apparently nobody believed me, and I did not get the fellowship (both laugh). But looking back on it, I think I was right. They were wrong.

However, I only had one other option for support to go to college, and that was a program for the US Navy that paid for everything. They paid for your books and your tuition, and gave you 50 dollars a month as living expenses. I was able to get into that program.  It did limit the choice of courses that I could take. They didn’t really look upon a major in art history, for example, as being appropriate for a future Naval officer. But that didn’t bother me, because I was really interested in science. I knew that. I didn’t know much else, but I knew that. The university had a set of core courses that you had to take in the first two years. They involved science, language, histoy, etc., the sort of the things you would expect. I had had a very hard nosed French teacher (laughs) and a very good math teacher in high school. I got into the advanced courses pretty quickly, and I really enjoyed it. Instead of taking French language, I could take French literature. And that was delightful. You got to read a lot of classics in French. For the sciences, we had to take physics. I found it thoroughly boring. And chemistry, I found it very smelly. I’d taken biology in high school; I found that a little smelly and gooey as well. So I was choosing my major mainly on elimination, rather than a conscious thought of direction.

At that time there was no such thing as oceanography to be taught. So it boiled down to botany and geology. I took geology first and I don’t know why. The introductory course was mainly an introduction to the jargon that geologists used. Somehow, I liked it. I never got around to taking botany. I just continued on with geology. There were good teachers. In my senior year, I guess, one of the professors had gotten a grant to support research for undergrads. He sent me out to do some sampling off the coast of North Carolina. That was my first experience with field research. And it was fun. I liked it.

BMR: This was just the post war period, right?

TM: Right. I just managed to dodge the Korean War (laughs). And by the time I graduated in 1960, we were in the midst of the Cold War with Russia. With a Bachelor of Science in geology, really, the only place you could get hired with that amount of education was the oil companies. And they were firing more people than they hired at that particular time in 1960. So I was rather glad that I’d already been committed to serving three years on active duty in the Navy.Since the outlooks for employment with geology were rather dim, I really considered the Navy as a possible career.

BMR: When you say Navy, you mean engaging as an officer or doing some kind of science assistance?

TM: I came out as an ensign, the lowest possible rank. Well, not really. Midshipmen is even more so. It’s the lower possible rank on active duty.  And I was very green, as you can imagine. (laughs) I was totally unprepared. But I did know that if I really wanted to make a career in the Navy, I should learn what the real Navy was like. I mean, I could have asked for positions in some sort of land-based operation, some of my fellow ensigns that graduated in my class, opted for going into Naval Law. They wanted to go to law school. Some of them didn’t have a choice, some of them wanted to go to Naval air, and few of us did. And some others wanted to go to the Marines, which I could not understand.

Every summer, starting with my freshman years on, the Navy took us on “experience” cruises. And they were good. The first one I went on was aboard a cruiser named the Canberra, which was a guided missile cruiser. It was out of Norfolk and it was a mind-boggling experience. Because, as a young man, I had not traveled more than two or three hundred miles from my home. Suddenly I was on a ship that was headed to south America. And I was the most lowly of people on that ship. Well, Midshipmen are technically officers, but they are treated as beginning young sailors. So we were treated like lowly swabbies, which was entirely fair. But I really enjoyed the experience (laughs), it was not particularly difficult. The Canberra had a wooden deck; I couldn’t believe it. So we learned how to holystone a deck, which is what they did back when there were wooden sailing ships.

BMR: What’s that?

TM: A holystone is a little brick-shaped (a little wider) stone, made out of pumice, I think. It has a little indention at the top. To holystone a deck, you put a stick in that indention, wrap your arms around  the stick, and pour some secret concoction on the deck that’s mainly alkaline boiler compound, and scrub the stone  back and forth until the board is perfectly clean. And then you go on to the next board. Everybody is in a line doing it in a rhythm. That takes up the morning, and then in the afternoon they gave you a can of brass polish, and you go around polishing anything that’s brass. Or you go down and clean the metal toilets. Polish them up. That was just like the old Navy you’ve read about.

We sailed south. I remember at one point we were near the Equator, and I looked out and I saw this sharp change in color, from tropical blue to sort of muddy blue. I asked a bosun mate, who was over me in many senses, what was that demarcation that I saw in the ocean? And he told me, “oh that’s the Equator.” And I said, “oh!” (both laugh). Well, of course it wasn’t the Equator, it was the outflow of the Amazon river. The muddy water coming way out, we couldn’t see land, but we were near the equator.

Subsequently, we had an initiation of crossing the equator, which is a big deal in the Navy. They have an initiation which tries to degrade anybody who has never crossed the Equator before. I remember having to crawl through a ventilation chute that was filled with garbage. Upon come out the other side being fed this little corn-bread stick that resembled a rough looking hot dogs, about that size, served in a bed pan and doused with cooking oil. There were other things like that, embarrassing things. But fortunately, and unbelievably, the Captain of the ship, who was a full four-stripe Captain,  had never gone over the Equator. I don’t know how he managed to avoid that. So, since he had to go through the initiation and because we were hitting the port soon, they went easy on us. we were going to Santos, Brazil, and we would be allowed to go out and walk around. They didn’t want us physically damaged. Like shaving our head shaved or something like that, which was not uncommon. So we got away with a lot of stuff that we probably would not have otherwise.

I remember pulling into Santos and I was somewhat disappointed. Here I was, for the first time, more than 300 miles away from home, and the place looked perfectly normal. I mean, the trees were green and the people moved around the same way, and talked funny, but other than that, it was just like home. A little disappointed. I expected something more extreme…

BMR: More exotic, maybe? (Both laugh)

TM: Yes, exactly.  The mother of my good friend in high school was a member of the League of Women Voters and she had been sent down to South America by the league to talk to the female leaders of various countries, encouraging them to be more politically active. She knew some people in Sao Paolo, which is just inland from Santos, and she gave me three letters of introduction to powerful women (laughs). One was to a university professor, one was to the head of the YWCA, Young Women’s Christian Association, and one was to the Chief women police of Sao Paulo. The university professor was out of town. The YWCA invited me to an English class they were teaching. That was a lot of fun. But the chief of Women police, she was really something (laughs).

BMR: She should, for being a chief police in Brazil at that time.

TM: I mean, this is a huge city and she shows up in a squad car with a female driver and takes me on a tour of the city. It was lovely. We had a wonderful conversation. It was the last day we were there, we had to go back to the ship. I’m a little late getting back, I’ve checked out, but there’s a bus waiting to take us back to the ship. I get out of the squad car, with the blue light going around, and she gives me a hug and gives me a little gift of a coconut filled with rum. I got on the bus. Everybody is looking at me: were you in jail? (both laugh). It was a lot of fun. So that cruise made a huge impression. I really enjoyed it. The next summer they wanted us to be exposed to the Marines, as part of the US Navy, and to Navy Air. There was some sort of dust up in Lebanon, so there weren’t a lot of Marines around at Little Creek, Virginia, but they did treat us like we were in boot camp. Yelling at us, asking those questions for which there was no correct answer. No matter what we said, we were chewed us out. They tried to beat us down. The boot camp philosophy in the Marines is to tear you down mentally and physically and then build you back up as a Marine. It’s an interesting philosophy (laughs). Anyway, we had one simulated amphibious landing as part of our training, and I remember running through the bushes with a dummy M1 rifle and a Marine popped up, a real one, with a rifle. He takes aim at me and fires. I see the flash coming out of the gun barrel and I immediately took flight, I don’t know, I just I literally dived at the nearest bush. And that convinced me I really didn’t want to be a Marine.

BMR: Was there a bullet in there?

TM: No, no it was a blank. We had no bullets, not even blanks. So, we didn’t get to fire back. This part of the training was the first time all the people from the University of North Carolina NROTC Unit were together. Before for our first cruise we were completely, dispersed. But we were together for this. We formed a fairly close bond and really worked together pretty well. We flew down to the Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi, Texas after Little Creek. There they took us for rides in a F-80 jet trainer and an sea plane. The fighter pilot, bless his heart, did not roll the plane or do anything really radical. But the ride gave me a clue that maybe I had motion sickness problems. Which I did. I managed to survive the flight without puking.

The seaplane had no wheels. It was docked in the bay and they ferried several of us out to the plane and we climbed aboard. Apparently the job of the seaplane and crew was to sink submarines. We took turns in the co-pilot seat attacking a marker in the ocean meant to be a submarine periscope.  The guys who flew this seaplane thought it was a fighter. It seemed to me they were just a bit reckless. They put me in the co-pilot’s seat and put a smoke bomb in the water. Then they said, “okay, that’s a periscope of a submarine. I want you to the dive on it and fire the rockets.” I sort of pushed the wheel forward. They said, “no, really dive!” So I closed my eyes and pushed the wheel as far forward as it would go. And oh boy, when they said fire, I squeezed the little trigger and then opened my eyes and pulled back on the wheel. I did well. Navy Air was a lot better than the Marine experience.

For the final summer cruise after my junior year, I was on two ships. One was a submarine rescue vessel which had a diving chamber on it. Its purpose was to rescue people from sunken submarines (laughs). But it would only work in certain water depths: three or four hundred meters, right? If you were deeper, you’re out of luck. The ship was run by sailors and officers, and the officers had come up through the ranks to eventually become officers. They were what was call “mustangs”. They were tough guys, but very gentle with us. They put us in the decompression tank and took us down to 500 feet. Our voices sounded like Donald Duck. They dressed us in hard hat diving gear and took pictures to send home to our local newspaper. It was a fun experience. We sailed down to San Juan, where I transferred to a submarine for the trip back to Norfolk. The boat was an old World War II, a very cramped diesel boat. When I saw the movie “Das Boot”, I could readily identify with the tight quarters.

BMR: Yes.

 I mean, I was in an officer’s state room. I shared a bunk with a really friendly officer I’ll never forget this guy. He was a charming, kind individual with a terrific sense of humor. And his name was ”Chauncy Sweet“, which was the most ridiculous name I’d ever heard. But I figured, you know, if he could live with that, he must be a good guy (laughs).  I got seasick on the sub before it submerged. But I really, I enjoyed that summer. I was treated more like an officer rather than a lowly swabby.

When I graduated, I wanted to know what the “real Navy” was like. If I was to make the Navy a career I needed that knowledge. Instead of asking for the special branches or things like law or air, or intelligence, I asked to be stationed on a destroyer out of Norfolk. I figured there’s nothing more Navy than a small ship, and there’s nothing more Navy than Norfolk, Virginia. And I was right. The destroyer was part of a squadron that specialized in anti-submarine warfare. It was built in 1940, and served in  the war. It was small, 369 feet long and with a beam of 39 feet. The Navy kept this old ship around for two reasons. One, they converted it specifically for hunting submarines, which means they got a lot more anti-submarine weapon:. torpedoes, hegdehogs, depth charges, and a special aimable, rocket-launched, depth charge called a weapon alpha. The other reason they kept it around was that it was faster than any of the modern destroyers. It could do 40 knots at top speed, which is pretty fast. The squadron that we were part of had six destroyers and one aircraft carrier (CVS Valley Forge). We usually steamed as a unit called Task Group Alpha, and would go out for two weeks and practice catching submarines. Then we would come back in for two weeks and try to fix things or go to school. I went to all sorts of important schools like firefighting, damage control, and airplane control. It was a useful education. I got qualified to drive a ship, became an officer of the deck. They would never let me dock it, or take it out of dock. But they did let me come alongside a carrier once to be refueled. This is sort of tricky. You have to match the speed of the carrier, stay within about 20 yards of the fueling ship while you’re pumping fuel. So it was a learning curve. It was a real test. I felt like I grew up more in those three years than I did in the previous 16. I saw three people get killed for the first time: accident, suicide, combat.

