University of Southern Mississippi
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
Harry Hammond Hess was born in New York City on May 24, 1906, and suffered a fatal heart attack in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1969, while chairing a meeting of the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences. Although Hess entered Yale University as an electrical engineering major in 1923, after 2 years he changed to a major in geology, graduating with the B.S. degree in 1927.
After his Yale education, Hess worked as an exploration geologist in Rhodesia for 2 years before beginning graduate studies at Princeton University. His Princeton mentors included A. F. Buddington (petrology), A. H. Phillips (mineralogy), R. M. Field (oceanic structure), and Edward Sampson (stratiform mineral complexes). Hess studied an altered Virginia peridotite body for his 1932 doctoral dissertation. He taught for a year (1932-1933) at Rutgers University and spent a year as a Research Associate at the Geophysical Laboratory of Washington, D. C., before joining the faculty of Princeton University in 1934. Hess remained at Princeton for the rest of his career and served as Geology Department Chair from 1950 to 1966. He was a visiting professor at the University of Capetown, South Africa (1949-1950), and the University of Cambridge, England (1965).
Hess' scientific record is unusual in its breadth. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1952), the American Philosophical Society (1960), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1968). He served as President of the Geodesy (1951-1953) and the Tectonophysics (1956-1958) Sections of the American Geophysical Union, and as President of the Mineralogical Society of America (1955), and the Geological Society of America (1963). Hess was awarded the GSA Penrose Medal in 1966, an honorary doctorate degree by Yale University in 1969, and a posthumous Distinguished Public Service Award by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
As a graduate student, Hess participated in a submarine gravity study of the West Indies under F. A. Vening Meinesz, later extending these studies into the Lesser Antilles using naval submarines. In December 1941, as a U.S. Navy reserve officer, Hess was called to active duty in New York City and was assigned responsibility for detecting enemy submarine operation patterns in the North Atlantic, resulting in the virtual elimination of the submarine threat within 2 years. Hess arranged a transfer to the decoy vessel U.S.S. Big Horn to test the effectiveness of the submarine detection program; he then remained on sea duty for the rest of the war. As commanding officer of the transport vessel U.S.S. Cape Johnson, Hess carefully chose his travel routes to Pacific Ocean landings on the Marianas, Philippines, and Iwo Jima, continuously using his ship's echo sounder. This unplanned wartime scientific surveying enabled Hess to collect ocean floor profiles across the North Pacific Ocean, resulting in the discovery of flat-topped submarine volcanoes, which he termed "guyots" after the Princeton Geology Building.
Hess' doctoral dissertation and two of his papers (published in 1941 and 1960) are considered classics in the study of peridotite complexes. At the time of his death, he was a designated NASA Principal Investigator for pyroxene studies of recovered lunar samples. Through these investigations, Hess was able to discern relationships between island arcs, seafloor gravity anomalies, and peridotite, leading him to postulate in 1960 that mantle convection cells were the driving force for seafloor spreading.
Hess was also a primary proponent of the Mohole Project, a 1957 proposal by Walter Munk to drill through the oceanic crust into the Earth's mantle. Hess and Munk arranged support and helped coordinate the initial drilling off Guadalupe Island, Mexico, by the American Miscellaneous Society (AMSOC), establishing the feasibility of drilling in the deep sea by dynamically positioned vessels. Hess provided nonpartisan scientific leadership for the Mohole Project during its second phase (1961-1966). At the time of its cancellation by the U.S. Congress in 1966, most of the scientific and engineering problems of ocean drilling had been solved, leading to the later successful scientific ocean drilling by the Deep Sea Drilling Project.
Harry H. Hess served the scientific community in the fields of geophysics, geodesy, tectonophysics, and mineralogy. In recognition of his leadership, the American Geophysical Union established the Harry H. Hess Medal "for outstanding achievements in research in the constitution and evolution of Earth and sister planets."
Dean A. Dunn
University of Southern Mississippi
Hattiesburg, Mississippi