Ben Oostdam's Autobiography: 1960-1963

page 24

Fall, 1961

The first semester of the 1961-2 academic year I took these courses:

• Marine Micropaleontology
  with F.B. Phleger for Foraminifera, W.R. Riedel for Radiolarians,
  T. Kanaya for Diatoms, and M.N. Bramlette for Coccolithophorida
  
  
• Petrology of Sediments
  with Tjeerd H. van Andel - a fellow Dutchman
  
  
• Oceanographic Research
  with D.L. Inman; this was the first of 2 semesters (the next was fall, 1962) which resulted in my Ph D proposal on November 3, 1962, followed by "Some Quantitative Aspects of Reef-Growth and Formation of Reef-Sediments on the Hawaiian Islands", December, 1962
  
  
• Seminar in Oceanography and Earth Sciences
  
  
• Problems of Marine Geology
  for which I did a presentation and paper on "Origin of Ocean Basins",
  on October 4, 1961, with Dr. Robert S. Dietz of NEL as "Conference leader"
  In my paper, I included :
  

  (A) catastrophic events : (1) extraction of the moon from the Pacific Basin (G. Darwin) - with which Dietz was unfamiliar (2) asteroid impact (Dietz ipse)

  (B) various evolutionary types of origin, including Seafloor Spreading (then credited to Dietz who later admitted having coined the name for what was Harry Hess' idea) which explained a lot but against which I offered: " no evidence of absence of sediments near divergence or increasing thickness towards convergence; what happens at foot of continental slope?"