BMR: That’s hard.

TM: That’s not pleasant. The first one was a young sailor who was actually in my division. He was scalded to death, while trying to clean out a boiler. Doused with boiling water. He was under the boiler when this happened. We had to get him out, and up a ladder for treatment. He stumbled off to our sickbay. A helicopter was sent to the ship from the accompanying carrier. From the carrier he was flown  to Norfolk, and he died on the flight.

BMR: That’s horrible, to witness that so young.

TM: Oh, it was yeah, he was maybe eighteen years old. There were two people at fault. The chief who ordered him to do the job working under the boiler and his boss, the Chief Engineer.  some real pain. The sailors did not like what happened. Everybody suffered. The second dead body was just some sailor who jumped off another ship in port. He came aboard drunk, jumped off the ship’s fantail. He said he was going to swim home. The ship eventually moved and his bloated body surfaced. So, I had to be an official witness for that. He just jumped off and presto. The cold water probably gave him a shock and he went to the bottom.

Then the third one, was really involved. There were two international incidents at that time. The first one was the Bay of Pigs in 1961. It happened just as John Kennedy had been elected president; Eisenhower got out. During Eisenhower’s tour, the Central Intelligence Agency helped form a group of Cuban expatriates who were to stage an invasion of Cuba in hopes that they could overthrow Castro’s regime. So, the CIA had paid for the training of these guys, paid for acquiring a few bombers, , and for the pilots. They arranged with the Navy to go down and escort the ships from Central America over to Cuba (laughs). In a way it was really crazy. I don’t mean to make fun of it because it was not fun, but it was strange. .

We always had trouble communicating with other ships because we were an old ship talking to other old ships, with old radios with all those little bulbs. Then one day these strange looking civilians came aboard our ship and put on a little transceiver on the bridge about, I don’t know, two feet wide, eight inches high, fifteen inches deep. And it was a radio. It was mounted up on brackets and we were told, “nobody can talk on this except the Commodore.” We had a Commodore onboard, as well as the Captain of the ship. So, “stay away.” It turned out that that radio was the same radio that taxi companies used at the time to talk to their taxis. And it worked much better than any of our radios. It had a short range, but the transmissions were nice and clear. Soon we started steaming down towards the Caribbean all by ourselves (not a part of Task Group Alpha). Nobody knew where or why we were going south or what we were going to do (laughs). There is a mechanical machine or early computer that would take our course and speed and estimate where we should be by latitude and longitude. They covered that up with a piece of paper so we couldn’t see it. None of the officers, none of the crew knew what we were going to do or anything about what was up. When you do that to any group, it’s like waving a red flag. So sailors in the   engine room kept track of the speed, the quartermaster on the bridge kept track of the course, and together they just did it by hand. They knew exactly where we were. And then when we got close to the Caribbean, we came to a halt. The bosun lowered some people over the bow of the ship and they painted grey paint over the ship’s hull numbers. Supposedly nobody should identify our ship. We continued into the Caribbean and then hung a right and headed for Central America. We were about, a hundred miles offshore when we got a radio from a carrier on our fancy new radio (the Essex as I remember). We didn’t know there was a carrier out there, but it was. They told our Commodore to meet this other ship at such and such a latitude and longitude. It wasn’t very far away. It’s the middle of the night. We go racing over to this other ship, which turned out to be an old cargo ship. This was one of the cargo vessels that were carrying the invaders from training in Central America to Cuba. Apparently what had happened on this ship was that the invaders had been practicing with a machine gun and accidentally shot one of their own. He was not dead, but he was severely wounded. We rigged a high line to the cargo ship and pulled the wounded man across the open water in a wire basket. We then rendezvoused with the carrier, and again high lined him over to the larger ship. Then the cat was out of the bag (laughs). Everybody, everybody knew what was going on.

BMR: It’s incredible that you have been in all of this, you know, historical events. (both laugh)

TM: And this is when you grow up very quick. H We were all doing 12 hour shifts. I occasionally would be the air controerl where I would track jets from the carrier that were flying overhead. They were not to engage with Cuban aircraft. They were there just to protect the US ships and hopefully scare away any Cuban aircraft. So, with radar I had to keep track of our planes and any Cuban planes that might show up. None did. The invasion had got started in the morning early, going on to the afternoon. We were steaming offshore up and down the coast, and at one point, the Cubans lobbed a shell at us. It landed on the seaward side of our ship, a little too far, but made a big splash. I was poking my head out of the engine room hatch at that time and saw the shell land. We decided to move a little farther out; we were obviously a little too close. Within a day, two days, it was over. There was no uprising. The Cubans were ready for us, to some extent, and they pretty much wiped out the small invading force.  Finally we were told, “okay, it’s over, but we want you to steam up the coast and pick up any survivors you find.” So, we stemmed up there, went very slowly, displaying the biggest American flag we had onboard. We found one body in the water; it was clearly a pilot. Apparently the Cubans had shot down one of the invading bombers. We got his name off the tag on his jumpsuit and left him there. We managed to pick up six or seven expatriate Cubans that survived the attack. They were dehydrated. I mean, they had nothing to drink for at least 24 hours, maybe longer, while hiding out in the marshy coast west of the Bay of Pigs. we carried them until we could transfer them to the carrier. We had a doctor on board, but none of them were really wounded, just suffering from exposure. After we took them to the carrier and headed home,  I went down to the mess deck where the sailors ate and there was a picture of our ship, taken from the air, steaming through the water. Someone had taken a yellow grease pencil, and painted a yellow stripe, down the centerline of the ship. The sign of a coward. Everybody onboard thought that we had not done anything to help the expatriates. We thought, well they sent us out there to help them. We didn’t help. Of course, that was Kennedy’s decision, and it was a wise decision. If we had helped, it would have started a real mess. It was bad enough as it was.

In fact, it led to the next exciting adventure, which was the Cuban Missile Crisis (laughs), when Khrushchev had sent a bunch of missiles out to Cuba. Kennedy had to react. At the time we were headed back to the port after two weeks training when we got a message. We were not more than 20 miles from Norfolk. The message from the shore told us to turn around and head south. No reason why. Nobody knew what was going on. At that time I was the ship’s navigator, something I really enjoyed and it served me well in the future. I had a first-class quartermaster, that really did most of the job. He was a smart, young man. At the time, he was headed into port to be discharged, and he had his wedding planned. He and his fiancé had rented the facility, hired the land, and sent out the invitations.  I was really upset because we couldn’t communicate with anybody on shore, couldn’t call up and say, Hey, “honey, I’m not going to be home, I’m heading somewhere.” The quartermaster wouldn’t speak to anybody for three or four weeks.

BMR: Right.

TM: Because we’d been steaming for a while, we needed to refuel, and so off Jacksonville, we met with a tanker to refuel us. Often when you get refueled like that, we would trade movies and magazines and stuff as you’re being refueled. We thought, this is smart. We’ll get some magazines, Times, News Week… and find out what’s going on. Well, we got a little package of magazines. There was a Vogue, and a McCalles, and  four copies Popular Mechanics Guide to patents. Totally uninformative.

BMR: So no news.

TM: Oh Jesus. The first contact we made was with a couple of our destroyers. They were steaming circles around a submerged Russian submarine. This was north and east  of the Bahamas. We joined the two other destroyers doing the circle, making sure we had them in our sights and the submarine on our sonar. A day or so later the submarine came up. I don’t know why it was down there not really trying to evade us, but it came up and started steaming east. Two  destroyers, ours and one other, sailed with him staying off his port and starboard quarters. The other destroyer was larger rand it had a Dixie land jazz ban. They got up on the 01  level and serenaded our Russian friend with a really good jazz concert. We could watch the Russian in the conning tower as they steamed along. We might as well not been there. He never took a look. Looking back at it, I’m sure we did pretty well. Then just two or three years ago, I was watching the History Channel interviewing a couple of Russian retired naval officers who were on that sub.

BMR: Oh.

TM: And they were telling about how they were debating whether or not to shoot a missile at the US when they came up. (both laugh)

BMR: In History Channel!

TM: So thank goodness they did not shoot! From there we went farther south. W we were steaming back and forth the channel between the eastern point of Cuba and Hispaniola, intercepting any ships passing through the channel and finding out who they were, what were they carrying. We did that for a while, all by ourself. It was great when you didn’t have to pay attention to other ships in our fleet. Then from there we went to the channel that runs along the north side of Cuba doing the same thing, catching any ship that came by. But it was so… It was well, we didn’t have anything complicated to do. We had swim call. We went fishing. It was wonderful. All this while folks back home were worried about whether or not the Russians would bomb Norfolk and had no idea where we were. After, this was a few weeks, the Commodore got a coded message saying, one of our airplanes had located a Russian transport ship that might have missiles on board. Of course, the weather was really crappy. That was a big storm brewing.  We had a location for the Russian ship and took off, full speed. It was cloudy and rainy and we had to get right up on top of the ship, before we didn’t see it. But once we got there, we could see the whole top deck was loaded with missiles. So Kennedy had bluffed out Khrushchev and they were removing the vessels. The Commodore was ecstatic, and we went home (laughs).

BMR: So those were your three years of experience in the Navy.

TM: Yes. They were the only non-boring things I did. When we got back, we found out that everybody back home knew what was going on and was scared death. They were afraid that somebody was going to come to Norfolk and bomb or shoot a missile at it. I never found out what my quartermaster did. He was not going to communicate anything with that ship again.

This was getting towards the end of my tour. It was time for a transfer. By then, I had learned two things. One was, I really had a problem with seasickness. However, if I just buckle down and kept going after about four or five days, my mind would tell my body to either get over it or die. And every time I get it over, I got my sea legs and I’d be okay. And since our schedule was two weeks out of two weeks in, two weeks was just short enough that by the time we went out again, I still had a little bit of sea legs, so I didn’t get badly seasick.

In addition to these international experiences, I had experienced storms that scared the pee out of me, and I really got to know the ocean. And I liked it. I don’t care if I did have to get sick for four or five days just to be there. I liked the ocean. And so I would aim for the Navy to pay for my graduate school in oceanography. I was due to be rotated anyway. And they sent back orders for me to go to the University of Washington, Seattle where there was an Oceanography Department, for a master’s degree. Well, I knew two things, by then. One was, the University of Washington Oceanography Department did not have what I would call eminent geological oceanographers as part of the faculty. And two, to find out what would happen the my Navy future,  I actually went up to BUPERS in D.C.  to ask them what the Navy would do with me when I finished my MSc. The answer: they would just stick on some ship as an officer. It would mean nothing in terms of the path of my career. And I also knew that a master’s degree of science would get me a technical job, but not a real research professorship.

BMR: So you knew by then that you wanted to move from the Navy into scientific research.

