John Milliman, Ph.D.

Chancellor Professor of Marine Science

College of William & Mary

Denise: How did you first decide to go into the field of oceanography?
John: How long a story do you want? (laughs) I grew up in Rochester, New York, my father was a banker and I thought that would be a cool way to live, so when I went off to the University of Rochester it was to be a banker. So I became an economics major, or I thought I was going to be an economics major. I was active in sports, I was class president and I was active in fraternity life, so I decided to take an easy course for science, and that was "rocks for jocks" and I also took economics and I realized economics was deadly boring, and geology was fun and I did well in it, so I switched to a major in geology. My mentor at the University of Rochester saw my interest in certain things with respect to processes. And, he said, "Milliman, you should go into oceanography." I didn't even know what oceanography was, so I said fine, so I went over and looked the word up in the dictionary there was no word (oceanography) in the dictionary, this was 1959, so I finally found out what oceanography was and I thought, great, I'll go into oceanography. I went to the University of Washington and was totally miserable, it was just the wrong fit. My mentor at the University of Rochester said "I'm going down to Miami to retire, but I'm going to stay associated with the University of Miami, why don't you come down and work with me." One thing led to another I did my Ph.D. and then I ended up at Woods Hole where I stayed for 26 years.

Denise: So that was right after you got your Ph.D. at University of Miami…
John: And went straight to Woods Hole.

Denise: And how long has Woods Hole been active?
John: 1931, I went there in late sixty-six, stayed until 1973, so that was 27 years.

Denise: What is one of the biggest advancements in science that has helped your work today?
John: I'm fortunate, and unfortunate in a way, I think more fortunate than unfortunate. I teach a course in marine geology at William & Mary, and when I got into geology and oceanography, we had certain paradigms, or the lack there of, all of which have changed. For instance, when I got into geology the continents remained constant in space and time, they didn't migrate.

Denise: That was before plate tectonics.
John: Before plate tectonics. For instance, we had always heard that the Appalachian Mountains… the old guys knew that the source of the Appalachian Mountains was to the east. Well you looked to the east there's the ocean. And so they say, the source was called Appalachia but it was obviously eroded away. Now that didn't make much sense, because if you look at the east of the U.S. there's an abyss. So we were essentially schooled in a lot of really strange things. So what I had my course do in marine geology, I'd say okay look, we have the paradigms now, plate tectonics, paleoceanography, turbidity currents, major events like the K T boundary.

Denise: What's the K T boundary?
John: There was a big meteor that hit the Ukatan area and essentially wiped out 85% of the species on earth. It wiped out dinosaurs, it wiped out species of organisms in the ocean. So there are a number of new ideas that we have about the earth that really have evolved since I got in. So what I have the students do, I say okay, what were the ideas before, and what kind of new technology do we need to understand the earth in a way in which we can essentially reconstruct old paradigms or create new paradigms? So your question is a logical one, but in fact everything has changed. But what I think has done the most for me, geology, as opposed to most other sciences, is an intuitive science in which you build upon what you've learned over the years. I was always involved when I was a student with really old coots. Old coots when I was young where much younger than I am now, but I looked at them as old coots, who would say, "I can remember back when I saw this outcrop in 1923." I'd think "jeez, 1923!" But in fact what happens is you build upon your experiences, so I feel right now I'm a much more engaged geologist than I was 25 or 29 years ago because it's an additive process.

Denise: So is it different from sciences like chemistry?
John: Well, I don't mean to say that, but Rudy (Slingerland) and I were speaking about this, in mathematics and in music, genius is something you have or you don't have. Many of the people in math and music have made their names one way or the other, probably before they were 25 or 30, and if you look at a lot of the Nobel Prizes in mathematics or physics, these were guys who made their major discovery when they were still young. Geologists usually make their major discovery when they're a lot older because they've essentially picked up intuition over the years.

Denise: What is one of the experiences you had in the field, that stands out as a memorable discovery for you?
John: There's one I remember, and this was not in the field, actually it was a discovery I made standing in the halls of NSF (National Science Foundation.) I had written an article with another man on river delivery into the ocean I wrote it in 1983. In 1990-1992 I was on loan from Woods Hole to work at NSF and it was almost like a sabbatical in a way so I could spend a certain number of hours a week working on my own research. As I began to essentially work on new information with respect to river input into the ocean, I realized that smaller rivers, relative to their size, had a much larger input into the ocean than did the large rivers relative to their size. For example, rivers like the Skagatt River or the Santa Clara River, or the Eel River, they have a much larger input for the size of the river, than a river like the Mississippi or the Amazon. I was scratching my head thinking about that and I was standing in the hallways of the old NSF building, looking up at the wall and there was a map of the world oceans which has topography of the world and I realized that all these small rivers empty onto active margins, so all the rivers I just mentioned are along the western U.S. where the mountains are really near the ocean, and then I realized all that these small rivers are emptying into active margins and it was like this hammer hit me in the head � Eureka! Chuck Nittrouer (University of Washington) and I wrote a proposal after that to work up in Alaska, and that's where I met J.P. Walsh (East Carolina University) and he got his masters degree on that work. And then we had a meeting down here in Australia in 1993 and I did a back of the envelope calculation and realized the island of New Guinea, as a result of it's very high mountains, very small rivers, if you add up the collective sediment entering the ocean from all of the rivers on this island, is more than the sediment leaving all of North America, and something like twice the amount leaving Africa. In other words, this, little bitty island has a huge impact. So, we decided to start to work in this area.

