posted on September 25, 2003 07:20:09 PM new
GOLD BEACH, Ore. (AP) - Jack R. Dymond, an oceanographer who helped discover exotic life forms subsisting in the cold, sunless depths at the bottom of the sea, drowned while fishing, a colleague said. He was 64.
The retired Oregon State University professor slipped Friday in the Rogue River and was pulled under, said Robert Collier, an oceanographer at the university.
In 1977, Dymond was a lead investigator on a research cruise at the Galapagos Rift west of Ecuador when he and other scientists spotted hydrothermal vents spewing warm, mineral-rich fluids from under the sea floor. To the scientists' amazement, they also found a community of tube worms, clams and other organisms living off the vents in the harsh, dark environment.
It was the first and essentially only ecosystem discovered on Earth that did not rely on the sun for energy, spawning a new field of research, Collier said.
Dymond traveled throughout the world in his research, visiting Russia's Lake Baikal, the Arabian Sea and the equatorial Pacific. He wrote nearly 100 scientific papers.
He was the first to explore the bottom of Oregon's Crater Lake, descending in a one-person submersible in 1988 and 1989.
In an article for The Oregonian in 1988 about the experience, Dymond wrote: ``Amidst the topographic grandeur and shockingly blue waters, I began to sense why this site has had such spiritual significance to Native Americans. ... I felt attuned to the significance of life and the uniqueness of our planet.''
Dymond was born in Bellevue, Ohio. He received a bachelor's degree in geology from Miami University in Ohio in 1961, and a doctorate from the University of California-San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1966.
He was a researcher at Columbia University before coming to OSU in 1969. He retired in 1997.
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If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