TM: Yeah. So I started researching Woods Hole, MIT, Miami, Scripps in La Jolla… I don’t I don’t think I looked at Texas at that time. but I looked at all of the rest of them. MIT-Woods Hole was very famous. I really thought that was a distinct possibility. But when I got the application, they wanted a list of all the textbooks I had in college, not only the courses I’d taken, but textbooks used in the courses. Well, the Navy bought my textbooks. And at the end of the semester, when I was finished, I had to give them back.  I had no idea what my textbooks were. So I flushed MIT, and that left Miami and Scripps. I really wanted to go to Scripps because they had a marine geologist there, that had actually written a textbook on marine geology. And so, I knew of it. His name was Fran Shepard.

BMR: [Francis] Shepard and his submarine canyons.

TM: Yes. He studied submarine canyons a lot. I applied there and with a little luck and a few letters of recommendation, I was accepted. I think having been navigator for six months or so, really stood in me good stead, I was accepted with a research fellowship. The Navy piled all my household goods into a big box and shipped it up to San Diego, and I started school at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It was a big leap. But, you know, by then I’ve been down to Brazil. I was a shellback. I thought of the distance I had traveled, both mentally and physically. I had a little more self-confidence, and I experienced some rather disturbing sights.

BMR: Right.

TM: Among the incoming marine geologists, the ones that I associated with most closely were Ross Heath, Wolfgang Berger and Jack Corliss. They’d all had little breaks in their educational careers. Ross had served in the Australian Geological Survey for a couple of years, Wolf, worked in an electronics company for a few years and Jack Coralis, I think he got a master’s degree in philosophy or something like that. And then we all chose to come to Ocean Research. I think that the fact that we all had a breather between undergraduate and graduate school allowed us to be a little more mature and to have a better sense of where we were going. It was useful. I, I don’t know if you know those guys. …

BMR: I don’t know them.

TM: Wolf was a famous paleontologist. He it did go on a few drilling cruises. Ross was my office mate. We stuck together for our first job and then our second job. While we were in the employ of the University of Rhode Island, he applied to become the Dean of the School of Oceanography at Oregon State and got the job. Later moved on as Dean of Oceanography at the University of Washington. We wrote a lot of papers together, and I learned that one of his outstanding characteristics was that he could look at a problem and think of a solution almost immediately. I would have to look at a problem and go to sleep on it, think about it for a few days maybe, but Ross was much quicker on the uptake.  He was an ideal administrator, but he was also a good scientist. Wolf Bergerwas also a very good scientist. He stayed at Scripps, as a faculty member, after graduate school and really became quite famous, wining several awards. Unfortunately, he died in a car accident just a few years ago. Ross is still in good shape. We write some emails occasionally.

There was an interesting thing about Scripps at that time, it was like the early feudal system in Europe in the sense there were all these independent nobles around, each with their own little army and they rarely talked to each other. At SIO there were all these faculty members, each with a group of technicians and students helping with their scientific efforts, but they didn’t talk to other faculty. In fact, some of them really did not like each other very much.

BMR: Why was that?

TM: The why? I don’t know. scientific disagreements, personality clashes?

BMR: You were talking about this renowned scientists at Scripps, right? Like Francis Shepard and all this people in marine geosciences…

TM: Fran was a dear, dear man. Oh, and he taught me, I think, in the last time he taught his course at Scripps before he retired. He would get up there with a pile of maps on the desk in front of the classroom, and he was so shy, he would fumble with the maps, and he was largely incoherent. His book was terribly boring, except for the chapters that other people had written. I looked at Fran and I said, you know, if he could do it, I could do it (laughs).

There were some doubts still there, but the guys who hated each other, it was one guy who would only work at night and the other guy would work in the day, so they would not run into each other. That’s how bad it was. That was an extreme case. But in general the faculty didn’t communicate with each other. The graduate students all had to take a set of core courses in biology, physical biology, geochemistry and marine geology. We were all in these courses together. And so we talked to each other. We knew more about what was going on in terms of research and animosities than any faculty member(laughs).

I’m sure it’s not like this now. Scripps is a much bigger place and I’m sure there are groups that work well together. But at the time… Not so much. There were some good people there. But the fact they didn’t communicate was just, unfortunate.

After we’d been there and completed our core courses, first year and a half, we, Ross and I, had this amazing experience. In the first year or so we had had a couple of student cruises. Back in those days the US Navy paid for all the ships, so SIO didn’t have to justify every time you took a ship out. You did not say to the Navy where you were going to do this and that and when we come back, you did not have to justify what you did. They just block funded the fleet. So SIO could take students out on a cruise and just teach them things like how to take a core, how to do a net tow for plankton, how to do a Nansen bottle cast for water samples, all those things that you did normally on research cruises. On one of the cruises, the professor in charge of the cruise had just migrated from UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles, and didn’t know much about the ocean. We worked all day doing these various operations, and then after dinner and a little bit of discussion, everybody went to bed. Everybody except for Ross and me. we figured, well, nobody’s doing anything, let’s play with the ship. We decided we would guide the ship around and map the Channel Islands, and the bays, and the ridges offshore San Diego. And we did that all night. Next morning, the professor, who first got up, took over. That may have been the reason that somewhere during our second year, we were approached and asked if we would like to take a ship down to Tahiti.

BMR: Wow, that’s a big cruise, right?

TM: Oh well let me think about it! When you get an offer like that, there’s no question about what the answer would be. All we had to do was think of a reason to do something on the way.

BMR: So the Navy was providing the money and all the logistics, all the technologies, for you just to sail. Did you have to give something in exchange, like the data or do something useful for them?

TM: Sounds like something we should have done, doesn’t it? (laughs) We did write a report, after it. But the reason we were going to Tahiti was, that one of the physiologists, Per Scholander,, had heard that the Tahitian pearl divers would, I think, get the bends when they went down and came back up from deep water, free diving. Scholander thought that physically, shouldn’t be possible.. So, he’d written a proposal to go down there and study these guys while they were diving, but he needed a ship on which to base his laboratory.

BMR: I see.

TM: And so we were charged with bringing him the ship. We didn’t care. We dreamed up this idea to survey an area of abyssal hills out in the middle of the Pacific. That had never been done before. I mean, there was no way to control your position relative to the seafloor at that time. You really didn’t know precisely where you were. You had a depth recorder, but at that distance from shore, the only navigational aid you had was the old sextant. Which is maybe accurate to a mile, if you’re really good. So we said, Well, this is simple. We’ll just anchor a buoy out there, put a radar reflector on it, and then survey around the radar. Nobody had done that. Then we’ll take cores and take a look at the sediment relative to the topography. We said, okay, that’s good, turned in the plan and it was okeyed without question. When we left the entire science crew was Ross and me and a guy named Harold Samouli. Harold operated some very primitive seismic reflection gear for imaging the sediment layers below the sea floor – and I mean really primitive. Resolution was crap. You were lucky if you could see basement beneath the sediment with that gear. We may have had one other technician; I really cannot remember. We sailed down to the Equator using our seismic reflection profiler to measure sediment thickness increase as we approached the equator. Then we sailed back north to an area at about 8° N we had chosen to survey. First we had to build a buoy. Our buoy was a long bamboo pole with three automobile tire inner tubes attached to it and a weight tied at the bottom to keep the buoy vertical. Finally, we taped an army surplus radar reflector to the top. We were going to anchor it with piano wire, which is thin but strong. We needed over 4000 meters of it. We had a lot of the wire and a couple of railroad car wheels to use as anchor weights. These were tied to the piano wire and lowered it over the side until it hit the bottom – no tension on the wire. Then we started surveying. This is where the star fixes came in: the noon fix, the evening fix and the morning fix. From these it was clear we had drifted.

BMR: Hum. So all the setting had moved at the same time.

TM: Yes, the buoy was not truly anchored. We said, “Well, we try to do it one more time.” We had just enough piano wire for another go. It didn’t work again. So we radioed back to shore and, said, “look, we got some real problems. And they said, “well, why don’t you try polypropylene rope?” The reason for this choice is it is relatively strong, and it is neutrally buoyant. So, there wouldn’t be any weight of the line itself. We steamed back to Honolulu where Harold disembarks and we get another technician named Tom Walsh and a huge box of braided polypropylene rope- a bit over a quarter inch thick. We opened the box and the rope was just all piled up in the box. This thing is going to have knots and we’ll never get it untangled. We took it on faith, did all the same things, tied it to the weight wheels, started lowering it over thew side. Amazingly the rope came out of the box with no problem whatsoever. We tied it to the buoy and started surveying. The skipper started taking fixes and it appeared to work!

We would survey and then take cores. We often took cores at night because we were using something called freefall cores. It was useful because we didn’t have it attached to a wire. If we would have attached it to the wire, the ship’s drifting, the wires forming some sort of arc going down, you wouldn’t know where the core is actually located relative to the bottom topography, which is what we wanted to know. So by having a freefall core, we just threw it over the side and it went straight down to the bottom at about 15 knots. When it hit bottom a lead weight at the nose of barrel, which made it balanced properly, would slide up as a core went into the sediment. That would release a couple of glass balls that were above the core and the glass balls would shoot upward and yank the core liner out of the barre and take it to the surface. Inside the balls were little strobe lights. And so you only used this device at night, so you could see the light flashing when the core came back up. They worked pretty well. We took a lot of free-falling cores as well as a few piston and gravity cores in areas where exact location wasn’t quite necessary. We did all the survey.

Somewhere about the time we started the survey, we got word that Per Scholander did not get his funding to study the Tahitian pearl divers. We got to come back home.

BMR: Had someone surveyed the area before? This was around Tahiti, right?

TM: No, this was north of the Equator. Sout east of Honolulu. It was about eight degrees north. Somewhere around there. I should mention (laughs) This is the time when all this business about seafloor spreading was just  getting to be a hot topic.

BMR: Hmm. Exactly.

TM: It really had not been resolved yet. We’re talking about 1962, 63… people were pushing ideas. So it was interesting.

BMR: So you had already heard about that. There was the paper by [Harry] Hess on seafloor spreading in 1962…

TM: Exactly. Yeah, that was one of the early ones. I mean, Harry was well respected and so people were paying attention. They just wanted to see some proof. You know. It wasn’t till Vine and Mathews published their magnetic anomaly paper in the Atlantic in 1968 that everybody said, “OK, that’s it.” And then everybody said, “Oh, now look, I’ve got this data and it also fits.” You know, it’s just, people had been collecting data since the war, Second World War, and all of it was sitting there, epicenter of earthquakes, location of earthquakes, geomagnetic pole studies of continents moving around… It seemed so good. And Ross and I, when we got back, the first thing we published was a paper showing the seismic record we had from north of the Equator all the way to the Equator, showing the sediment thickness of the equatorial region. It got thicker and thicker when you go towards the Equator and it was a little bit thicker, this north of the equator. At the time, the whole science of oceanography was just blossoming, and the scientific journals would publish almost anything that said “oceanography” on it. Ross and I published a paper on that transect in Science magazine in 1965. And the next year we published another paper, this time on the manganese nodules. We had found a lot of these nodules in the tops of our cores. We published this paper  in Nature. We were so naive at the time. We knew these were important journals, but we didn’t think anything was special about publishing in in Science. It’s just unbelievable, looking back at it: two second year grad students running a cruise and publishing in Science and Nature!