Denise: Was that the start of Margins?
John: Well it wasn't the start of MARGINS, but it was of Source to Sink, and if you'll notice that S2S is working in relatively small rivers, it's not the Amazon, it's not the Mississippi, it's not the Yangtze. Most of the students that will be reading this interview have never heard of the rivers we're working on. But the rivers emptying into the Gulf of Papua have a collective load about half again as large as the Mississippi, so it is a huge amount of mud influx.

Denise: How do you calculate what is dispersed from rivers?
John: Oh it's sort of a magic wand or crystal ball. Actually I'm getting quite good at it now, I'm working on a book on world rivers. But essentially the nature of a river, be it the water, solid load, is a function of a certain number of things. It is the size of the water shed obviously, it's also a function of the elevation of the river, a river that has it's head waters in mountains, or lowland rivers, it's a function of the nature of the rocks, are they extremely hard old rocks, or very soft, young rocks, and it's a function of the rainfall, is it a heavy rainfall or is it a light rainfall, and then, sort of overriding all of that is human influence. You kind of parameterize this, and come up with essentially predictive algorithms. So for instance, if I know the nature of the rock in the headwaters of the river, the elevation of the headwaters, the rainfall in the river and the size of the river, I can have a fairly good estimate as to what the suspended load of the river is, probably with a 50% error.

Denise: How did you get involved in working with rivers?
John: I began working with coral reefs, and I wrote my first book when I was 35. After I did coral reefs and carbonates and limestone, I kind have got out of it, wasn't finding it as interesting anymore. I was working on a project in Brazil, we essentially got the Brazilians to pay for us to study their whole continental margin that is the longest contiguous north and south continental margin in the world. It goes from 4 degrees north to 34 degrees south, a huge margin. Our last big cruise was in the Amazon river, and I had never thought much about rivers at all, and I got on the Amazon and it blew me away. I thought, "here I am in the largest river in the world." And then I went to a meeting and I made some statement about rivers that was completely ignorant and someone called me on it, "You know Milliman, you don't anything about rivers." And I thought, "he's right." So I went on sabbatical in 1975, this was when I was 37 years old, and I studied a river out on the west coast up in Vancouver, and that got me hooked. I got interested in looking at rivers on a worldwide basis. I was on a review panel with another guy that was the head of the project, and he worked for NOAA, and we were in the Minneapolis airport, having a hotdog together, and he said "John, if you could have a ship, a U.S. ship working in the East China Sea, what would you do?" And I said, "The Yangtze River" and his eyes went up, and I said "Do you know about the Yangtze River?" And I went on ad nauseam about the discharge of the Yangtze River, and the suspended load, and I could see his eyes kind of going back into his head, as if to say why did I open my big mouth, so he finally looked at his watch and said he had to run to his airplane. Four months after I got a phone call from his office saying "Would you like to lead a group of Americans to go over to China to coordinate the first Chinese-U.S. Oceanographic project, this was in 1979. So we went over and we started to work with the Chinese, really looking at the interaction of the big rivers over there with the ocean. Chuck Nittrouer was involved with that too. As that project was wrapping up, I was at NSF and started to realize the significance of the not the big rivers, but the small rivers. So it's sort of interesting how these things lead from one thing to another, so if you ask me how it happens, I can't give you a straight answer and say I knew when I was 26 years old that many years after I'd be doing this…it's almost like a labyrinthine path from where I began to where I am now, and if you ask me five years from now I'll probably be somewhere else.

Denise: So it's a career that is encourages questions and different paths.
John: I turned 65 last year, most people my age are retired, I am more psyched about doing the stuff I do now. A friend of mine up at Woods Hole, Henry Stommel, he probably did more for oceanography than anyone in the last half century. He said "I can't understand why anyone would give me money to do what I'm doing because I'm having such a good time." And that's the way I feel. I wake up in the middle of the night, I don't wake up every night, but when I do, usually I'm thinking about my research.

Denise: It´s very apparent, I can see the excitement and passion that you, Rudy (Slingerland), Neal (Driscoll) and J.P. (Walsh) have, it's very inspiring.
John: It's fantastic, your husband J.P. is just starting on his career, and here I am probably approaching the end of mine, well, I say probably because but my wife says "How many more years John?" And I say, oh, three, or four or five, I've been saying three or four or five for about the last eight or nine years. Ultimately I know I'll have to stop. And then coming out on this ship… I think Rudy told you about the great morning, he, Neal and I had this morning, it was incredible. What happens I think in science, and certainly geology, is you remember the highs, but there's an awful lot of if not lows, but non-highs. Those moments like I mentioned where I'm standing in the hall in NSF what I don't remember are all the hours leading up to that moment, just like I don't remember all the hours on this ship that essentially lead up to the two hours this morning which was really good.

Denise: This morning, from your perspective, there was discovery, what was your take on it?
John: Oh it was incredible! The neat thing is sometimes you get a synergy in which somebody says something, someone picks up and adds onto it and then someone else picks up on that, and in the end there's a kernel left of what was originally said, but it's been twisted and massaged and essentially it evolves into something that has a life of it's own, and you sit back and say "Wow, look where we've evolved in the last two hours." I'm a person that believes geology is a series of events, interspersed by larger times when there isn't much happening. I actually write that in my book that essentially as a person looking at rivers, a lot of rivers are responding to episodic events, and in a way research is the same way, you have this series of events that help with discovery, or synthesis or understanding, interspersed with these long periods which, it's not that there isn't anything happening, but your building up to these events, it's almost like an earthquake. An earthquake doesn't just happen, there are tensions and pressures in the earth that build up, and build up and then bang! Well it's something like that I think in research. You feed in ideas, and if you can sit down with colleagues, and here we are on this ship, there are no phone calls, there's no-one that has to go off to a meeting, you can sit there with these seismic profiles, that you've been looking at for the past week, and then bang! It hits you!