Thomas Saunders English, 1928-1985

Abstract

After three years of illness, Tom English passed away in Seattle, Washington, on 5 January 1985. ... Tom was born and grew up in Washington, D.C. The undergraduate years, 1946 to 1950, were spent at Iowa State University in Ames, first as a journalism major, later as a zoology student. He continued at Ames with graduate work in zoology and statistics, receiving a master's degree in 1951 with a thesis on age, growth, and life history of carps in a local lake. ... Before receiving his doctorate at the University of Washington in 1961, Tom did graduate studies at the University of Oslo and in Bergen, Norway (1954-55); he also served in the U.S. Air Force at Fairbanks and near the North Pole (1956-58) and spent one year as instructor in fisheries biology at the University of Alaska (1958-59). His Ph.D. thesis treated the distribution and abundance of planktonic flatfish eggs in Puget Sound. Tom joined the teaching faculty of the then Department of Oceanography of the University of Washington in 1959. The next quarter of a century of his professional life was more than filled with teaching, research, participation in base-line studies for the state and federal governments and administrative work in the department. ... Tom's research interests revolved around problems of sampling design and the plankton of the Arctic Ocean. ... The common method of estimating stock size of fishes with pelagic eggs from integrating areas within contour lines of egg abundance was critically assessed and a better method was proposed. ... Tom chose to discharge his ROTC obligations of undergraduate days by entering the Air Force ... and, apparently, elected to be detailed to the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory outside Fairbanks. ... he spent two summers and autumns on Drift Station Alpha, an ice floe near the North Pole .... The biological investigations were performed under contract with the Arctic Institute of North America. Besides being among the first to SCUBA-dive under the ice ..., Tom established in great detail what earlier polar investigators could only suggest: that the annual phytoplankton cycle under the ice is primarily driven by underwater light, which in turn depends more on snow melt than incident radiation. ... In the mid-sixties, Tom's continuing interest in the plankton of the Arctic Ocean was directed to Fletcher's Ice Island (also called T-3). Plankton collections were made in eight summer seasons between 1966 and 1973, and in all or most other months from 1968 through April 1974. The island drifted during this time from about 75° N north of Point Barrow, to beyond 85° N, to north of Ellesmere Island. In addition, summer collections were made in 1975 at the main camp of the Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment in the Beaufort Sea. Predominantly north of 80° N, Tom, his students, and his assistants collected the following (approximate numbers): 5500 samples each for temperature and salinity, 5000 for oxygen, 3300 each for phosphate, nitrate, and silicate, 6000 for chlorophyll, and 4000 measurements of photosynthesis (14C); further, 5800 phytoplankton and 11 000 zooplankton samples were gathered .... While the emphasis was on the upper layers, some sampling extended to the bottom. The enormous, truly unique body of analyses has only partly been evaluated .... Tom chose not to spend much of his energy on the dissemination of research results through publications but, like a real college teacher, to devote his time primarily to transmitting knowledge by classroom teaching, as well as guiding students doing research. ...