BMR: Those were actually the years that the US and other countries were starting to undertake missions to study precisely that area for manganese nodules.

TM: Nature and Science were willing to publish almost anything about the oceans. That’s the only reason we got it published. But I do think it made an impression on our fellow professors. Not that I thought much about it at the time. We were having fun! We made a little 3D models of our survey area (laughs)

 International happenings now make another entrance into my career. At the time, Howard Hughes was building a massive ship. He was reportedly going to go out and collect manganese nodules. We know later that it was the CIA funding this massive ship that was going out to collect a sunken Russian submarine. But at the time, nobody knew that. So Ross and I published this paper on manganese nodules, which in that area turned out to be fairly rich in trace metals that were in demand: copper, cobalt, nickel. As a result, we were offered a fellowship by International Nickel Company… (laughs) Because they figured they’d better get into this game if Howard Hughes was about to get in it. Totally bogus. But, you know, it was money. We’re glad to have it (laughs).

BMR: Did you accept the fellowship?

TM: Of course. We only had a couple of years to go and that would cover our costs. It was nice. We went on to publish other papers about the survey area, about deep sea sediments.  For young graduate students, we had published a lot. The only problem was, they were all combinations of Heath and Moore, which you can’t really use for an individual’s thesis. We had to write separate theses, which we did. Oh. (Laughs) it was sort of exciting. And in 1968, we got our degrees.

The Moho Project had been in the works for a few years while we were at SIO. The contract had gone to Brown & Root in Texas to build the ship and the equipment to drill all the way through the crus. Congress finally saw all the cost overruns and said that “it ain’t worth it” and killed the project. But the various oceanographic institution said “you know, if we could drill into the deep ocean, we find out a lot of good stuff. Even if we didn’t get all the way to the Mohole. we could get the sediment and get down to the crust, maybe we can even drill into the crust using standard oil company drilling technology.” And so they joined up in the Joint Oceanographic Institutions, Deep Earth sampling organization, and got funded. So in our last year at Scripps, the Scripps Institution was the lead institution for the Deep Sea Drilling Project. Mel [Melvin] Peterson, who was just down the hall from our offices, was the first chief scientist. And things were gearing up, but things were not that simple. Before the funding for DSDP there were a lot of tests of being able to dynamically positioning over the seafloor in deep water and drill. I mean, there was an expedition off off Florida, where they used one form of positioning. There was even an expedition in Lake Superior in the US, which has deep water, four hundred meters or so. And there was a dynamically positioned barge with outboard motors on each corner that actually did some drilling off San Diego and recovered some cores. They covered the early technical aspects of it pretty well. There were oil company ships that could drill in deep water. And so the line was, “okay, we’re not going to do anything fancy. We’re just going to get an oil company ship and go out and drill and recover cores. So that’s got to be simple.” The organization at first was at Scripps, Mel [Melvin Petterson] was chief scientist. There was a representative from the  National Science Foundation, which was funding the project, sitting at Scripps, making sure we weren’t screwing up.

BMR: Oh, I didn’t know that.

TM: Yeah, well, you could see why they’d be interested. The advisory structure was a just simple a Planning Committee of eminent geologists. Many of them didn’t know squat about oceanography. They actually planned where the ship would go and drill. They would invite people to participate. It was pretty ad hoc. I think one of the first legs, Doc Ewing from Lamont-Doherty, and Lamar Worzel, were drilling on these little bumps in the Gulf of Mexico.

BMR: Leg 3, in Sigsbee Knolls, I think?

TM: Sigsbee, yeah. And it was a salt dome (laughs) which (laughs), which you just don’t want to do that. Years later, when we moved from this one committee to several committees and the ODP, we had a Safety Committee through which all proposed drilling sites had to pass. And this committee was made up of oil company geologists whose other real job was to find the oil, but their job for us was to avoid finding oil. It was an important safety issue. But, you know, by this time, I was an expert in the microfossils called Radiolaria. I worked with Bill Riedel , the leading guru of radiolarian stratigraphy. Bill was the chief scientist of the barge, I think they called Caldrill, which tested dynamic positioning off San Diego.

BMR: Yes.

TM: And he was probably he was the man, I think, more than any other, who proved that Radiolaria really could be used as a stratigraphic age tool. Prior to that, even up until the 1950s, Radiolaria were looked at as an oddity, that apparently didn’t speciate for millions and millions of years. That’s because the Challenger expedition of 1870 something had Pacific sediments from the surface of the deep seafloor containing Radiolarian that everybody knew were also present in Miocene and older sediments in the Mediterranean area. So there were only two explanations. One, that species were long lived because they were found at the sediment surface Or, two, they were eroded out of an outcrop of older sediments and redeposited. Everybody knew that the ocean was the ultimate catchment of sediment, it came in, and fell on the seafloor, and was buried layer by layer. So they chose the idea of the long-lived species. Seemed more reasonable. But not to Bill. Scripps was getting cores from the Pacific occasionally, containing only these older fossils. He had gone over the entire Scripps collection, sampling cores that contained Miocene only Oligocene, only, etc… and kept them as his type cores. He started working on a real chronostratigraphy for radiolarians. He was my mentor, so I knew his work, and I could recognize those radiolarians too. AI was eager to go out on the drilling program and give it a whirl.

BMR: You really saw how the science was being built from the very beginning. Even with technologies, I mean, the very idea of having cores from the bottom of the Pacific, for example.

TM: I knew it would be exciting. And I was really anxious to go… Bill had already gone on a couple of legs, which he used to improve his stratigraphy. I remember, after I finished my thesis and defended it, and just before I made a decision of what to do next, (laughs) I went into Bill’s office seeking advice because I had  been so focused on my thesis for the last two years, I didn’t think about anything else but my thesis. I said, “Okay Bill, what do I do now?“ He looked at me, shook his head, and said, “Well, figure out what you want to do and then do it!” I said, Oh, (laughs). So shortly after, Ross and I went with Tjeerd (Jerry) van Andel up to Oregon State. OSU wanted to build their Oceanography School and hired Jerry , an eminent marine geologist, who had been our friend and advisor at SIO. He offered us the chance to go to OSU with him as postdocs. I also applied to go on DSDP Leg 8, which was scheduled to drill a transect across that mound of sediment that we’d surveyed way back in 1964.

BMR: Why they were interested in that area?

TM: Well, by this time, 1968, 69, Vine and Matthews seminal paper had come out and there was this idea that the Pacific plate maybe was moving. The nice thing about the equatorial region i, is the upwelling, which occurs precisely on the equator, it gives rise to all of this high productivity of plankton. The upwelling zone is a fixed entity; it doesn’t care where the plates go. It’s totally tied to the Coriolis effect, which changes sign at the equator. Nowhere else. So you have upwelling at the equator producing thick sediment under the equator. If the Pacific plate moves, so will the thick sediment. That was the idea behind drilling, a transect across the equator, at least in my mind. By then, Vine and Matthews had come out and everybody in marine geology was writing papers about the seafloor spreading. So I said, “Well, let’s do this.” It was great.

There were two co-chief scientists on DSDP Leg 8: Josh Tracy, who was an eminent geologist from the U.S. Geological Survey and had been closely involved with the drilling on the island of Enewetak . The other guy was George Sutton from the University of Hawaii, he was a geophysicist. We went to sea, with two co-chiefs and seven scientists, four from the US, one from France, one from Australia and one from Switzerland. We started drilling and talking about what we’re looking for. It was clear that neither George, nor Josh knew what the hell we were doing (both laugh). They had been given this job by people who knew a lot more. And so we started drilling a whole series of sites from North of the Equator to South. At one point, we actually used some equipment that had been developed for the Mohole Project. It was a coring bit activated by a turbine at the end of the drill string.  we were using diamond-faced bits, and we put it on the end of the pipe and pump water down through the turbine, which rotated the bit to drill into the sediment. We wanted to see how it worked, and drilled with it for a while. We got through the sediment and hit some harder stuff and kept drilling. After a while, we were unable to get the thing to go deeper. We pulled up the core, which was this beautiful solid piece of calcareous chert. Nice long piece. We couldn’t sample it because it was too hard, I mean you needed a diamond saw to sample it. And the face of the bit was smooth, completely barren of any diamonds. The whole devise had been totally worn out. So we said, well, what happened? What had happened was, at that time, there was no heave compensation on the drill string. So when you’re out there, and the ship goes down and up and down, the pipe is rigid and so the pipe is going, bang, bang, bang, bang on the chert. And yeah, we broke the turbine, all the little fan blades broke, just like when a bird flies into a jet airplane engine. It was not a good thing.

BMR: Everyone was learning how to use the technologies.

TM: Absolutely. It would not have worked on the Mohole Project either.

BMR: …and what kind of technologies would be needed if you wanted to continue with this thing of drilling.

TM: Well, it was, the large expanse of chert that we ran into, not only in the Pacific, but in the Atlantic as well, clearly indicated that we needed another kind of drill bit. So probably the first important technological change was get this Hughes roller cone bit. You know what a roller cone bit is?

BMR: Yes. The one that has three…

TM: It has three little cones with the little carbide tips on them, that roll around chewing on hard rock rather than rolling flat on rock face. They did manage to do a lot better, they still wore out, but they were much better than the flat face diamond bit had been.

We continued to drill. I was absolutely thrilled, and was able to get some good sediment samples. Some cores didn’t look at all undisturbed. You know when you open the core, and split it in half and look at it, If it were completely undisturbed you would see circles of worm burrows in the carbonate sediments. But we’d open up a core and instead of little circles there were long vertical stripes. You said, “ah, ah. This is not undisturbed!” It may be from a certain depth, but it’s not undisturbed. We were worried about that. But the bit and the disturbance were two things that came out of the early legs, and obviously needed to change. And the roller bit was the solution for the first problem. The second problem took a little longer because it was not standard oceanographic, I mean, oil company technology. Oil companies just want to make a hole. Scientists want to collect sediments (laughs). It’s not the same thing. The only stuff we collected in the earlier days that was undisturbed were sediments that were lithified and didn’t flow. The drill bit acted like an upside-down funnel. You push it through the soft sediment and it funnels up sediment four inches around the bit and pushes it up the pipe. Fills it up quickly. You might push it down nine meters, and you probably collected one or two meters of the in-place sediment. Later on, I wrote a paper on biostratgraphic boundaries found in cores from the first several legs of drilling. It showed most of the boundaries were either between cores or in the core catchers. Their distribution in the cores should have been random if we were not collecting everything. The paper that I wrote was called, “DSDP, Big Successes and Little Failures.” Collecting in place, undisturbed sediments was a little failure. It was Jim Hayes, co-chief on DSDP Leg 9, that pointed out this rather serious problem. After being out also in the equatorial Pacific, he came back to Scripps and talked to the DSDP engineers, we had engineers as part of the organization.

