A Lifetime Spent Answering the Call of the Sea : Science: Walter Munk, professor emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has used everything from scuba gear to sound waves to study the ocean.

LA JOLLA — It might have been ice or air or earth, but it was the sea that captivated Walter Munk.

Munk, one of the world’s best-known oceanographers, wandered into the study of oceans as a college physics student looking for a summer job near his girlfriend’s coastal home.

Now he’s 75, the girl is a memory and the ocean is his life.

Sitting in his home on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Munk said his scientific specialty easily could have been something else.

“I love the ocean,” Munk said. “But if you enjoy learning new things, if you enjoy being out of the laboratory like I do, you’d have an equally good time whether you became a glaciologist or a meteorologist or an oceanographer or a geologist.”

In the years since he stumbled into his first job at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the soft-spoken scientist has become famous for getting out of the laboratory and onto the sea for experiments that have revealed secrets of waves, tides and ocean circulation.

He was an early user of scuba gear and among the first to employ high-speed computers to study geophysical data.

Munk pioneered the use of sound waves to explore the ocean’s structure. Now he is leading an international experiment that could settle the debate over global warming by using sound waves to track changes in ocean temperatures.

In January, Munk received Columbia University’s Vetlesen Prize, sometimes called the Nobel Prize of earth sciences, adding it to his long list of fellowships and awards, including the National Medal of Science.

The Vetlesen jury called Munk “a senior statesman in the field of oceanography.”

“He’s full of ideas,” said Arnold Gordon, oceanography professor at Columbia. “He opens up whole areas of research. Much of what we are doing now in oceanography are things he started.”

Munk, a professor emeritus at Scripps, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1917 and moved to New York at the age of 14 to work in his grandfather’s bank. He studied physics first at Columbia and then at Caltech in Pasadena.

While at Caltech, he landed a summer job at the Scripps Institution and had so much fun that he asked to become the research institute’s first student, earning a doctorate from the University of California.

During World War II, Munk enlisted in the Army but was soon called back to San Diego to help the military and Scripps develop a system for forecasting sea swells and surf before amphibious landings. He correctly predicted high but manageable waves for the Normandy invasion.

After the war, Munk studied the waves and currents caused by the 1946 nuclear bomb tests in the southern Pacific Ocean, once watching from a raft a mere 10 miles away from a Bikini Atoll blast.

“It’s stunning; it’s horrible,” Munk said. “It’s not dark, it’s quite white. You see the boiling and the water vapor above you, like a curtain coming down all around you.”

In 1947, Munk became an assistant professor, settling into the seaside home built by his architect wife, Judith, and a long career at Scripps.

Munk has no plans to retire; he’s in the midst of what he calls “the most exciting experiment of my life.”

The project, aided by 11 institutions and seven nations, may determine whether the world is growing warmer, as many scientists fear, because of a buildup of industrial-age gases in the atmosphere, called the greenhouse effect.