This post was written by Jessica (Jingyun) Lin, GSAS ‘26 and an intern in the RBML’s Graduate Student Internship in Primary Sources. She recently processed the Wallace S. Broecker papers.

 

The Dangerous Playground

We will think about early human bones when we hear the word carbon-14 dating. We might think of mummies and Tutankhamun if we watch BBC documentaries, but we may rarely know how carbon-14 dating is used to uncover the Earth’s history, namely, its climate, land formations, oceans, and ecosystem. The late 19th-century discovery of radioactivity and the wartime research into atoms and isotopes gave rise to carbon-14 dating. An isotope of the carbon atom abundant in all organic materials, carbon-14 decays at a known rate, allowing scientists to date materials back tens of thousands of years.

Wallace (“Wally”) Smith Broecker was caught right in the middle of it. Growing up in a midwestern white protestant suburb of Chicago in the 1930s, Wally had lived a rather uneventful life before entering Wheaton College, a fundamentalist school. Yet Wheaton’s ties to Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory (now Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory), through alumni J. Laurence Kulp and Paul Gast, drew him toward a lifelong pursuit of carbon and a scientific narrative of the Earth. During his summer internship at Lamont in 1952, Wally landed his fingers on the wires of the carbon dating device. Samples hundreds or thousands of years old seemed to speak to him through carbon isotopes. And the freshly built instruments, born of wartime advances, gave Wally the power to hear them. As he traced carbon back through time, his talent for science shone.

We can read plenty online about Wally: the “grandfather of climate science” who popularized the phrase “global warming” in the 1970s, and the dyslexic verbal genius remembered for his humor and peculiarities. He was Lamont’s resident prankster, living by the rule of “at least three outrageous acts each year” to stay safely unfit for administrative roles (Geochemical Perspectives). He was a prolific writer and was extremely vocal. Many of his ideas were developed through phone calls and conversations where people frequently noted his brilliance (Columbia Spectator). Yet too rarely do people ask what his science was like from the inside: the joy of looking for answers and, more than anything, the embarrassments, struggles, and apprehensions that accompanied him from the beginning.

The sketchy method

Lamont was built in 1949, located in Palisades, north of New York City. It was an oasis of peace and quiet, long commutes, and barren social life. They had picnics of roast pork, sailed the seas, tinkered with steel and iron-shielded counters to detect atom decays, and debated numbers about water, air, and rocks. It was a place that Wally called his Garden of Eden in his autobiography. But like the biblical Eden, Lamont was well under the surveillance of, not God, but the federal government, the military, and corporations. It was a time when WWII incentivized research on isotope dating. In the early 1950s, Kulp brought the technique to Lamont. Shortly after Wally arrived, he and Kulp had a Kr-isotope detection so accurate that it attracted the FBI’s attention, as Kr was used by the government lab to detect Soviet nuclear activities. After an oath of secrecy, they were invited to the government lab and henceforth scavenged the knowledge to build Lamont’s first CO2 gas-counting machine, a method that later became the research standard for carbon-14 dating. 

It was Wally’s first carbon dating field trip, in Mono Lake in the Great Basin, California-Nevada, whose interpretations included an illegal radioactive waste dump into the lake. The public speculation went all over. Yet science never played whistleblower. Wally and his fellow scientists kept investigating for the next decades on the mysterious rising of the radiocarbon levels. According to his autobiography, Wally monitored the conservation policy and he was proud of his dating repositories, a subtle moral push back, but slightly ironic with his entirely scientific voice. It was a mix of institutional secrets probing, public acidity towards science, and the voices and silence from animal and human inhabitants. The news clippings, email debates, hand-drawn data plots, photos, as well as his own account of the mystery in the collection are all evidence of this pursuit that lasted over 50 years spanning much of his career.

Evidently, behind the wonder and excitement of science stood larger sociopolitical forces. In the 1950s, the Navy and the Atomic Energy Commission were among Lamont’s major funders; Kulp was multitasking between leading the radiocarbon lab and working side missions for the government, while research incentives for defense continued to escalate as the Cold War wore on–this scientific playground was surely infested with serpents. 

There, merrily following carbon, Wally and his fellow Lamontians ventured into the world’s oceans on their research vessels. One was converted from a luxury yacht rigged with custom carbon extraction gear and the first large-volume sampler built out of an oil drum and a ship’s porthole. By the 1970s, this pursuit had carried the scientists into GEOSECS, a survey that assembled a full chemical fingerprint of Earth’s oceans and resulted in Wally and Tsung-Hung Peng’s 1982 oceanography classic Tracers in the Sea, helping give rise to many new fields of research in marine science. The collection preserves an original typewritten hardcopy distributed by the Lamont laboratory. 

