- Christopher S. Martens
- Distinguished Professor of Marine Sciences
Department of Marine Sciences
12-4 Venable Hall, CB#3300
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3300
cmartens@marine.unc.edu
I grew up in south Florida and the Florida Keys, living in Marathon near the 7-mile Bridge and then moving to Homestead to finish high school at South Dade. My mother was a high school teacher and a Thomas Hardy scholar. Before the war my father had been a ship's officer on passenger-freighters for the trans-Atlantic Red Star line, mostly on the Westernland. He met my mother at sea during one of those long, long voyages. My parents' love of the ocean was what brought our family to the Miami area and then to the Keys where my Dad, trained as an engineer, eked out a living on the night shift at tackle shops and as a fisherman. In the 60's the best money came from pompano then found in large schools off the Everglades - over a dollar a pound at the dock.
As a kid I jumped in any pool without a fence, searched the old bootlegger's shack on Boot Key, hunted for baby sharks in the shallows and baby raccoons in the mangroves, hung around the shrimpboat docks or played with the returning tourist kids and their friendly families at Hall's Camp, now the site of timeshare condos. A visit to the big city was Key West before Jimmy Buffet, with authentic Cuban restaurants, mysterious old houses and brick forts. To make money I dove up lost knives and dropped tackle or scrapped boat bottoms for 50 cents at Shanahan's boat livery behind the old Marathon Sundry Store (now a Chinese restaurant). When I turned twelve my Dad found a way to trade for and give me a small boat of my own; the greatest gift that I have ever received. It was a 14' wooden skiff that could handle a good-sized chop and it changed my life from mostly land-bound local urchin to ocean explorer and adventurer. I no longer just looked out over the water at the far off Johnson Keys but ran home from the school bus, and then off in cut-offs to the nearby docks where my boat lay waiting for me. I needed money for gas and maintenance, a common problem for all boat owners. Gruff-talking old Shanahan, who owned a boat livery and watched out for me when my Dad was at sea, taught me how to bullynet crawfish (called spiny lobsters by outsiders) at night in the shallow waters around Marathon and I began making about $15 to $25 a night working from sunset to 1 or 2 am. Crawfish kept in the boat under damp burlap brought $0.33/lb live at the dock at 6:00am the next morning. They ticked like clocks while breathing. After just a few months of this easy living I had ceased to see a need for schoolwork, or school for that matter, and was having an easy time with others of like mind. With a dad off on month-long fishing trips and a mom working in Dade County schools for better pay, I had the run of the town and I took it.
Fortunately, I crossed paths by chance with a professional marine biologist, Richard Robbins, helped him collect some fish, and was invited to visit him at the University of Miami's marine lab (RSMAS). I did so after my parents moved to Homestead, and was immediately hooked. As a high school senior at South Dade, I worked afternoons at RSMAS with several marine scientists on a study of conchs, received advice about a potential career n oceanography, even more advice about the importance of doing well in school to would-be marine biologists, and was urged to go away to college. Everything that they told me turned out to be true. Based on my conch project work at RSMAS I won a scholarship to Florida State University and moved to the frigid northern realms of Florida. At Florida State I immediately went to work ($1/hr) for a marine sponge biologist, Harry Wells, who urged me to add chemistry, physics and math in order to be prepared to study the oceans. I reluctantly majored in Chemistry but learned to study and enjoy diverse subjects. Chemistry, biology, physics and geology had all became relevant as I finished my senior year as an undergraduate and the distinctions between them blurred just as it does in the ocean. As a graduate student I sought more involvement in field-oriented research, and had a wonderful experiences as a Ph.D. student in Chemical Oceanography working with an adventurous young geochemist, Bob Harriss, who had just joined the faculty at Florida State. I began to really study the oceans using new insights and skills. The perspective was different from that of my beloved Florida Keys childhood but the motivation to build my own career in marine sciences came directly from those early experiences. In 1972, I moved to Yale University to complete two years of postdoctoral study and to be a junior faculty member before joining the faculty of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1974.
At Chapel Hill I have had the privilege of working with an incredibly gifted and diverse group of students and colleagues for several decades. Many of my students have won prestigious prizes and fellowships for their research. All have gone on to successful scientific careers, most as faculty at well-respected universities and several as dedicated high school science teachers. I was elected chairman of the Chemical Oceanography Gordon Conference in 1987, received the B.H. Ketchum Award for Leadership in Coastal Research from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1995, and have been a co-recipient of The Geochemical Society's Best Paper Award in Organic Geochemistry twice: in 1984 and 1998. I am a scientific board member of the Max-Planck-Society in Germany. In 2002 I was made a Fellow of the international Geochemical Society and the European association of Organic geochemists. I occupy the William B. Aycock Endowed Chair in Marine Sciences at UNC, and have been a participant in the development of outstanding marine sciences programs across our state including those at UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Wilmington, East Carolina University and NC State University. A new program is evolving at Nags Head and I hope to help colleagues with its growth as well. We need many more marine scientists and much more funding to understand, let alone solve, the problems that our coastal waters now face. The upcoming decades will witness further major changes in these valuable resources and we need to understand the processes that control these sometimes shocking alterations. I served as Chair of UNC's Department of Marine Sciences (1990-1995) and Director of the Marine Sciences Program (1993-1997).
My research generally focuses on the cycling of carbon, sulfur and nitrogen in coastal environments although our team works in the deep sea on topics such as the newly discovered gas hydrates in deep sea sediments and in Amazonian tropical rain forests on the global carbon cycle. Our project at Aquarius developed from exciting new discoveries concerning the possible importance of marine sponges as sources or sinks of nitrogen to coral reef ecosystems. Our hypotheses concerning the role of sponges in nitrogen cycling in coral reef ecosystems could not be tested without the Aquarius facility and its marvelous staff of professional divers and engineers. In the absence of special saturation dive training training capabilities we would be unable to safely and effectively work for the longer time periods required to run the necessary experiments. And now you know that through the terrific NURC and Aquarius programs I have been able to return to the Keys where I first developed an interest in marine sciences research. It's as much fun for me as when I was a child. Snorkeling and SCUBA diving is a blast; going down in a submarine to see the deep seafloor is an exciting adventure; getting to live undersea for an extended period with for almost unlimited access to the underwater world day and night is the stuff kids dream of!
Come along and join us on the web as we try some of the world's first underwater measurements of sponge respiration and nitrogen release. We have a new web site for a major school outreach project this summer (http://www.scienceunderthesea.org/) in addition to the regular live web cams that will be on in the Aquarius Habitat website during the entire mission. Philippe Cousteau will lead the team of divers, including high school students, Kaya Lindquist and Melissa Winch, that will meet the Aquanauts in front of live cameras during August 25th and 26th (see website for times). We hope to catch the once-a-year coral spawning event predicted for Friday night, August 26th, during a special live dive transmission on http://www.scienceunderthesea.org/ beginning at around 9:30pm.
We'll be doing our work in collaboration with studies of water stratification and flow over the reef by other investigators. Sponges may be primitive creatures, however, they appear to have an important role in the changes we are seeing in coral reef ecosystems around the world. My advice to students starting out in marine sciences is to re-use that advice I took many years ago: Work hard and try to do well in school, seek out experiences that teach you about your own true interests and pursue them consistently. Never, never give up if you love something and are willing to fight for it. And don't be afraid to talk with marine scientists whenever the opportunity presents itself …. We love to talk to the next generation of oceanographers.