Eventually, NSF chose to fund the project through the organization called Joint Oceanographic Institutions, and they contracted with JOI to fund the drilling. And so there was no NSF overseer there anymore. They started building advisory committees, across several subdisciplines of marine geology. After Jim went back and said, “you know, these sediments are all disturbed. They are clearly disturbed. Isn’t there a way you could get a core out ahead of the bit and collect the sediment?” And the engineer said, “uhm, maybe we could do that. And so they went on and built the first hydraulic piston corer, which was initially only four meters long. I used it on Leg 74 It worked pretty well. Not every time,  but pretty well. There were still some problems with the shear pins. you had to pump up the pressure in the drill string, to shoot the core out ahead of the bit. If the shot was either too strong or too weak, It didn’t work very well. But they eventually they solved that problem. They later extended the length of the barrel to nine meters, rather than four.

Just after leg 74, I had took a job with Exxon Production. But I still maintained close contact with the Drilling Program. I served on committees, and Exxon let me do it because they said, well, you can’t do anything bad on it. (both laugh) There were several failings, I think, in those early days. Almost from the beginning, I know from Leg 8, we had not only US scientists onboard.

BMR: I wanted to ask you about that, yes.

TM: I don’t know how we went about it, because I wasn’t privy to selecting people, but we had an Australian Swiss and Frenchman on board Leg 8, and it just kept going from there. Later we had French and, British, German, and even the Russians as paying members in the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP). Initially, Russians were a special case, because they were still using Russian money, which wasn’t on the international market, as a result they had to use fuel to pay for their membership in the drilling program. At this time we migrated from just letting Europeans come aboard, to saying, you come aboard but give us some money. And the Russians didn’t have any money to give us. So they gave us fuel oil (both laugh).

BMR: Really? Was that on the Glomar Challenger?

TM: Yes, still the Glomar Challenger. By that time we had something called the Information Handling Panel, because there was so much data being generated, that there had to be some way to collect it and keep it. The panel was arguing about how to do it. There were of course paper copies, but that would be very burdensome. So they were going to use microfiche. Do you know what a microfiche is?

BMR: Someone told me about it, but I’ve never seen one.

TM: Well, it looks like a photographic negative, about this big. You slip it into a microfiche reader and it blows it up, so you could read it . That takes much less space than a piece of paper.

So they were voting to shift the data achieving onto the microfiche. You know, the normal sort of data you collected, and that’s sometimes by machine, sometimes by a person. There was one guy on that committee, named Al Loeblich, who was a micropaleontologist with Chevron Oil. He was a real character, he was married to another paleontologist, who was a lady that was quite and gentle, just as he was irascible with the others, a character in the other direction. The Russian on the panel was objecting to going onto the microfiche, because Russia didn’t have any microfiche readers. And so, well, Al told me this story. Al said, I’ll tell you what, Andre (?name). He said. I am with Chevron and I’ll buy you all the microfiche readers you can use if you just send us one of your new backfire bombers (laughs). Andre shut up after that.

I really loved having Russians onboard, and they were all good scientists. The ones I worked with in particula.  Alexander Lisitsin was internationally famous marine geologist in Russia. Also, a hero of the Second World War. I think he was a navigator on a bomber. Some of his papers and books had been translated. He visited Oregon State University when I was there, and I took him on a tour of the Cascades. His father had been to Oregon when he was a young man. Alexander was more like a Frenchman than he was a Russian. He looked like a Frenchman and acted like a Frenchman. He was a real gentleman. But he did get into trouble later on. He was in charge of one of the big oceanographic expeditions. The Russians had these huge ships that went all over the world. On his expedition some technician deserted while they were docked in Honolulu. Lisitsin caught a lot of flak after that. We didn’t see him for several years. Eventually the Russians had to leave the drilling projects. They couldn’t really deal with the money exchange and the politics.

BMR: Maybe we can talk about this in the next meeting.

TM: Well I hope they do come back. If we get rid of Putin and the politics of the Ukraine war, that would be really nice to have them back. Anyway. For a while we did have them. But one of the things that struck me, and it was true of just about everybody in the early days, there were never any women onboard. The Russians never sent any women scientists.

BMR: I mean, I know there were women from… Italy, or the UK and other countries, right?

TM: Yes.

BMR: That they went onboard by pairs…

TM: This whole thing about women going to sea evolved very quickly. When I was at Scripps, women had a hard time going to sea at all. And there were lots of women there. Then, they changed the policy, when I was there. It was alright for a woman to go, but they had to go in even numbers. They had two bunks per staeroom.

BMR: Yes, I’ve heard that.

TM: By the time I got to Michigan, back in 1989, we had a ship that sailed the lakes. It just had one big bunk room, everybody slept there. Men and women. Anyway, those were two sorts of social problems that affected ocean science in general, early on. And frankly, I think it’s also true to some extent now, how many Japanese women have you seen on the drilling program.

BMR: There are but not many. If you look at the percentage, is not that much.

TM: Yeah.

BMR: I think it’s increasing with the time, but it’s true that at the very beginnings, not that much.

TM: Of course, yeah. I hope it changes. And it’s a wonderful about social evolution, it usually moves in the right direction (both laugh).

BMR: We can continue talking in another occasion, if it’s fine for you. I’ll be really looking forward to have another meeting.

TM: Okay. We left off when I was co-chief of Leg 74, which drilled a transect on the Walvis ridge.

BMR: We have not started yet with that, so maybe we are… early in the seventies probably? In terms of scientific ocean drilling?

TM: Okay. It was a very successful cruise. We’re using the hydraulic piston core for the first time, for me. it had been used before, and was collecting a lot of good sediment. We had only had one misstep. One of the crew members came down with hepatitis. We had a doctor aboard, but we didn’t know what kind of hepatitis it was. If it was hepatitis C, then it was both dangerous and very infectious. So everybody on the ship got a shot in the butt. We sailed into Walvis Bay to offload this guy, and went back to drilling. It was a good cruise. Phil Rabinowitz, who was my co-chief, was more of a hard rock geologist,, and the only discussions, disagreements, that we would have was when to stop drilling into basement rocks. We drilled into basements and we collected basalt. And I said,” okay, we got some basalt, let’s go”. And he said, “No, I want to go deeper, and see what else is there”. We drilled a little more, and we got a layer of carbonate in between the basalt layers. We get the age of the carbonate, that was the same age of the basalt. And he said, let’s drill a little more. And got another layer of carbonate. Finally, even  he gave up. But that happen on almost every site. I don’t know what would have happened if we kept on drilling, but we never got anything older than the late-Cretaceous. It was all, pretty much the same age.

We were always finding little mysteries like that. On DSDP Leg 17, on which I served as a micropaleontologist, we drilled in western tropical Pacific between the Marshall and the Line islands. We drilled in different locations and would get the age of basement: it was always the same thing, Albian, Albian, Albian… And we said, “ok, let’s go to the plateau. I think it was the Magellan Rise, which has a thick sediment cover We drilled like crazy, and we got to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, and kept on drilling. By the time we gave up, we were in the Upper Jurassic. Which is way older than anything around the Rise. So, what we must have been looking at on this isolated high, it had collected everything through time, and all  the seafloor around it, must have been covered with sediments of Albian age over basaltic basement. We never proved that flood basalts covered older sediments, but it makes sense. And it’s fascinating. I mean, nobody fully understood it  – actually somebody did in 1967, I think.

At Scripps, well-known marine geologists (Henry Menard), published a text book about marine geology. He was a wonderful writer. The book is a pleasure to read. And the only thing unfortunate about it is he published it about a year before seafloor spreading was widely accepted. So it was immediately out of date. In it, however, he proposed something he called the Darwin Rise, which was out around the Mid Pacific mountains and Line and Marshall Islands, a big tmound. And after seafloor spreading became the new thing up, I didn’t know what the hell that Rise was. But I suspect it was like bulging up of the seafloor rising in response to high heat flow and a lot of flood basalts coming out, all over the place. We went to see Stu Smith, who was Menard’s technical assistant, and said, “Hey, Stu, where are all the data sets used to map the Darwin Rise?” Menard based the idea of this Darwin Rise on the present depth of the guyots, (they are flat top seamounts). If it’s a flat top, it must have been at sea level for a while. They were now at different depths. So Menard brought them all back up the sea level, and that created the Darwin Rise. Perfect sense. And we went to Stu and said, “look, where is the data for the depth of all those seamounts and seamount locations?” He said, “I don’t know where it is.” (laughs).” We never got a chance to go back and look at that. Sad. In those days, that was one of the reasons that we did the things that you asked about. All we did to preserve data well. There weren’t requirements on what we published including all the data that had been used. We might publish the table of chemical analysis of something like that, but a lot of data was lost. Anyway, Leg 74 went without a hitch. We had onboard Nick Shackleton; who did a lot of good oxygen isotope measurements from the sediments of that Leg. Nick was such a good guy. I miss him.

BMR: That was in 1980. Probably we can talk longer about this leg in the next meeting?

TM: Okay. Are we ready to end this meeting?

BMR: I think so, yes.

---

PART 2

Disclaimer

This transcript is based on a video-recorded interview deposited at MarE3, JAMSTEC (Yokosuka, Japan).

The transcripts of the research project Oral Histories of Scientific Ocean Drilling are polished representations of oral conversations, and are intended solely for the purpose of preserving and documenting personal accounts and memories. They are not a literary product, and are not intended to exhibit literary qualities.

The primary goal of this transcript is to capture the spoken words and memories of the interviewee as accurately as possible. Minor editing and polishing works have been performed to enhance clarity and readability while maintaining the authenticity of spoken discourse, including non-standard grammar, inconsistencies, repetitions, and pauses.

The reader must be aware that memories of an event can vary between individuals and may evolve over time due to various factors, such as subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and personal emotions.

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Please cite the interview as:

Interview of Theodore C. Moore Jr. by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2024 March 08, virtual. [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is March 8 of 2024. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, postdoctoral researcher at JAMSTEC. Today I’m in a virtual meeting with Ted Moore.

Ted Moore (TM): I’d like to start by going back a little bit. Is that all right?

BMR: Yes, sure.

TM: When we left off, I was talking a lot about the drilling programs and my experiences, and the technical developments. But I’d like to skip back in the chronology.

BMR: Okey. What would you like to go back to?

TM: Well, when we left Scripps (Institution of Oceanography) and went to Oregon State (University). Ross (Heath) and I with Jerry Van Andel, we were being supported on an Office of Naval Research (ONR) contract, studying sedimentation in the Panama Basin. But I did go on DSDP Leg 8 and then later, on Leg 17, in the tropical Pacific. The only problem was that back then you went on these legs and you came back with lots of data with absolutely no support for working on it. There was no financial support for the onboard scientists. And so we were looking for support. Fortunately, we had that ONR contract. But both Ross and I felt we needed something of our own and not just living with Jerry’s funding.

Fortunately, about that time, the National Science Foundation, with the governmental support, initiated something called the International Decade of Ocean Exploration (IDOE). They were encouraging the submittal of proposals that were large projects focused on explorations of the ocean and how it worked. They also encouraged a multi-institutional approach. I don’t know how we heard about this, but maybe it was through Jerry. We heard that Brown University and Lamont-Doherty at Columbia were working together to start a program on mapping the Ice Age Ocean. Now, John Imbrie was the intellectual leader of this, and he’d written a paper with Jerry years ago using a factor analysis technique, which I found very useful and used in my thesis. John and his coworker, Nilva Kipp, had written a paper in which they showed how you could use factor analysis to group microfossils into assemblages, and then with that numerical description, you could relate those assemblages to something simple in the ocean where they had lived, like sea surface temperature, and do it in a fairly statistically convincing way. This is what they proposed to use to map the temperature of the ocean surface during the last ice age. Well, I was familiar with factor analysis, and we had the effrontery to contact Jim Hays (at Lamont-Doherty) and John (Imbrie). I certainly knew Jim. I don’t think I’d met John yet. We asked if we could join in. It fit within the parameters of the IDOE charge of having a multi-institutional approach. We were fortunate, we were accepted whole heartedly and started to work. That consumed me for the next ten years. I did no more drilling work.

