John Diebold of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia university passed away the night before last. He was a pioneer of marine seismic reflection data acquisition, working with compressed air sounds sources back in the 1960s. He was also an interesting and nice person, and he was part of our group working on the North Anatolian fault offshore Istanbul. See his web site (linked). He also volunteered for our Rapid Response cruise after the Haiti earthquake. Heartland Wife (HW) read his papers (with Peter Buhl) when she worked for Royal Dutch Shell research in the mid 1980s. Of course, he has been in numerous projects that I had no involvement in; just his name on a proposal lent it some additional credibility. He said he spent over 5 years total at sea. I think that includes the old Lamont sailing ship Vema. He was on the Conrad when it rolled about 55 degrees.

I suppose a nice way to remember John is for the BBQ (cookout) in his back yard in Nyack New York at the end of May last year. Lamont was hosting 3 Turkish grad students and postdoc for a couple of months, I had hosted a 4th one who was then at Lamont, and about 4 professors came from Turkey for a few days of working sessions.

John gave a Turkish Ph.D student one of his guitars (as a gift, not just for the evening), and they played music together and separately. It was really a wonderful, memorable evening. John was part of the reason that there seems to be a lot of good will in our ongoing international collaboration with 2 Turkish universities.

Chris Sorlien AKA Heartland Chris

• Diebold web site