| Summary: | Alford, Don Anderson, Don, geophysicist Assur, Andrew, geologist Bader, Henri, geologist Ballard, Geoffrey E. Barnes, Peter Bennington, Kenneth Brewer, Max Brown, Irene, geologist Bull, Colin Bush, Al, geologist Bushnell, Vivian, Arctic geologist Butkovich, Ted, geologist Campbell, Bill Cosby, Lee, Commanding Officer of CRREL Crary, Bert, geologist Dansgaard, Willi DeGoes, Louis Dunbar, Moria Eiken, Hajo, expert on sea ice Fermi, Enrico, physicist Fletcher, Joe Frankenstein, Ginnie Gow, Tony Hansen, Lyle Henderson, Don, Professor of Geology, Univ. of Illinois Hibler, Bill Jahns, Hans Jeffries, Martin Jezek, Ken Kelly, John “Shipwreck,” Kingery, David, metallurgist Kovacs, Austin McCartney, Chester, General Mellor, Malcolm Mock, Steve Pierson, Chuck Ramberg, Hans Rearic, Doug Rothrock, Drew Seligman, Gerald, British Glaciological Society Shapiro, Lou Solomon, Susan Thomas, Bob, NASA Thorndike, Allen Tilford, Shelby Urey, Harold, famous chemist Weeks, Caroline Weeks, Frank Weeks, Richard Wilson, Stan, Oceanographer, NASA Wilford Weeks, born in 1919, has had a long and distinguished scientific career in geology and oceanography, including decades of involvement in both polar regions. He earned both his B.S. and M.S degrees at the University of Illinois at Champaign, where he also developed a side career playing the contrabass in various major orchestras. His Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago were temporarily interrupted when in 1955 he was called to active duty as an Air Force officer. This led to his assignment to the Hopedale Station in Labrador to the Joint Services Sea Ice Physics Program. He made side trips to Greenland and Baffin Island. These northern assignments started his lifelong involvement with polar studies. In 1956 he earned his Ph.D. His next duty station was to Thule, Greenland, where he continued doing structural studies on the vertical grain distribution in sea ice. In 1957 he left the Air Force after two years of service, and joined the staff of Washington University in St. Louis where until 1962 he taught various courses on geochemistry and geology. His summers were spent with the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE) in Wilmette, Illinois, where he continued his research on sea ice. After declining teaching positions at both the University of Wisconsin and Washington University, in 1962 he joined the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in Hanover, New Hampshire. There he became a member of the Snow and Ice Branch and was Chief of that department from 1964 to 1966. He stayed with CRREL until 1989. His various assignments at CRREL included several stays at Thule, Greenland from 1964 through 1967. He spent time at Camp Century, an under-the-ice, secret facility some 100 miles from Thule. While there he studied the variation of compressive strength in glacial ice and snow as a function of variations in density, as well as the in-situ temperatures of ice at depths 10 meters below the surface of the ice cap. He also continued his long-term interests in the study of sea ice and river ice. Weeks offers comments on the tools and equipment necessary to conduct such operations, including the planes, helicopters, ice breakers, living quarters, scientific instruments. He also discusses the roles and personal interactions, including personality conflicts, among his colleagues. Another theme was the decline in polar money in recent years that has limited research efforts, especially for Arctic projects. Most funding has gone for projects in the Antarctic. During these same years, 1964 to 1967, he made other research trips to the Beartooth Mountains in Montana, where he studied shear and tensile strength variations and grain size distributions in the snow pack. In 1969 he worked for a time as a consultant to the Humble Oil Company (which later became Exxon), to study properties of the sea ice in the Northwest Passage. Tankers would have to pass through this area in order to reach Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, site of a huge oil strike in 1967. In 1973 Weeks had a four-month assignment in a warmer clime when he worked with Japanese scientists in Hokkaido, Japan at the Institute of Low Temperature Studies, the third largest snow and ice research group in the world. Later he wrote one of the early studies on the cost-effectiveness of towing ice bergs for use as alternative fresh water sources, and concluded that an effective use of these bergs is some years away. Another assignment with CRREL was to study sea ice and coastal pressure ridges as part of the Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment (AIDJEX), a really outstanding program, especially in its early phases. The principal big sea ice dynamics model was not developed there, however, although AIDJEX had the great benefit of introducing a number of first class people to sea ice science. Some of these people, including Weeks, were also associated with the Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program (OCSEAP), a very diverse program. Weeks conducted many laser profiles of the surface roughness of ice in the late 1970’s, including measuring crystal orientations in fast ice. In 1979 Weeks was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a prestigious honor. This led to his first assignment in the Antarctic. In 1980 Weeks, and Tony Gow conducted a study of sea ice in McMurdo Sound that included crystal orientation studies. They also studied platelet ice that forms from super-cooled water that came from under the ice shelf. Such ice does not exist in the Arctic. During the years from 1984 to 1986 Weeks, in part because of the urging of Bill Campbell, became more involved with NASA. He became a member of the Earth System Science Committee, a project conceived by Shelby Tilford to look at the earth as a total system. In 1986 Weeks went to Alaska to become Chief Scientist at the Alaska Synthetic Aperture Radar Facility, and later became Professor of Geophysics at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. There he taught a graduate course on sea ice. In 1990 he returned a second time to the Antarctic to collect ice samples from McMurdo and the Ross Sea, and a third time in 1993. That same year he retired as Chief Scientist, but continued on at CRREL on a limited basis. In 1995 he made his last working trip to Barrow. In 1996 he moved to Portland, Oregon, and continued consulting on an occasional basis. He has continued working on a book about sea ice, one that is as yet unfinished, and plays contra-bass with several orchestras. Major Topics Long career of Wilford Weeks in the Arctic and Antarctic regions Pioneering scientific research on glacial, sea, and river ice Goals and achievements of CRREL, SIPRE, AIDJEX, and NAE Personal recollections about his scientific colleagues Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
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