Harmon Craig: The Gumshoe of Geochemistry

Harmon Craig: The Gumshoe

of Geochemistry
.

In his search for clues to the composition of the Earth’s interior, Harmon Craig, the
venerable professor of oceanography and geochemistry at the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, has led 28 deep-sea oceanographic expeditions, made 17 dives to the
Home bottom of the ocean in the ALVIN submersible vehicle, including the first descents into
Sci-Tech the Mariana Trough, and the first investigation from inside the crater of an active
underwater volcano. He surfaced last year in Rome to claim the Balzan Prize.
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Harmon Craig, for instance, professor of oceanography and geochemistry at the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, is
never without his indispensable Hastings Triplet hand lens, in case he happens on
an interesting rock.

He also carries a vial of polished green olivine crystals, to remind him of

fascinating rocks he has already found. Craig, a Scripps faculty member since
1955, is good at finding interesting rocks.

"Most geologists take what they call a hand-specimen," Craig says. "But for our
work with noble gases you need to take 10 to 20 kg of lavas because you need
several grams of olivine crystals. We have a rule in my lab that we generally
don’t analyze samples that other people collect. You have to get your own
samples."

Never satisfied with classroom or laboratory science, Craig has taken the scenic
route in the collection of his own samples, venturing to some of the most remote
spots on Earth in pursuit of the elusive gases and rocks that provide clues to
the composition of the Earth's interior.

His wall-to-wall chase has produced so many fundamental findings about how the
deep Earth, oceans and atmosphere work that last year [Ed. note: Nov 1998] he was
awarded the Balzan Prize, the first time the Balzan, considered the equivalent of
the Nobel Prize in the fields of natural sciences, was awarded in geochemistry.

He received it with suffusion. "The Prize’s most significant effect was to

establish that Geochemistry, especially Isotope Geochemistry, which began in
1947, had come of age and is a mature science," Craig says. "This was much more
important than the specific person chosen for the award. Besides, prizes and
awards are not worth much when they come after one's mother has died."

It is, of course, the weight of his own work that anchors geochemistry in
scientific bedrock. According to John Edmond, professor of earth, atmosphere and
planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Harmon Craig is
really one of a handful of people who invented the field of modern geochemistry.
If it weren’t for Harmon, there would be a lot of floundering going on."

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Harmon Craig: The Gumshoe of Geochemistry

His work has been honored many times before the Balzan, including election to the
National Academy of Sciences and V.M. Goldschmidt Medal of the Geochemical
Society in 1979, the National Science Foundation’s Special Creativity Award in
Oceanography in 1982 and the Arthur L. Day Prize of the National Academy of
Sciences in 1987, among others.

Craig’s University of Chicago thesis on carbon isotope geochemistry under Nobel

Laureate Harold Urey earned a geology-geochemistry Ph.D. in 1951, after which he
remained as a research associate at the Enrico Fermi Institute. His contributions
began immediately.

During this time he and Urey discovered that meteorites fall into discrete groups
based on their oxidation states and iron content. Next, he studied the
distribution of heavy hydrogen (deuterium) and oxygen isotopes in natural waters,
establishing the Global Meteoric Water relationship of these isotopes, work which
has become fundamental for studies in hydrology and climatology.

MAKING WAVES

In 1969, Craig and colleagues from McMaster University in Canada demonstrated for
the first time that helium 3, a rare isotope of helium that was trapped in
Earth's interior at the time of its formation 4.5 billion years ago, is being
released from mid-ocean volcanoes by a process called "degassing" that played a
key role in the evolution of the atmosphere. Using helium 3 as a tracer in ocean
currents, Craig discovered the Pacific Ocean deep water circulates in the
opposite direction to what scientists had previously theorized.

In 1970, Craig, once described by the Los Angeles Times as a "gumshoe of

geochemistry", teamed up with colleagues at Scripps, Columbia University's Lamont-
Doherty Earth Observatory, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to direct
an international project called the Geochemical Ocean Sections Study (GEOSECS)
for a global investigation of chemical and isotopic properties of the world's
oceans. Results from GEOSECS represent the most complete set of ocean chemistry
data ever collected and contributed significantly to the advancement of chemical
oceanography. One of Craig's discoveries during this program was that lead is
rapidly scavenged from the deep sea by particulate material, which turned out to
be the major route by which many trace metals are removed from the ocean.