BMR: I see.

TM: However, I did serve on the Deep Sea Drilling Planning Committee, Paleoceanography Panel, and other things like that.

BMR: Right. This was starting in the eighties.

TM: It was… It started in 1975 in Rhode Island… but I started in early 1970s with the CLIMAP project and extended through 1980.

BMR: And after this, in the in the early eighties, you moved to Exxon, right?

TM: That’s right.

BMR: So you were in Exxon and you were also working in some panels in the Ocean Drilling Program. What was the relationship between American offshore industries and scientific ocean drilling, at the time? How did you experience that relation?

TM: Well, they liked DSDP (Deep Sea Drilling Project) and the Ocean Drilling Program because it was producing information they found useful, not the least of which was greater detail in biostratigraphy, relating evolution of the plankton to time. This is something they didn’t really do. As I said, the oil industry made holes. We wanted cores. It’s hard to develop anything about ocean history if all you’ve got is a hole and maybe some logs. So, the project of mapping the seafloor with John Imbrie really laid the groundwork for much of the stuff that came to be transferred to the Ocean Drilling Program, in the sense that, we also had detailed stratigraphy as part of the CLIMA project.

BMR: Right.

TM: The major part of the CLIMAP team was Nick Shackleton from Cambridge. Nick was the guy that could really do a lot of oxygen isotope analyses on very small samples. He was critical to that project because he could easily locate the time in a core, or the depth in the core, in where the maximum glacial development occurred. So we could go to that core depth, take a few samples and estimate the temperature. That was critical, But Nick didn’t stop just there. He was busily developing a long term record of oxygen isotope variation, and relating it to all sorts of oceanographic things going on. We had moved to Rhode Island, Ross and I, in the middle of that. In 1975 we were in Rhode Island, and the Deep Sea Drilling Program ended somewhere around 1983.

BMR: Uhm.

TM: At the time those interested in scientific ocean drilling were wondering what we would do next. And one thing some of the people thought we should do, was to drill on continental margins. We had a little subcommittee to explore that as a reasonable thing to do. The reason we were focused on this area is that Exxon scientists, led by Peter Vei at Exxon Production Research, had published the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Memoire 26, in 1976. It laid out a whole new concept of the architecture of sediments on the world ocean margins. Not just on one ocean margin, but all around the world. This was revolutionary. And it was an unusual occurrence because usually it was the oil companies which received scientific thought from the academics and used it. This turned everything around. They were presenting a new hypothesis, a new paradigm that we hadn’t really thought of. There was only one problem. They had all this seismic data, and it was proprietary, which meant they didn’t want to share with us – they shared a little bit, but not enough to really convince everybody that they had something that was real.

BMR: When you when you say that they didn’t share the data with you, do you mean with the international community of scientific ocean drilling, or you (researchers) in US institutions?

TM: They didn’t share with anybody (laughs) outside their company. I mean, that’s certainly true of Exxon. There were slight problems in other countries. Australia, for example, required them to turn over their data to the country, to their Geological Survey. And in fact, there were a few key seismic lines that Exxon made publicly available. They used them to demonstrate the concept that Vail and his coworkers were presenting. So that’s why we started thinking, “Well, let’s go drill the margins and see if he was right.” But we had this meeting down in Texas with a few oil company guys and some prominent geophysics… We were led by John Ewing, who was at Woods Hole (Oceanographic Institution). At the end of the meeting, the decision was that the academic world did not have enough detailed seismic data on ocean margins or continental margins to undertake such a program. It was too soon. So that idea went by the way, and we went back to regular deep ocean drilling with a new ship, the (JOIDES) Resolution and with the newly developed hydraulic piston corer.

BMR: Right. So you were talking about the Ocean Margins Drilling Program, right?

TM: Right.

BMR: It was discussed as before the DSDP became ODP.

TM: Yeah. We couldn’t do it.

BMR: What was the reaction of the non-US members of the ocean drilling community regarding this proposal?

TM: Well, it was an interesting proposal. But they accepted the judgment of the geophysicists. A little disappointed because it was a new hypothesis we could test. We could take cores and date the sediments, and look at the type of sediments there… You know, it was a challenge, but it wasn’t to be yet (laughs). So that ended, and we started looking at a future of expanded science in the Ocean Drilling Program. I went out on Leg 74, as I mentioned, which was my last leg in DSDP before leaving for Exxon. I had to go to Exxon for personal reasons, not the least of which is they paid a lot more money than any university did. I was very fortunate to go there. I thought, if I was going to find anything out about Peter Vail’s hypothesis, why not work for Exxon? So I could be an inside man. I applied there, they accepted me, and I went off to work there. They taught me how to be a seismic reflection interpreter, which I did for eight years.

BMR: Because until the date you had been mainly doing work related to geological analysis of the samples.

TM: Yeah, mostly biostratigraphy. And it is interesting, that a micropaleontologist has an eye for subtle changes in fossil morphology. That’s what defines the species we look at. That subtle talent is also useful in looking at seismic records, looking for changes in how the individual reflectors are oriented, and what that tells you about where the sea level was. So that’s where I went when I left Rhode Island. And right away, the link between what I had been doing and what I was doing there, was joined. My first job after a little bit of training was to go out to help the group that did drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. They had a bunch of seismic lines that they wanted interpreted. There was about a mile of Pleistocene sediments sitting on the shelf and slope of the northern Gulf of Mexico. The geologists there were relating their stratigraphy to glacial-interglacial stages, rising and falling sea level. The only problem was, they were using a four-stage glacial-interglacial stands that they had been out of date for about 12 years. I said, “Why don’t you guys use the oxygen isotope record?.” By that time, our good buddy Nick Shackleton had worked up an oxygen isotope record that stretched back 2 million years. In other words, almost the entire Pleistocene. And they said, “Oh, well, you know, oxygen isotopes just measure temperature.” In 1968, Nick and Neil Updike had written a paper that showed most of the isotopic signal was in ice volume, not in temperature. They hadn’t read that paper. So that was my first heroic effort for Exxon Production Research. I wrote a little internal paper for them. But that was just the beginning. I really learned a lot while I was working for them. I worked on sections from the Nile Delta, offshore China, the North Slope, the Bahamas… All over the foreland Basin in Columbia and Bolivia… It was something new every week and it was always challenging and interesting.

BMR: What kind of things did you learn in Exxon that were valuable for scientific ocean drilling or for your later experience in academia?

TM: Well, interpreting seismic data itself, and having experience in doing it, was a great bit of learning and skill that I had developed. I did learn other things like how oil migrated and how it matured, and that sort of things. But it wasn’t as key to scientific ocean drilling as being able to interpret the seismic records of sediments into which we drilled. And that helped me out on a couple of instances. In 1986… The price of oil had gone down. They were firing geologists left, right and center. The Houston Chronicle had four pages of houses for sale. It was a debacle. I will say that Exxon Production Research tried to keep as many geologists as they felt they could, and they put us on a project of evaluating every oil producing basin within South America. I spent about 18 months working on Colombia foreland basin and the Magdalena River Valley, as well as the Altiplano and a little bit of Bolivia. When we got finished, we presented it to the vice presidents of Exxon. I’ve never seen such a ho hum reaction (laughs). It was so discouraging and so insulting, really. And, I won’t go into detail, but I soon left Houston, I felt by that time – and my wife felt by that time – it was time to leave the hothouse of Houston and find something more amenable. When I left, in my exit interview, Exxon Production Research was very kind and they let me stay on a month or so after I told them I was leaving. This is a bit unusual, but I was going back to an academic position, so it was okay with them. But they asked me, did I have any comments? (laughs) I thanked them for all the schools they’d sent me to on how to do interpreting, on how to do history analysis of sedimentation…  And even a particular course that I tried to avoid called the “leadership course,” which turned out to be pretty interesting. I said, “you know… somehow I think Exxon sends all its vice presidents to asshole school because they were the most insulting people in the company I ever met.” I enjoyed working with the people I did work with. They were great. I enjoyed teaching. We taught in China, and Cairo, and a numerous place around the world –  Canada, Colombia… But the last experience was not a good one. And I was glad to leave. I felt fortunate to be able to get a job in the department here in Michigan where I started in 1989. All during my time at Exxon, I’d been on the Ocean Drilling Information Handling Panel. We’d meet at Texas A&M, which was right up the road from Houston, and work on how to preserve the drilling data. It was interesting – we had one guy on board named Mike Loughridge, who was head of NOAA’s Geology and Geophysical Data Center. He pointed out that archiving data was no small problem. Think of all the media that we’ve used to preserve anything in terms of records, starting with the microfiche to the nine track tapes, to the reel tapes to the CDs, etc. We got sort of discouraged. At that time, CDs were sort of the big thing. And he said, “Well, they’re good for about ten years and then they start to fail.” We said, “Okay, what should we use?” He said, “The only reliable means of archiving data is paper.”

BMR: But it takes space…

TM: (laughs) It was shocking, but believable.

BMR: Were you the chair of the (ODP) Information Handling Panel?

TM: Yes, I was.

BMR: Were you working with non-American scientists, in that panel?

TM: Not just American scientists. We were a fully international program by then. And our international partners were paying money to be in the program. They could send representatives to the panels and had a certain number of slots available to them on each leg.

BMR: Did you find any kind of challenge or difficulty on being the chair of that Panel?

TM: No, no. I’ll tell you, one of the really great thing ocean drilling programs, all of them, was bringing together a community of scientists. And it was always a friendly community. Everybody wanted to help everybody else. It was just like you’d like it to be. And in fact, I sometimes thought the community as a whole got along better among themselves than individual scientists did at their own institution. There would always be little petty battles in their institution. But when they came together in a panel or a meeting or on a leg, everything went well. In fact, one of the great things and one of the weaknesses of the program, is that when we judged proposals for drilling, rather than saying, “Okay, we’ll do it” or “No, forget it, we don’t want to do this,” we would say, “It’s a good idea, but you should do this, that and the other to your proposal to really support it.” Send it back to them, and then they’d rewrite it, and send it in again. This could go on for two or three times. And finally, if it was approved, then it had to be put in the planning schedule. So the time between the first proposal coming in to the time it was drilled was probably averaging around five years. That’s a long time. And it was one of the problems. I mean, in an oil company that wouldn’t be unusual if you had a new prospect, It would take you five years to really evaluate it. But in science, you make a proposal, you should get the money and do the job. Or not.

BMR: I would expect that it would be the opposite. I would have expected that the industry moved way faster than science proposals.

