Great Geologists | 109
Harry Hess
Harry Hess whilst serving as an officer aboard
the USS Cape Johnson in World War II.
In February 1945, the assault transport ship USS Cape Johnson was engaged in supporting the American troop landings
at Iwo Jima, one of the key actions in the Pacific Ocean theatre of World War II. This was one of many operations in
which the ship was involved, as it transported troops between bases in the Pacific, and to various battlefronts. Its military
missions also helped serve a scientific purpose. The ship was equipped with sonar that allowed bathymetric surveys of the
ocean to be undertaken.
The significance of this opportunity was not lost on the ship’s executive officer (subsequently, its commander), Harry
Hess. Hess was an academic geologist based at Princeton University, who as a U.S. Navy reservist had reported for active
duty the day after the Pearl Harbour attack by the Japanese air force. Hess already had a particular interest in the geology
of the oceans and understood that these new data could throw light on how the oceans formed. In fact they proved
inspirational him in developing one of the most important strands of the plate tectonics paradigm — sea-floor spreading.
Harry Hess was born in New York in 1906 and attended Ashbury Park High School in New Jersey. He entered Yale
University in 1923, with the intention to study electrical engineering. However, he found this subject boring and, looking
for something that would give freer rein to his imagination, decided to study geology. Since he was one of only two
undergraduates at the time, he took graduate as well as undergraduate courses. This was hard work, but he graduated in
1927, with the first B.Sc. in Geology at Yale.
After graduation, Hess spent eighteen months as a mineral exploration geologist in Northern Rhodesia (now, Zambia). He
remarked, “At seventeen miles a day, I developed leg muscles, a philosophical attitude toward life, and a profound respect
for fieldwork.”. However, he was not destined to be an industrial geologist. He returned to the U.S. and was accepted for a
PhD program at Princeton, studying the serpentinisation of a large peridotite intrusion at Schuyler in Virginia. He received
his PhD degree in 1932.
Hess taught at Rutgers University between 1932 and 1933 and spent time at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie
Institute in Washington, D.C. before accepting a position in the Geology department at Princeton in 1934. This would
continue to be his academic base for the rest of his career.