Later, Craig led two expeditions on Lake Tanganyika, using the GEOSECS
methodology to study the geochemistry and limnology of this 1,400 m-deep lake.

Using the Scripps "Deep-Tow" vehicle to measure helium 3 and radon along the axis
where the tectonic plates in the Galapagos sea floor spreading center are rifting
apart, Craig and colleagues also discovered the existence of submarine
hydrothermal vents. Then, driving the submersible ALVIN, he discovered similar
vents in the caldera of an active volcano called Loihi, located over 900 m below
the sea surface, that is erupting to form the next Hawaiian island. On another
voyage aboard ALVIN, into the Mariana Trough, he discovered hydrothermal vents
nearly 3,700 m deep.

Craig has also cored and analyzed gases trapped in Greenland ice, showing that
the methane content of the atmosphere has doubled over the past three hundred
years, a finding important for studies of the atmospheric greenhouse effect. He
is currently measuring temperatures of past glaciations, using his discovery of
gravitational enrichment of heavy noble gases in the air trapped in polar ice
cores.

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Harmon Craig: The Gumshoe of Geochemistry

Other projects have taken Craig to sample volcanic rocks and gases throughout the
East African Rift Valley from Northern Ethiopia to Lake Nyasa, and to the Dead
Sea, Tibet, and Yunnan, China. He has made field expeditions to all the major
volcanic island chains of the Pacific and Indian Oceans collecting lava samples.
Craig's aim was to delineate mantle hotspots where volcanic "plumes" are rising
from the earth's core through the deep mantle and can be identified by their
primordial helium 3 content. He has identified 16 such hotspots where the helium
3 to helium 4 ratio is much higher than in the upper mantle and crust of the
earth, fourteen in oceanic islands, and two on the continents, in Ethiopia and
Yellowstone Park.

In 1972, Craig and his wife, Valerie, showed that carbon and oxygen isotopes can
be used to determine the origin of marbles used in ancient Greek sculptures and
temples, a study that continues.

Now, regrettably, after more than 40 years of resolute research in Earth’s

margins, Harmon Craig reluctantly admits his expedition days may be over, that
time may have "beached" him.

The research may be dry-docked, but there are plenty of cores to read, rocks to
analyze and papers to write. Once in a while there is even a moment to reflect.

"I guess I’m proudest of the expeditions and field work I’ve carried out in
pursuit of the elusive and primordial isotope helium 3," he says, "especially the
work along the entire length of the East African Rift and on most of the Pacific
volcanic island chains. These were the most complicated and difficult things I
have done, so they were sources of great satisfaction."

While the Balzan Prize will be retired to the Balzan Room at the UCSD Faculty
Club (to share the wall with three already there, won by the late oceanographer
Roger Revelle, geophysicist Freeman Gilbert and oceanographer Wolfgang Berger),
Craig is not about to retire. He may not launch any more ocean-going expeditions,
but his research continues to sail.

At the moment he is working on two fronts. First, in terms of the gases brought
up from the deep mantle of the earth and emitted in volcanic eruptions, he is
trying to determine isotope ratios and their concentrations in magmas and lava
minerals. "These gases are a probe to try and understand the structure of the
Earth's mantle and where the volcanic eruptions that make hotspots come from," he
says.

"Second is a recent discovery I made that helium from the earth is injected into
the deep regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet, in the lowermost 250 m, not as a
simple upward exponential curve, as one would expect from diffusion, but as large
cusps which must be due to injection of ice layers from places where they
accumulate helium." This is the first look anyone has had at actual transient
major ice flow at the bottom of thick (3050 m) ice caps, and may help tell us if
the West Antarctic sheet is going to slip off into the ocean, with possible dire
consequences.

AN UNDERSTANDING WIFE

As has been his practice for years, he sleeps until noon, reads the International
Herald Tribune with breakfast, does some writing, then heads to the lab in the
middle of the afternoon, where he works and writes until going home for dinner at
9 p.m. At home, he writes more and reads until 4 or 5 a.m.

"I have a very understanding wife," he says. Valerie, his wife of 51 years, is

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Harmon Craig: The Gumshoe of Geochemistry

also his Administrative Assistant at the lab, as well as his companion and
colleague on all expeditions.

