Another good one gone

Rico says that, through his father, he was able to meet some remarkable men who worked at Scripps, including Willard Bascom, John Isaacs, and Meredith Sessions, and Doug Inman was one of them, as his obituary by Corrnelia Dean in The New York Times reveals:

When Douglas L. Inman (photo) began his career as a coastal scientist in the 1950s, little was known about the coastal region where water, land, and air come together; geologists call it the nearshore. It was obvious that beaches differed from place to place, but geologists struggled to do much more than classify them according to their shapes. Little was known about the direct relationships among waves, currents and the movement of coastal sediments like sand.
Dr. Inman, who died at the age of 95 on 11 February in the La Jolla area near San Diego,  California, helped change all that. At the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla and its parent institution, the University of California at San Diego, he led research that opened the eyes of science to the processes that shape the beach.
Among other things, early in his career, Dr. Inman integrated studies of coastal change with the theory of plate tectonics— the idea, new at the time, that the Earth’s crust comprises a number of moving plates. He was a leading theorist of the idea that coasts comprise “littoral cells”— that every stretch of coast had a source of sand, something to move it, and a sink where this sediment ends up. (In California, the sources are typically rivers that carry sediment to the coast, the transport mechanisms are currents that carry sediment along it, and the sinks are the deep submarine canyons that cut almost to shore through the region’s narrow continental shelf.)
Dr. Inman trained generations of coastal scientists who, building on his insights, created a large and influential body of coastal research and themselves trained still other scientists, who refer to themselves as Dr. Inman’s descendants.
Today, as a rise in sea levels threatens most of the world’s saltwater coastlines, the practical implications of this work are clear, but Dr. Inman saw them in the 1970s. The Coastal Challenge, his 1973 paper in the journal Science, sounded an early alarm about the impact of development on coastal areas. He advocated the creation of the California Coastal Commission, which was established in 1972.
“He invented the field,” said Robert T. Guza, an oceanographer at Scripps who was a student of his. “He started it.”
Douglas Lamar Inman was born on July 7, 1920, in Guam, the son of a Marine Corps captain. The family lived in the Philippines, China, Nicaragua and, after his father died when Douglas was 14, in La Mesa, California. He received a bachelor’s degree in physics and geology in 1942 from San Diego State College, now San Diego State University.
Having joined the Marine Corps Reserve, he was called to active duty. As a Marine captain, he participated in amphibious landings in the Pacific. After his wartime service, he began graduate study at Scripps. In 1953 he joined the faculty there. By then the study of the nearshore was beginning to take off, driven largely by military needs. But studying this geology was difficult. “It’s a pretty harsh environment to sample,” said Rob Holman, a coastal scientist at Oregon State University. “It’s right there and it’s accessible, but it’s one of the harshest.”
Dr. Inman and his students repeatedly had instruments wash away; instruments robust enough to survive the surf often interfered with the very waves, currents, and sand movements the researchers were trying to measure.
He became an early user of scuba equipment, and made what is believed to have been the first dive in a submersible craft into narrow Scripps Canyon, off the coast of La Jolla.
The plate tectonics theory was still controversial when Dr. Inman began his career. Until then, research on the geology and physical processes of the nearshore concentrated on the measurement and prediction of waves, based largely on typical wind direction and strength, and on the distance the wind blew over open water before reaching land.
Dr. Inman theorized that plate tectonics could help explain differences between the bluff-backed beaches and narrow continental shelf of the West Coast, where the Pacific Plate is sliding under North America, and those of the less seismically active East Coast, with its flat beaches.
Dr. Holman said Dr. Inman’s work integrating the theory with coastal processes created “the global context that would explain why these beaches would look so different.”
His work on littoral cells began with observations of the coast near La Jolla. He noted that sediment moved into the nearshore at Dana Point and was carried by longshore currents that moved south, often eroding beaches as they went. Eventually the sand reached Scripps Canyon, where it fell into the abyss.
“He was not the first person to notice that beaches eroded,” Dr. Guza said. “But Doug actually measured the waves; waves this big caused this much erosion. This was a quantitative approach that was unique at the time.”
Today the littoral cell concept is key to research on how beaches gain and lose sand and is crucial for the beach nourishment projects, common on American coastlines, that replace sand on eroded beaches. “It puts some sense into sand budgets,” Dr. Guza said. “Where does sand come from? Where does it go? Inman really formalized that idea.”
Dr. Inman’s survivors include his wife, Patricia Masters, a marine archaeologist; their son, Bryce; and two sons from his marriage to his first wife, Ruth, who died in 1978, John and Scott. Another son, Mark, died in 1975.
Dr. Inman’s scientific descendants are “a huge number of people who ended up very influential,” Dr. Holman said. “He had high expectations and very high standards. He was the guiding light of that time.”
Perhaps because in his early professional life there were few ways to obtain hard data about what was going on in the surf zone, Dr. Inman developed “his sort of intuition of how things were,” Dr. Guza said. “He turned out to be right more often than was even reasonable. He had the best physical intuition of any person I have ever met about the ocean."

Scripps Pier: