Chapter 2

To the US

Story

McKenzie’s Research Fellowship at King’s College meant that he was free to develop his own research, and to travel. McKenzie was invited to visit Scripps in 1965 by Freeman Gilbert and Walter Munk. ScrippsScrippsScripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, California was established to support marine biological research, but from 1908 onwards pioneered geophysical research in the oceans. Teddy Bullard was a frequent visitor and undertook early ocean floor heat flow measurements with Roger Revelle. In 1962 the University of California established the new Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics alongside Scripps in La Jolla. had a reputation for heat flow work, and an extensive research base in physical oceanography. It was a good place to explore ideas about convection in the interior of the Earth. This first trip to Scripps ended suddenly. McKenzie had mistakenly travelled on an immigration visa, which made him liable for the draft to fight in the Vietnam war; he returned to Britain hastily after eight months.

ARCHIVE REFERENCE: LDGSL/1107/A/1/2
McKenzie to David ‘Dai’ Davies, Department of Geodesy & Geophysics, University of Cambridge, England, expressing his pleasure at being at IGGP (Scripps) and learning to compute using FORTRAN, Edward ‘Teddy’ Bullard was also there discovering a method of compensating for electric currents induced in the oceans, [1965].