Much of Craig’s recreational reading reflects his interest in science and the
sea. Currently, he is reading "The Story of Spin" by Sin-itiro Tomonaga
(University of Chicago Press, 1998), the history of quantum mechanics by the 1965
Nobel Prize winner whose work was unknown in the U.S. here until after World War
II; and "Cochrane: Britannia's Last Sea King" by Donald Thomas (Viking, NY,
1978), a biography of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, one of the greatest of the British
Admirals during the Napoleonic wars.

Craig’s passion for adventure and discovery is equaled only his love of the
written word. The grandson of famous stage actors, Craig was raised in a Thespian
family and displayed a "bookish" aptitude for both literature and science, as
symbolized by the vial of olivine crystals in his pocket. "The gem form of
olivine was invoked by Othello, who said: ‘Make me such another world/ Of one
entire and perfect chrysolite’", he recites.

"I can’t imagine living without poetry," he says. "Many scientists don’t care
much for it, but poetry is one of my greatest loves."

Poetry’s saraband swirl of syllables and ideas intrigue him. Among his favorite
books, he lists T.S. Eliot’s "Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950" (Harcourt
Brace, NY, 1952), and, even though he professes atheism, the King James Bible. "I
love it for the language, the entrancing story of how people developed a concept
of a god and his interactions with humans, and the threads of the different
writers that run through the Old Testament."

Another book he treasures is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ "Tarzan of the

Apes" (Ballantine Books, NY, 1993). "It first incited my lifelong interest in
Africa."

Science, of course, continues to intrigue him. "What I enjoy most about science
is the incredible rush when something snaps into place and one suddenly finds or
understands something that has not been previously known," says Craig. "I think of sc
similar to a chess game. There is an opening game (discovery), middle game
(enlarging a subject), and end game (tidying up). My style and preference are the
opening game. Of course, one has to play the middle game to get funding for
research, because it is difficult to get funded for exploring new ideas,
generally because proposal reviewers and program managers are playing the middle
game. So, I generally write middle-game proposals to keep working on a subject I
have started. This keeps the lab running and one can use part of the funding for
exploring new ideas."

Specifically, what interests Craig about geology and oceanography is that "there
are so many unexpected and wonderful things to discover that have been lying
around unsuspected in the rocks and oceans and if one is lucky or serendipitous
one can sometimes find these things."

THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION

One question fascinates Craig above all others, the only one he says that’s
probably unanswerable: What is the origin of the universe, if it had an origin,
and what was there before the Big Bang, if there was a Big Bang?

"I think the greatest frustration, not only in science but in all human thinking,

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Harmon Craig: The Gumshoe of Geochemistry

is that this most important question of all will never be answered."

Craig sees it really as two questions. "If there is a god that started things
going, what was that god doing before the origin of the universe, and what, if
anything has that god been doing since," he wonders. "Remember that the Hebrew
God stopped all conversation with humans. After his encounter with Job he never
speaks again. More probably in my estimation there are no gods, and then the
question is: how did things get started without them. Or has the universe always
existed, and then why? These are the ultimate questions, which render all others
insignificant by comparison.

Craig’s catalog of credits is certainly not insignificant, even for someone who
claims he doesn’t believe in goals or adhere to the ‘scientific method’.

"I’ve never had any goals," says Craig, who grew up in New York and Boston. "I’ve
just wandered through science working on what interests me at the moment. I have
some long term studies, but no real goals. I feel if you can define goals, you
know what you’re going to find already."

To illustrate this paradox, Craig says he’s been rejected twice recently by
Marine Geology in NSF Ocean Sciences for a proposal to dredge some newly-
discovered seamounts in a high-helium 3 gap in the Austral islands at the point
where the Austral fracture zone intersects the chain.

"The tenor of the review is ‘Craig doesn’t follow the scientific method. He
doesn’t lay out exactly what he expects to find and what it will mean,’" Craig
says. "I wrote the Program Director and said, ‘I’ve never used the scientific
method in my life’. I don’t know any good scientist who ever worked with the
scientific method."

As Harmon Craig explains it, a lot of times you work on something for completely
the wrong reasons. "As the Dark Lady of the Sonnets said, ‘After all, the road
always leads somewhere.’"

-end-

Comments? Questions? Corrections? Assignments? douglaspage@earthlink.net

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