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The 2001 Joseph A. Cushman Award
John W. Murray |
John was born in London in 1937, but was evacuated to Bury in the north of England during WW2 where he lived until 1953, after which he moved back to sunnier climes in Worthing on the south coast. Since he can remember he was always keen on microscopy. In his teens his parents had given him a biological microscope and he spent many happy hours making preparations of rocks and biological materials to examine. In 1956 he went up to Imperial College of Science & Technology, University of London, to study a B.Sc. degree in Pure Geology, followed by a Ph.D. in Micropaleontology in 1961, under David Carter. Whilst at Imperial College he seems to have been an exemplary student and won many medals and prizes. John had been introduced to foraminifera as a first year undergraduate and has been fascinated by them ever since! In his final undergraduate year he undertook a project on Cretaceous planktonic foraminifera from the very first borehole drilled in connection with the Channel Tunnel (to link England with France). In 1959, when he started his research, there were few published papers on foraminiferal ecology (mainly by Phleger and Lankford). For his Ph.D. he chose to study the ecology of a small estuary (Christchurch Harbour) in southern England. Apart from collecting samples over four seasons and staining them for living forms, he measured the temperature and salinity of the bottom water, the dissolved oxygen content and the pH, and then tried to relate their distributions to these parameters. He also maintained foraminifera in a tank in London and has attempted culturing experiments intermittently ever since. He spent 1961–1962 as a postdoctoral researcher at the Marine Laboratory, Plymouth (England) carrying out experiments on living foraminifera and studying the ecology of a traverse from the Tamar Estuary, nearby, across the inner shelf. He should have stayed for two years but got married and had, quickly, to look for a "proper" job! Fortunately, he was offered a lectureship at the University of Bristol where he stayed until 1975. During that time, in 1965, he had the good fortune to join an expedition to the Persian/Arabian Gulf. They camped in the desert on Abu Dhabi island (there was only a tiny village there then) for a month and sampled the lagoons and shallow shelf. He was to return again in 1969. The research from these visits led to no less than seven publications. Another key event was to obtain the John Murray Travelling Studentship from the Royal Society of London (named after THE Sir John Murray, of Challenger fame, not our John, but a remarkable coincidence, nonetheless). This took him to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for three months. He was offered generous space and facilities by Ken Emery and benefited greatly from exposure to the ideas of biologists, especially Howard Sanders. Bill Berggren also arrived there just before he left. He sampled the shelf and Buzzards Bay for ecological studies. Back at Bristol, John then became involved in mapping the sea floor of the English Channel in a team led by Professor W.F. Whittard. This awakened an interest in Tertiary foraminifera which he further developed by studying on land the classic Palaeogene sections of the Hampshire and Paris basins. After Whittard died the work continued with Doug Hamilton and changed its focus to modern sediments. This gave John the chance to collect Recent assemblages from shelf seas and, together with his father (who has always been a source of great encouragement), they designed a special sampler that sealed the sample of surface sediment on the sea floor so that nothing was lost in transit through the water to the deck of the ship. During the late 1960’s the first scanning electron microscope arrived in Bristol and John persuaded the Professor of Zoology to let him use it. This enabled him to produce the Atlas of British Recent Foraminiferids in 1971. In parallel with this he wrote his first book on the ecology of foraminifera which was published in 1973 and was very well received. Another highlight of 1973 was a month-long visit to F.W. Haake and G.F. Lutze in Kiel, Germany, where John finished an important review article on comparative studies of living and dead benthic foraminiferal distributions. In 1975 John moved to Exeter University to become Professor of Geology and Head of Department. He stayed there until 1989 when his department was unfortunately closed following a fundamental and controversial reorganisation of the Earth Sciences in British universities. During his tenure, however, John became involved in DSDP, first as a shore-based scientist and then at sea, on Leg 81 to the Rockall Plateau. He found it fascinating to work in such a close environment with a diverse team of colleagues, but he was always seasick and the two months on ship were very stormy indeed. . . . suffice to say he returned home a much leaner man! Most of his work in Exeter was on foraminiferal ecology but he found time to edit the first and second editions of the Stratigraphic Atlas of Fossil Foraminifera, published by the British Micropalaeontological Society and the Atlas of Invertebrate Macrofossils, published by The Palaeontological Association; two societies in which John has always been particularly active. Just before he left for Southampton, he completed the manuscript of his second book on ecology, Ecology and Palaeoecology of Benthic Foraminifera (published in 1991), for which John, perhaps more than anything else, is especially recognised throughout the world. It had taken him three years to write. John is now at the Southampton Oceanographic Center (formed by a merger of the University’s Department of Geology and the former Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, Wormley), with its fine new site in the city’s dockland; he only has to look out of the window to see the Queen Elizabeth II or another liner about to sail off on some exotic cruise! John still maintains a full teaching program and in recent years this has included courses on paleontology, micropaleontology, paleoecology, stratigraphic techniques and basin analysis. For a while, John also ran a special M.Sc. course in micropaleontology. He also finds time to continue his work on modern foraminifera and, latterly, has focused especially on agglutinated assemblages (with Elisabeth Alve of Oslo). This has led, in particular, to new ideas about the significance of agglutinated assemblages in the fossil record. During this work, they developed a dreadful reputation for throwing original assemblages into acetic acid, apparently in order to investigate how much ecological information is retained after taphonomic loss of the calcareous faunal component. I seem to remember at the Vth International Workshop on Agglutinated Foraminifera, in Plymouth, so concerned were the participants that an embryo "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Foraminifera" was set up! Some fourteen papers have now ensued from this successful Anglo-Norwegian collaboration, including also a major baseline study of shallow water foraminifera from southern Scandinavia and a time-series on intertidal foraminifera near Southampton. Elisabeth remembers first meeting John in the late 1980’s and it didn’t take long before he was dragging her out onto some particularly sticky mudflats looking for his "dear forams" (her own words). His enthusiasm is infectious and she, like many others have been dragged out into the mud or to some exposure by John, and have lived to tell the tale and be wiser for it. John’s most recent work is now concentrating on the dynamic processes leading to the formation of assemblages on the high energy shelf, west of Scotland. Over a remarkable career spanning nearly 40 years John has published over 150 articles and book chapters and has written or (co)-edited 8 books. He has supervised more than 20 research students (from Britain, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Spain and Germany), many of them having gone on to work in the petroleum industry. He has served as Editor and President of The Palaeontological Association, Chairman of the British Micropalaeontological Society, and Honorary Secretary of the Geological Society of London. He has been Editor of Palaeontology, the Journal of Micropalaeontology, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Foraminiferal Research. He lists his hobbies as water-color painting, reading and walking, especially by the sea. But I bet his walks by the sea include collecting a few samples, now and again, because John’s real hobby will always be his beloved foraminifera. John, perhaps, appears an archetypal, reserved Englishman, but to those who know him well he is great fun (with a playful sense of humour), and a generous and kind friend. He is also a dedicated scientist and enthusiast, an original thinker, a great teacher and mentor, and through his publications (most notably his compendiums on ecology and palaeoecology) has produced a great service to students of the foraminifera, worldwide. For these qualities, it is therefore fitting that the Board of Directors of the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research is pleased to present John W. Murray with the 2001 Joseph A. Cushman Award. John E. Whittaker
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