Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
it might not be adequately monitored and documented.
11
Master of the
science-funding alphabet, he took steps to ensure that it was. Taking
advantage of resources available to him as the president of the Scientific
Committee on Ocean Research (SCOR), a committee of the International
Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), Revelle designed an atmospheric-
monitoring program for the 1957- 58 International Geophysical Year
(IGY).
12
In July of 1956, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography had hired
Keeling as a junior scientist, and he brought his pathological obsession
with measuring atmospheric CO
2
with him to La Jolla. In 1957, Revelle set
Keeling up with IGY funds (and about $10,000 of dubiously allocated AEC
money) and put him in charge of the new IGY atmospheric-monitoring
program.
13
Keeling constructed CO
2
-monitoring stations at the Mauna
Loa Observatory in Hawai'i and at a research post in Antarctica in order
to establish a baseline of atmospheric CO
2
that could be used to measure
future changes.
14
In March of 1958, the amount of CO
2
in the atmosphere
stood at about 315 ppm.
15
co
2
and the international geoPhysical year
The Keeling Curve would eventually become an icon of global warming,
but in the spring of 1958 the curve was still only a few data points on a
plotter, and Keeling was little more than “a peculiar guy” living on a vol-
cano and trying to figure out the best way to measure CO
2
.
16
Technically,
Keeling's Mauna Loa Observatory put CO
2
research on the government
payroll, but it was Revelle's involvement in planning the International
Geophysical Year that really landed CO
2
on the public research agenda.
Lasting from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958, the IGY was the larg-
est cooperative international scientific research effort the world had ever
seen. The idea arose from a 1950 gathering of physicists interested in the
ionosphere; in less than a decade it blossomed into a project involving more
than sixty thousand scientists and technicians from sixty-six nations.
17
The initial group met at the home of James Van Allen, a rocket scientist
concerned primarily with cosmic rays. Also present were Lloyd Berkner,
a physicist who would become both president of the ICSU and a member
of Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee; Sidney Chapman, a man
that
New York Times
science writer Walter Sullivan dubbed the world's
“greatest living geophysicist”; and three other physicists, J. Wallace Joyce,