Amid a mix of institutional pressures, political complications, and uncertain funding, they deciphered and recorded the Earth’s ancient bookmarks across the American West, the paleolakes of Canada, the Arctic Ocean, and islands throughout the Americas and Pacific. Their findings have since informed films, textbooks, magazine articles, university courses, and museum exhibits.

Climate watchdog

It could be that from the beginning, the act of humans deciphering the language of the Earth’s chemistry, had inevitably linked Wally with foreseeing the human fate. The pursuit of carbon had brought Wally to understanding the effect of anthropogenic CO2. In 1975, two years before Wally was named the Newberry Professor of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences–at the age of 43, he published a Science article that put global warming into its title, which was followed by a surge of public attention and research interest in earth sciences, habitability, and a reflection on human activity post-industrial revolution. A concentration of news clippings around the era could be seen about Wally’s discovery in this collection. You’d be amazed how unrelated most of the publishing houses are to this topic, yet the terms “warming”, “atmosphere”, “ocean”, “climate”, and “future” were all over them. 

In 1992, Wally got involved in the Biosphere 2 project; first learned it through a random reading in a newspaper and then became the main academic connection to the project. Biosphere 2 was initially a two-year experiment in which 8 humans lived in a sealed glass architecture containing complete artificial miniatures of the Earth’s ecosystems and geography. The project was cofounded by the Texas oil heir, Edward P. Bass, in exploring the possibility of space colonization and ability for humans to live in a man-made biosphere. The directors contacted Wally to consult about a mysterious, simultaneous drop of both oxygen and CO2 levels despite the presence of plant respiration–the important gas exchange in the biosphere–for his expertise in carbon tracking and for the neutral ground he held as a university scientist. 

Wally subsequently made several trips to the Arizona desert where the glass spectacle stood, communicating with the directors and the biospherians. In Wally’s words, the spectacle was a $150 million entity that stands “no chance” to ever happen again (GSA Today 1996). After the first involvement, he kept a close eye on that project, made recommendations, named administrators, and organized meetings to make use of the facility after the initial experiment failed. In the numerous news clippings he collected regarding the project, it can be seen that the Biosphere 2 was a joke to many, and that institutional science led by Wally was seen as an impartial and rightful party to come to rescue.

In the following years, under the advocacy of Wally and other climate scientists, Biosphere 2 was managed under Columbia, and the project fostered climate studies for undergraduate students who would spend a semester there, which had received an unexpectedly positive feedback. In the usable areas circled out in the gigantic architecture, Columbia built a dorm complex and spent millions on maintenance, creating a refuge in the abandoned experimentation field. In 2003, because of the financial complications and physical distance, the climate studies program came to an end with Columbia giving up its management. According to his autobiography, Wally later wrote to his connections in Arizona, and knew the air-tight seal had broken and that the site had become a semi-tourist attraction centered around Columbia’s old dorm complex. Despite the broken air seal, he wrote optimistically about the water and coral research still being done there.

 

It had not been all too different for him in terms of scientific practices. In his 67 years at Lamont, Wally actively advocated for cruise survey projects, educational projects, and academic and administrative appointments, sustained by a few die-hard scientists’ own salaries, including his own. This was also the reason he was appointed professor so early. It was a new and underfunded field, yet their results were reported frequently in the news, with terms like global warming and concepts like the ocean conveyor belt becoming common knowledge even to this day. It was not until 2008 that Lamont built a new geochemistry lab building, with its initial funding provided by a climate enthusiast and businessman, the founder of Lands’ End, Gary Comer. Comer became interested in climate change after observing melting ice during his Arctic cruise, and turned the retirement-intending Wally back to his playground: he actively engaged in climate debates for another decade, recording his talk from his hospital bed, until his passing in February 2019. And as if his legend couldn’t come any more full circle, to have another voyage, Wally asked a colleague to scatter his ashes at sea on an upcoming research cruise.

Excited by truth, new methods, and intellectual links between geological events and their chemical explanations, Wally was equally conscious of the societal and political meanings behind the earth sciences, and these could all be seen in his prolific writings—manuscripts, textbooks, and research correspondence held in this collection.

Special thanks to Nettie Isabella Calvin, PhD, of the Ocean Sciences Department at UC Santa Cruz, for their generous help with revisions.