High Up, Deep Down, Ice Cold: An Ocean Geologist Explores the World

Armchair readers of High Up, Rolling Sea, Deep Down, Ice Cold will imagine themselves intimate explorers of Earth's most remote and forbidding places. You'll travel in the company of Peter Vogt, an intrepid driven by his own nature to seek out extreme climates and locales. Vogt chased ice and climbed mountains and volcanoes on three continents before devoting himself to Earth's final frontier: the depths of the 71 percent of our planet that is ocean.

Following an unerring instinct for opportunity, he trained at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), Cal Tech and the University of Wisconsin, balancing physical science at its finest with the icy chill that always felt like home to him. As a student and ocean geologist, primarily for the Naval Research Laboratory, he voyaged from the Antarctic to the Arctic, transversing all of Earth's six oceans, seven continents, thirty-one subcontinents and far-flung islands.

The voyages you'll share with Vogt are far from the high luxury of 21st century ocean liners. With one exception, his teaching cruise along the equator on the Cunard Adventurer to see the June 30, 1973, total eclipse of the sun, he traveled rough on working ships fitted for exploration, enduring sea sickness, bad food and ribald equatorial initiations. Ships ranged from the 400-foot-Glomar Challenger to the tiny 25.5-foot-long Mir submersibles.

Most traveled the high seas, with the Glomar Challenger lowering four miles of pipe core into seafloor sediments. Mir descended three miles to the floor of the Molloy Deep, the Arctic Ocean's deepest spot. In the 145-foot US submarine NR-1, Vogt was part of a crew motoring along the ocean floor at 3,000 feet deep.

When ships couldn't do the job, Vogt switched to airplanes, zig-zagging over the Southern Hemisphere's night skies in the specially outfitted The Lockheed Constellation Paisano Dos (Lockheed NC-121K) to make land gravity measurements and monitor the reception of satellite navigation signals.

Over four decades, he traveled 10 tomes around Earth at the equator to see our planet and show it to us in this book and historic global map, The Dynamic Planet.

See you aboard High Up, Rolling Sea, Deep Down, Ice Cold.

Marine geoscientist Dr. Peter Vogt was educated at Caltech and the University of Wisconsin. Undergrad wanderlust led him to climb Mexico's high volcanoes, travel overland along the Andes, work for a mining company in the blistering Arizona desert, and get his first taste of oceanography on a Scripps Pacific expedition. As a new Wisconsin grad student, he first helped a professor in Antarctica (1962-3). Next year Vogt enlisted as research watch-stander on a seven-month Woods Hole expedition to the Indian Ocean, and collected thesis data on two icebreaker cruises (1965 and 1966, tailed or buzzed by the USSR)) to the European Arctic. Vogt's career as Navy civilian scientist spanned almost four decades: The Naval Oceanographic Office 1967-75 and 1975-2004 with the Naval Research Laboratory. Besides applied research, he participated in basic science research on many US vessels and some foreign ones (Norwegian, French, Soviet, and Russian). Most of the cruises investigated the bottom and sub-bottom of poorly known deep ocean venues: the North and South Atlantic, Arctic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.Some memorable deployments were on the US nuclear submarine NR-1 (1999), two 10-hour dives (1998) in the Russian MIR submersibles made famous in the Titanic movie, and a stint as Co-Chief Scientist on the Glomar Challenger (1975). In Calvert County, Maryland since 1969 with his wife Randi and sons, Vogt focused his avocational interests on local natural history, especially the Calvert Cliffs, and the effort to preserve natural and farm land from suburban sprawl. In retirement he has continued his woodcraft hobby (locally found wood) and writing. He holds a honorary doctorate from the University of Bergen (Norway).