John Atkinson Knauss is a person who has made a difference in what today’s oceanography is all about. Born in 1925 in Detroit, he was commissioned in the Navy program in meteorology and received his B.S. in meteorology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946. These were the war years, and brought John to the Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego for two years, and then on to Washington where he was one of the young men working with Roger Revelle to establish the glorious traditions of the Office of Naval Research (ONR). There John, Art Maxwell and Gordon Lill invented the Albatross Award which they promptly awarded to themselves for thinking of it.

Munk, W. 2001. Vignette. Oceanography 14(2):33, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2001.40.

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