Richard P. Von Herzen, Explorer of Earth’s Undersea Furnaces, Dies at 85

Richard P. Von Herzen, an explorer who found that the icy depths of the deep sea conceal vast regions of simmering heat, helping to confirm the scientific view of the Earth’s crust as continuously in motion, died on Jan. 28 in Portola Valley, Calif. He was 85.

The cause was vascular disease, his daughter, Lane Von Herzen, said.

For more than a half-century, Dr. Von Herzen worked at the nation’s pre-eminent centers for ocean research — the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. As it turned out, his early career was nicely timed to address a great controversy.

In 1912, Alfred Wegener, a German geophysicist, proposed that the continents move around slowly like parts of a giant jigsaw puzzle — as suggested by the shoulder of South America’s fitting neatly into the armpit of Africa. The idea prompted waves of ridicule and debate that went on for decades.

But Dr. Von Herzen’s research was part of a large body of work that validated the theory.

A gifted inventor, he developed the first modern instruments and methods for gauging temperatures in the sea’s depths, letting him and his peers make wide readings of how heat from the Earth’s molten interior rises through the seafloor. His voyages in the 1960s across the South Atlantic and Pacific Oceans revealed high temperature flows at seabed mountain ranges, and low flows at deep ocean trenches.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/science/earth/richard-p-von-herzen-explorer-of-earths-undersea-furnaces-dies-at-85.html