TM: Well, the proposal aspect itself may be fast, but getting ready for it took a long time. I mean, you’d have to do seismic in great detail around it. Drilling a big hole is a lot of money. There was one hole we drilled in Colombia, while we were working there. It was right in front of the foreland basin where the mountains were coming up, and there was this big hump of sediment right in front of the mountains.It was perfect. It was, you know, a hill that you could drill into and the oil would be trapped at the top and you could produce it and it would be wonderful. And we got it all ready. They started drilling and they found that the clay in the sediments was such that when they pumped the water down, the clay would expand and seize up the pipe, and they’d have to pull it out and do something else. And they drilled and drilled like this. And they spent about $10 million drilling that hole, which in those days that was a lot. It was on land. It was easy to get to. And… they got it. And there was no oil. It was what they call a dry hole. And then they had to explain why (both laugh).

BMR: I understand that this is a risk that is always there when the industry drills.

TM: Yes, it’s always the risk. In the years after I left, I think got a lot less risky because the seismic work that was done prior to drilling was a lot more advanced. They really did three dimensional maps of anything that they wanted to drill. And they did lots of testing and looking at the reflections, to see if there were any little anomalies that might be gas or oil. So the success rate went up.

Left: Steve Hovan and Ted removing the piston from the piston core during the site survey expedition for ODP Leg 199. In the right, Ted during that same cruise celebrating Halloween. Courtesy of Ted Moore.

BMR: Let’s go a bit ahead in time, in the transition from ODP to IODP… How did you witness that transition?

TM: It was strange. I was on ODP Leg 138, but I think at the time I wasn’t on any panels or committees. I got a call from one of the lead scientists, and they said, “We need to start writing a science plan for the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.” There had been talks about it. NSF was concerned about the amount of money that was involved, but they had a wonderful offer from the Japanese to build this state-of-the-art drilling vessel, the Chikyu. It was a hard offer to turn down, and it was something new. At the same time, there were a lot of fussing going on about the limitations of the JOIDES Resolution in terms of not only drilling to great depths, not only having more protection against hitting a gas pocket, or oil seam, or something like that, but also drilling in areas like shallow water or ice-covered water that we couldn’t do. So there was a lot of hope that the new integrated program would address these problems. We knew if the Japanese would build that ship, that would address a lot in terms of safety of drilling and depth of drilling. But there was that other part, about ice covered and shallow water that needed to be addressed. Anyway, I got a call, I think from the chair of the Planning Committee, and they asked me if I would head up what they called an IODP Planning Subcommittee (IPSC) to write a science plan for the new program. It would contain representatives from Europe, the US and Japan. And the guy from the US besides me was Jamie Austin. He was wonderful. He is wonderful. Of course, you know that Ako (Asahiko) Taira and Jimmy Kinoshita were the Japanese representatives. Dieter Eickelberg and Jörn Thiede, both of those guys are from Germany, and Hans Christian Larsen was from Denmark. That was the committee. And I had an assistant, a note taker, Joanne Reuss. We’d meet at least two or three times every year, discussing what we would do, what would be the range of science that we thought we could address, and people would be excited about… I, as chair, went to all the panel meetings that I could go to, and discussed science and ask them for guidance. I told them what we were trying to do. And when I went to Europe, I would broadly hint that we really needed somebody to come up with a mission specific platforms program to drill in shallow water and ice-covered regions. Thank God they got the hint. Although they probably had the idea, anyway. So they came up with a European organization that moved forward with the plan. It was, really, rather exciting. I enjoyed going to the panels because it kept me up with what drilling that was going on.

We were particularly interested in the drilling in the Arctic Ocean. There were a lot of people who said it couldn’t be done, but Kate Moran and Jan Backman had talked to a lot of icebreaker captains in Norway and Sweden in particular, and they said, “Oh, yeah, we can do that.” But getting seismic data in that area was really, really hard. You had to deal with the ice, you know, and you had to put everything a little below the ice. And then maybe you could get data. They only got about two or three really good seismic lines across the Lomonosov Ridge where they wanted to drill. And they had to pass it through the Safety Panel. Those lovely oil company guys who turned their hats around and tried not to find oil. Well, they were shown a close up of where they wanted to drill. And right away, you could see problems. You didn’t even have to have served in an oil company. On the ridge, there were all these flat lying sediments on top. Then there was a break and a lot of tilted sediments under that. And if you were an oil company guy, you’d look at that and you say, “Wait a minute, that’s a perfect trap for oil.” I mean, those tilted beds where oil would migrate up, then hit that layer and the overlying horizontal sediments on top would trap it. You drill down there and boom, you’d have an oil well. The panel wanted it done because they were excited about it, but they couldn’t justify it. Finally, one of the guys said, “Have you got a larger seismic line that shows the whole ridge?” “Oh yeah, we got that,” and they put it up. You looked at it, and it was like you could hear a sigh of relief go around the room, because all those tilted layers came down to the base of the ridge and then cropped out, exposed to seawater. So anything that was in them, would just be seawater, rising up. And they said, “Wow, okay, now where do you want to drill?” (both laugh) And they said, “Well, we don’t know exactly how we’re going to be able to situate ourselves on the line.” So we’d like to drill somewhere between A and B on this line. This had never been done before. The Safety Panel always said, “we want crossing lines so we know what it is in approximately three dimensions.” But they said, “oh, okay,” (both laugh) that was amazing.

[Interruption]

BMR: We were talking about the Arctic drilling…

TM: IPSC, as we called it. IODP- Planning Sub Committee.

BMR: So there you were not only thinking about Arctic drilling. You were planning the program for the 2000s.

TM: Yeah. Everybody knew, especially the Europeans who were going to fund it, that drilling the Arctic would be the first priority for the mission specific platform. I mean, it wasn’t written anywhere, but everybody knew it. It was just too damn exciting. It had never been done before. And that wasn’t the only thing, of course. The Japanese were very excited about drilling into the subduction zone, and possibly, I don’t think they’ve ever done this, but maybe even reaching the Moho in some places. It was very exciting. I think, that in general, by going to all these meetings, by presenting our progress at national meetings and staying in contact with the community in any way we could, we had a lot of support from the drilling community. And a lot of good ideas. I mean, there was the deep drilling with the Chikyu, there was a mission specific capability, and then there was a whole other area of science in the study of microbes in the ocean sediments and in the ocean crust, that was new and exciting. It was really very exciting. We got all that laid out. Dieter Eickelberg was the German who was in charge of the really deep drilling in Germany, and he provided, I think, a lot of reassurance and guidance for the Japanese planning the state of the art drilling ship. It went well. We got Mike Coffin, who was then a scientist at University of Texas, to put together the ideas in the first draft. And then the committee went over it with hammer and tongs. The higher ups in JOIDES had been stung by the last science plan not being up to their standards, and having to completely rewrite it. So, they kept close tabs on us. Even Bob Dietrich flew down and joined with us in Zurich, Switzerland, when we finally put together the rough draft of the total document.

BMR: In what sense do you say that it was not up to the standards of JOIDES?

TM: (laughs) In what sense…? It was written by people who were not used to going through a National Science Foundation review. And it was too informal… too chatty… it wasn’t rigorous. And it really upset some people. I never read it, so I don’t know. But they turned it down as soon as they got it. They didn’t turn ours down. And in fact, we went through so many damn reviews. I felt like I was in a traveling circus. The final one was put on by the US National Academy of Science. There were, I think, four eminent scientists, one of whom, by the way, used to be at the University of Michigan. He was then, I think, president of Cornell University. A brilliant man. We had an Australian and another, I think, a British guy appointed by the National Academy to review the plan. I was sitting there, representing the IPSC committee. There’s a National Science Foundation guy sitting there as well. AT. They did an oral review that lasted about an hour, maybe a little more. I don’t know. It wasn’t bad. They had good questions. They each had a turn at different aspects of the of the proposed program. And the chair, he was so good. He took notes on everything that was said and by the time we’d finished, he had the outline of the report sitting in front of him. He was a really impressive man. I think that was the last review. We’d had a couple before that. I think the National Science Foundation was pleased. We went in front of the JOI Board of Governors and told them how it went and they seemed pleased. And we got the money. That was the important part. We did drill on the Lomonosov Ridge with not only success, but surprising discoveries. The JOIDES Resolution continued to do really good science, looking at methane and all that stuff. And the Chikyu started its job. I was really impressed with the Chikyu. I felt honored to be there when they launched it. It was just spectacular. I even got to meet the Princess (both laugh).

BMR: They were there, of course.

TM: But, you know, early on when we first started putting it together, I went with the JAMSTEC folks to see the head of MEXT. We went in there and there was the Director, an elderly man who spoke perfect English. All the Japanese people from JAMSTEC and from the MEXT guys under the Director were in the room. The Director was smiling. (laughs). He says, “Oh, I sort of like this project, but I only have one request.” And I said, “Well, what is that?” He says, “After the Second World War, General MacArthur made us dump our cyclotron into Tokyo Bay, and I would like to have it returned.” All the Japanese in the room… their faces, just froze, I mean, rigid (both laugh). I started laughing, because it was a joke, and he laughed. And that was it.

BMR: I knew about the synchrotron thing but not about the relation they made with Chikyu.

TM: I thought it was wonderful how they had this national contest to have a young person name the ship. To get the community in on it. Ako (Asahiko Taira) went around and gave talks about it. We had him at (University of) Michigan actually, to give a talk on subduction zones and drilling. We made a lot of public information efforts and garnered a lot of public support for the program. And I think it’s proved well. I went on two legs, the Artic drilling leg. I did contribute to it, but my specialty in Radiolaria was a total washout. There were just very, very few Radiolaria. I let Kozo Takahashi do it all. I went on to do something else with fish debris to estimate salinity. It was a success. And then, the last leg I went on was 320, which was another drilling of the tropical Pacific.

BMR: Closing the circle.

TM: Yeah, it was a nice closure. When I walked off that ship at the end, I knew that was the end of my drilling career. Because the circle had been closed. And I had learned so much from the site surveys, by then the site surveys were really a wonderful thing all in themselves. They had the swath mapping and you could really see where you were drilling so much better. I learned a lot from the swath mapping and by then the work that Nick Shackleton had started on Leg 138, which was doing the isotopes, correlating it to the carbonate. And then with Larry Mayer correlating that to the seismic data, and showing you could correlate from site, to site, to site. The fact that they were drilling so that they had hydraulic piston coring continuously and then went back and drilled other cores over the interval between cores taken at the first hole. That way, they were able to make sure they got everything. Unlike leg eight, where we maybe got a third of what was there. So it was a wonderful time. The beginnings.

Ted kneeling with a team from Rhode Island in the North Pole. Right, the crossing the line ceremony on site survey for IODP 320/321. Ted was performing as King Neptune. Courtesy of Ted Moore.

BMR: You have been involved in scientific ocean drilling for 40 years, so you really saw how everything evolved. How international cooperation changed from the beginning?

TM: It was always good. I mean, the fact that we had three non-US scientists on the Leg 8 says that we already realized that we couldn’t do this with just the US. We needed other scientists. And this need was easily met. People were eager. And when you think about it, I did this calculation once and I’ve forgotten the answer. When we started out, we had seven scientists on board, not counting the co-chiefs. On Expedition 320 we had 30 on board. So the size of the Science Party and the amount of technical equipment we had on board had greatly advanced. The quality of the sediment recovery had greatly advanced. And if you take 30 people working 12 hours a day, for 56 days, and add all that up, multiply it, it’s a hell of a lot of man-hours. In fact, It amounts to man-years of effort (2.4 man years), on two months of drilling. In terms of output for your money, it’s a good deal and nobody complains. They say, “12 hours a day. Great.” And they’re usually up there working or discussing for 14 hours or more. It’s wonderful. I think one of the greatest legacies of ocean drilling has been the formation of an international community that know each other, like each other, as friends and as fellow scientists, and are eager to work together. It’s a great legacy.

