by Kathleen Crane. Westview Press, 2003. ISBN 0 8133 4004 7, Hardcover, $27.50.
Meghan F. Cronin
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Book Reviews:
Sea Legs: Tales of a Woman Oceanographer
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Sea Legs: Tales of a Woman
Oceanographer by Kathleen Crane. Westview Press, 2003. ISBN 0 8133 4004 7, Hardcover, $27.50. Meghan F. Cronin |
As scientists, we learn to write in passive voice, to parse out subjectivity,
defend ideas with citations, figures, and tables, and under no circumstance
use the word “I.” It is no wonder that the popular media portrays
scientists as myopic half-humans, devoid of common sense. Enter Kathy Crane
and her autobiography Sea Legs: Tales of a Woman Oceanographer, published
in February. If you think Tibet is exotic, try pictures from places 2,500 meters
below the ocean surface.
Crane’s life story takes the reader on exhilarating deep-sea Alvin dives,
international expeditions in the Arctic, and the search for the Titanic. Her
tales include battles between scientific empires at the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and run-ins
with the FBI and latter-day KGB. Here is a vibrant woman, an explorer, teacher
and mother, who traverses between disparate worlds with an uncanny sense of
balance.
A graduate of Scripps, Crane has done her share of refereed journal articles,
proposals and a lion’s share of field work. A graduate student in Fred
Spiess’ Deep-Tow group, Crane was one of the first to locate thermal signals
of deep-sea vents. After a postdoctoral position at WHOI with Bob Ballard, she
went to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and then
took a teaching position at Hunter College in New York City. In 1980, her research
shifted toward the Arctic, and in 1989 she joined the U.S. Navy’s Naval
Research Laboratory. However, being a woman, she was not allowed onboard U.S.
Navy submarines. Instead, with Office of Naval Research (ONR) and National Scientific
Foundation funding, she collaborated with Swedish, Norwegian, Canadian, Russian,
French and German scientists, whose countries all provided facilities for women
on their Arctic fleets. While the book does not read like a feminist tract,
the memoir clearly aims in part to question the rules that forced her to do
research on foreign vessels.
Through accounts of her multifaceted career, Crane examines the variety of motivations
for being a scientist. Exploration and challenge are certainly bread and butter
for this woman who was short-listed as a space shuttle astronaut. However, the
search for beauty and expression is also a strong driving force in her career.
Although she made a brief turn towards the arts entering into film school, ultimately
her need for financial stability brought her back to science. With a characteristic
sense of balance (hence the title Sea Legs), she manages to combine her artistic
and scientific pursuits — producing scientific documentary films, writing
a memoir and searching for the pristine beauty of uncharted territory. And after
the discoveries came the inevitable responsibility of stewardship. With funding
from ONR and the World Wildlife Fund, Crane collaborated with Russian scientists
and others to produce in 1999 the Arctic Environmental Atlas detailing heavy
metal, organochlorine and radionuclide contamination in the Arctic and the sources
of those contaminants. She is now program manager in the Arctic Research Office
of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Besides describing Crane’s personal motivations for pursuing a science
career, Sea Legs also illustrates the varied societal motivations for supporting
science. Fieldwork is not cheap. Shiptime typically runs $20,000 to $50,000
per day. Why do taxpayers support these ventures? It is Crane’s premise
that the Cold War provided the deep pockets for science and that Sputnik opened
the door for young girls to study mathematics and science. The government called
her generation out to action to defend the country against possible Russian
technological superiority. As a result, adventurous women such as Crane were
spurred into fields previously dominated by men. Societal fear is a powerful
motivation for opening tax coffers. ONR’s primary purpose in funding oceanography
was to hide submarines. Although much of ONR research is in the open literature,
a sizable amount is classified. Crane also describes work funded by other deep
pockets, including Hollywood (up the road from Scripps), foreign governments,
an oil magnate who was interested in searching for both the Titanic and the
“lost city” of Atlantis and nongovernmental organizations (such as
the World Wildlife Fund and the National Geographic Society). Candid discussions
from the trenches about the expectations and pressures that each of these funding
sources place upon scientists are important for maintaining overall integrity
and credibility in the sciences — and Crane supplies this.
Her book is a good read with many fun tales. My favorite is the story of sailing
on the ice breaker YMER with the King of Sweden. “The Swedes had requested
that I bring a ball gown, for dinner with the king, and the Norwegian team had
requested that I bring my toughest winter boots, for days we would spend on
the ice,” Crane writes. Descriptions of her first cruises are classic graduate
student stories. How many of us have been in the pressure cooker with a crazy
chief scientist? But in this case, the chief scientist in fact did have a mental
breakdown and was met by an ambulance at the next port stop.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Jacques Cousteau inspired a generation of oceanographers.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Bob Ballard captured the imagination of the world
with his discovery of the Titanic, a discovery that was made in truth through
the efforts of a large team of competitors and colleagues (including Crane).
Ocean sciences will do well by having another colorful voice to articulate the
wonders of the scientific world to the public that supports their endeavors.
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