BMR: You have also been involved in other projects, in multi-institutional programs. What are the differences or similarities between scientific ocean drilling and those?

TM: In general, none of them have the international breadth that the drilling program does. It is unique in that respect. And by its very nature, this continuing two months out, turning around with a new crew, you really incorporate a huge swath of the existing scientific community. There have been unfortunate parts of it. For example, I’m very sorry the Russians haven’t been able to be a continuous member. I’m disappointed that we’ve rarely included a Central or South American country in the international program. There are good scientists there, but it’s never worked. I know we tried, but it just didn’t work.

I had another program that was international with the Russians, the study of Lake Baikal. And that was a job that I took on because of my ability in seismic reflection interpretation. That was right at the time, the 1990s, late nineties, when the Russians were in great flux in their political and scientific organizations. In the early days when we worked in CLIMAP with Russian scientists, I was amazed at the Academicians in Russia, what power they had. They had unbelievable power. I mean, we had meetings over there. We needed their pollen data to help set up and verify the CLIMAP models, and they were eager to cooperate. But we would go on and on at joint meetings in Moscow. We’d always overrun in time. One time, we were scheduled to fly down to Baku where there’s a lot of gas production and tar beds and all sorts of interesting stuff. We were late getting finished with the meeting and I thought, “Oh, we would just catch the next plane, I guess.” We got to the airport, and there was our plane, sitting on the tarmac with a whole line of passengers waiting at the door for us to get on, so they could take off. That would never happen in the United States or in Japan, I don’t think. But that shows you the power the Academician had. That all changed. So when we did Lake Baikal, suddenly there were some of our scientific colleagues that were driving taxis just to make ends meet. We were working with the southern branch of the Oceanology Institute. NSF realized the state their sciences were in and wanted to help. I had a grant to do this work, and they said, you know, “we’ll give you money to help your Russian co-workers. make a proposal to do something for the Russians and we’ll give you the money.” SI said, “Well, how about some new computers.” And so they gave me, I think, $10,000. The Russians came over for a visit and discussion. I had ordered the computers. I think I got three PCs. I gave them the PC’s and they carried it back as extra luggage. (laughs)

BMR: That’s very interesting. But I didn’t quite understood why NSF approved to kind of changing technologies.

TM: For giving the Russians those computers?

BMR: Yes.

TM: They had some empathy. They thought it was important to maintain a good scientific community in Russia. And this was one way of helping. When we flew into Gelendzhik a couple of years later, and I said to myself, “I gave them those computers, but given their financial situation, it would not surprise me if they had been sold just to stay above water.” But no, they were still there, being used. That was a good project. I think we contributed a lot. One thing we did was pointing out to them that they had methane hydrates trapped in the bottom sediments. They didn’t realize that and it took us a while to figure it out, but that’s what it was. They accepted it later as a potential resource. I don’t know what they thought about it at first, but it sure was there.

CLIMAP also had international cooperation, but it was not as fully integrated as a drilling program. I mean, we went to the Netherlands to talk to their paleonologists, the pollen people. There was one guy named Thomas van der Hammen who’d done a lot of work in the Andes. We used the pollen to estimate the precipitation and temperature at his site locations. And that was the check data. We gave all the other data (sea surface temperature, ice margin, albedo, sea level) to the to the global atmospheric modelers, they did the air temperature and precipitation globally. And then we’d check their estimate against the pollen estimate to see how good they were. They were pretty good, considering the different scale of one little sample in a lake somewhere, and a big grid of data from the model. But Van der Hammen, the Russians, the British… Those were the main ones we cooperated with. But it wasn’t extensive, you know, it was like, “We need this data. You got it?” “Yeah.” “Okay.” Most of the work was in the US, but there were many institutions involved. Lamont-Doherty (Geological Observatory), Brown (University), (University of) Rhode Island, (University of) Maine, (University of)  Wisconsin… I probably have missed some. We had a lot of students, a lot of scientists, a big budget, but when you divided it by the number of scientists, it wasn’t very much.

BMR: So scientific ocean drilling was receiving much more budget than those programs.

TM: Oh, yeah, it was much bigger and much more cooperative. I mean, we were all on that ship working together and talking to each other all the time for two months. You can’t do that without really getting to know someone and knowing what they’re good at, what they need, what you can do with them. I never regretted going to sea on the drilling program. And when the ship pulled in, I said, “you know, if we could go another month, I wouldn’t mind it.” (laughs). My wife had an entirely different idea.

BMR: (laughs) I can imagine. You have been onboard the Glomar Challenger, the JOIDES Resolution, and also the platform to drill in the Arctic.

TM: …In the Arctic and back on the JOIDES Resolution for my final leg. I was there at the launching, but I never went on the Chikyu. But meeting the Princess was enough (both laugh).

BMR: Yes. So I wanted to go a bit back in time, to ask you about your role in the IPSC. I know that for the second IODP (2013-2024) there were some changes in the structure, organization… Is there something that now, looking back in time, you would have done different?

TM: You know, I’m not very insightful when it comes to things like that (laughs). All of them worked pretty well. I mentioned the problem of how long it took to get a proposal through, and that was something that could be corrected, but you would correct it by not being so gentle with the proposers. And I think they did that, eventually. There were cases where the person proposing just couldn’t get it right. He’d get insightful reviews. We’d always send it out for outside reviews, it wasn’t just the panel. That also took time. And we got reviews that were better than the proposal. We finally convinced another scientist to join with this scientist, to write the proposal coherently. And it worked. But that took a long time.

BMR: So do you mean that the Planning Committee was trying…?

TM: Well, these were the advisory committees. And they would say yeah or nay and send it back or not. Then pass the approved proposals on to the Planning Committee and say, “Okay, drill this.” Then the Planning Committee had to decide priorities of drilling and the operator of the ship had to work with the Planning Committee to get high priorities in a logistically sensible way. So you’re not going to jump from the South Pacific to the North Atlantic, from one leg to the next, just simple stuff like that. In the beginning, it was just one committee, the Planning Committee. They did everything. They made the proposals themselves. They told who was going on board, and they said, “Go drill.” That was as simple as you can get. But it wasn’t very satisfactory. And it didn’t have international participation on the Planning Committee at first.

BMR: I really like this insights on how it changed, from the beginning to the last IODP.

TM: I think, some of the things that were important to the change, was providing a little bit of funding to the US scientists. I don’t know how it worked with the other countries. But providing a little of financial support so they could at least get the data that they collected into a publishable and correct form, maybe writing a few papers. But that was all you could do. That was an important change. Getting all the countries on board. I forget how many countries we ended up with, but we had a lot. The Irish, the Canadians… I mean, that was wonderful. I went to a meeting in Ireland once, and they were so happy to be a new member of the drilling community. It was really evident. And I think it served everybody well. Everybody went back to their home with a fresh feeling of camaraderie.

BMR: How do you see the future of scientific ocean drilling, now that you have witnessed so many transformations?

TM: Well, it’s going to go through a tough period. I’m not sure. I mean, the Chikyu is still there. I don’t know what the Europeans think about the Mission Specific Platforms, I really haven’t heard. But the JOIDES Resolution is going away. I understand that. Ships get old, like people. (laughs) Most ships last about 20 years. So if you ever get a ship named after you, it’s no big deal. It’ll be gone in 20 years. (laughs) So I don’t know what the US is going to do, because there’s a lot of demand on National Science Foundation money. There’s a lot of budget ascribed to ocean drilling. And although I think really interesting science is still being done, there is competition. What does the National Science Foundation think and what does the National Academy of Sciences think? Every time there’s been a development, a new program, every 5 to 10 years, we had to go through all these reviews saying, “Yeah, is it still doing okay? Are they making advances? Are they proving new things?.” Every time the answer was yes, but now we have to not only do that, but we have to get the money for the ship. And that’s a lot of money. I hope it survives. For example, I still think we don’t know enough about the microbial community. Nobody has. They’ve hinted that there are microbes that actually eat crustal rocks. But how do you verify that? We haven’t developed the technology to sample a piece of the upper crust without contaminating it with seawater. And somehow we’ve got to figure that one out. I’m not even sure how you do it. There are other things. The Chikyu is yet to fulfill all of its promise, in terms of drilling active margins. They haven’t drilled the South America trench area, have they?

BMR: (nods)

TM: That had been planned originally. They also planned originally to drill on the Ontong Java Plateau. I’m sure that hasn’t been done, but they’ve done a lot of good drilling on the Japanese margin. We’ve learned a lot. So is there a call for JOIDES (Resolution)-type ship anymore? That’s the question. Maybe we’ll just join with the Europeans and do mission specific platforms. We have enough seismic data now that maybe we could do a little more testing of Peter Vail’s ideas. Ken Miller of Rutgers University has been the leader in a lot of testing of Pete’s ideas, and they’ve been pretty good tests. I was rather impressed. I did a couple of papers trying to figure out from what seismic data we had, how much sea level changed. And I had a lot of doubts, because it was very simplified way of looking at it. Later there’ve been much better attempts. But in both places we looked, on the coast of Alabama and the coast of New Jersey, we estimated there was a substantial sea level change at ten and a half million years ago. A big drop. And I was surprised. Pete Vail had said the same thing. We actually found the same big drop in two very different areas. So that made me a little bit of a believer. What Pete and his crew basically said is that this has been an ice world since the beginning of time. And that was a huge revelation to geologists. They’d known there have been ice ages in the past. But the fact that there was always a bit of ice around, that was a new idea. So we still have, I think, a lot more to work on, on the continental margins. And maybe that’s where we’ll go now.

BMR: Is there something that we have not talk about, that you wanted to mention or explain?

TM: I think one of the great things that Nick Shackleton did, that has been passed on through the German marine geology group, is the idea that in large regions of the ocean you can look at the physical properties of the sediments that are largely controlled by large environmental change to the the bottom water of the ocean. These changes are felt pretty much the same way everywhere in the deep ocean, and they control the amount of carbonate that is preserved for example. You can take a carbonate record from one hole, at one side, and correlated to one hundreds of kilometers away – in great detail. This is a wonderful thing. Not only that, all of these variations are related to the orbital parameters, which came out of the CLIMAP project. They’re the ones that said, the pacemaker of the ice ages are the orbital changes. And these orbital changes have been going on since the beginning of time. People have used this, and the records from ocean drilling, to tune the timescale to the orbital parameters back for at least 60 million years. That means, you can look at accumulation rates in the Eocene and have the same precision as accumulation rates in the late Pleistocene. Amazing. That’s something we couldn’t do before ocean drilling, before CLIMAP, before Nick Shackleton, and before those excellent German scientists Thomas Westerhold and Heiko Pälike.

BMR: That’s fascinating. I want to thank you very, very much for your time. And I know it’s late in the evening for you, so also thank you for joining me at this time.

Pictures of Ted and his family. Courtesy of Ted Moore.