FEDOROV, KONSTANTIN NIKOLAYEVICH

(b. Leningrad, Russia, 17 December 1927; d. Moscow, Russia, 21 September 1988),

physical oceanography, oceanology.

Fedorov was a leading Soviet physical oceanographer (Russians use the term oceanologist) who took part in a number of major expeditions and contributed to the growing field of micro-oceanography and the study of oceanic fronts. He also became known to scientists outside of the Soviet Union through his leadership role in the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, and his presidency of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research. Fedorov led much of the Russian work on satellite oceanography and used satellite images of floating ice to identify major eddy patterns in the ocean.

Background and Training . Fedorov’s parents both took an interest in science and technology, and he probably inherited his gift for languages from his maternal grandfather. His father, Nikolai Fedorov, was an electrical engineer. His mother, Aleksandra Konstantinovna Fedorova-Grot, became a leading historian of physiology. She was the daughter of Iakov Karl Grot, a renowned philologist who had written the standard textbook on the Russian language prior to the Bolshevik Revolution.

Fedorov’s teenage years coincided with World War II. He was evacuated to Kirov Oblast, and he planned to work in aviation. He enrolled in the Kazan Aviation Technicum in 1943, and after the war he pursued these studies closer to home at the Leningrad Aviation Instruments Technicum. During these years he took an interest in the scientific aspects of aviation, including meteorology, and soon moved to hydrometeorology. After studying oceanological engineering at the Leningrad Advanced Naval School of the Arctic for several years, in 1953 he joined the graduate program at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology. Established in 1941, this institute was part of the USSR Academy of Sciences and had developed from Russian studies of Arctic oceanic conditions. It was named for its first director, P. P. Shirshov, who died the same year that Fedorov became a graduate student.

At the Shirshov Institute, Fedorov was able to take part in some of the Soviet Union’s most important oceanographic expeditions. During the International Geophysical Year of 1957–1958, for example, Fedorov was part of the Vityaz’s scientific crew. In 1959, he took part in the Akademik S. Vavilov’s scientific cruise in the Mediterranean.

Vladimir B. Shtokman, Fedorov’s mentor at the institute, had a lasting impact on Fedorov’s scientific life. One of Shtokman’s goals was to transform physical oceanography from a descriptive exercise to an analytical and mathematical one, to make it more of an exact discipline and a worthy subset of geophysics. Colleagues later recalled how Fedorov implored others to ask questions of the ocean, rather than just describe its properties, an attitude that perhaps came from Shtokman (later it would be reinforced by American colleague Roger Revelle, who argued along similar lines in international meetings). Shtokman trained several of Soviet oceanography’s leading figures, including Fedorov, who wrote a candidate dissertation that integrated some of the theoretical ideas of ocean currents with practical applications. This work won him a prize from the academy’s Presidium, and he soon won an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to study with oceanographers in England (1958–1959).

Years at UNESCO . Fedorov began a longer stint under UNESCO when it created the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in 1960. Designed to organize and manage international scientific cooperation, the IOC tried to blend scientific expertise with intergovernmental politics. The IOC’s first secretary was an American, Warren Wooster, and Fedorov became deputy secretary. Although Wooster and Fedorov had a good working relationship, the IOC’s early years were marred by political sparring and competing scientific programs, particularly between American and Soviet delegations. These were tense years for the United States, the Soviet Union, and the world, with many geopolitical crises that undoubtedly strained relations between colleagues in international settings. It was a difficult period for Fedorov, whose scientific attitude about asking questions of the sea occasionally did not fit with his own delegation’s proposals. Oceanographers from the United States and Britain criticized Soviet proposals as too descriptive and huge in scope, evidence that they paid more attention to size than scientific substance. Fedorov and others believed that this was a natural result of the IOC’s policy of asking nations for proposals rather than asking oceanographers to agree on the scientific merits beforehand.

Fedorov became the IOC’s secretary in 1963, which automatically made him the director of UNESCO’s Office of Oceanography, raising his stature and responsibilities in the organization. He helped to coordinate international projects in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the tropical Atlantic, and on the Kuroshio Current in the Pacific, to name just a few. The stakes were very high for the Soviet Union, politically and scientifically, because oceanography was one of the few areas in which scientists were cooperating across national lines on specific projects. Fedorov also helped to organize the Second International Oceanographic Congress, which was held in Moscow in 1966. This was no easy task, as there were a number of political conflicts about UNESCO’s role in convening or organizing such a congress with the Soviet Union as a host state, because the Soviet government refused to follow UNESCO’s own standards, especially in areas of language interpretation and visas for participants. Still, Fedorov tried to ease the relationship between UNESCO and the Soviet organizers, though he could not have single-handedly erased the many political problems of the time. At the closing ceremony, Fedorov addressed his fellow scientists and said that he personally believed there were more ways to cooperate between nations than by launching large-scale surveys. Perhaps this reassured scientists in the West who criticized the Soviets’ emphasis on descriptive oceanography, but it also reflected his longstanding belief that scientists should ask questions of the sea rather than only gather data.

Thermohaline Finestructures . Despite his obvious standing in international oceanographic circles, Fedorov had yet to establish his scientific reputation. In fact, he still did not have his doctorate in oceanology. But in 1965, he took part in an expedition aboard the American ship Atlantis II, which resulted in some collaborative work in the Indian Ocean with the eminent American physical oceanographer Henry Stommel. It was an opportune time for Fedorov to work with a leading western scientist, because the International Indian Ocean Expedition was in its final stages, and the whole project was coordinated by Fedorov’s office at the IOC. This expedition brought the world’s oceanographers to the Indian Ocean to do research to help the surrounding countries developing their fishing industries and scientific capabilities. Stommel was best known for his work on ocean circulation and the interaction of water masses. Together, Fedorov and Stommel began to work on the dynamics of the ocean in a different way, by focusing on much smaller water structures.

In describing the genesis of this research, Fedorov blamed the reversing thermometer, a standard oceano-graphic instrument invented in the 1870s by Henry (Enrico) Negretti and Joseph Warren Zambra, for contributing to the conservative ideas about the ocean’s structure. Although this instrument revolutionized the study of the seas by allowing the study of temperature in deep water, it had some drawbacks. In particular, Fedorov claimed, it gave the illusion of a smooth transition to colder water at greater depths, without abrupt changes in temperature. Not only was this idea incorrect, Fedorov pointed out, but its wide acceptance among oceanographers gave a misleading impression of the rate of mixing in the ocean. Newer instruments coming into use at mid-century, especially Athelstan Spilhaus’s bathythermo-graph, allowed for continuous or high sampling rates, and gave a different picture—the ocean consisted of distinct layers characterized by differences in temperature, salinity, and other properties. Fedorov and Stommel argued that the ocean was stratified to an extraordinary extent, with thin yet distinct thermal layers.

Fedorov built upon this work and conducted further observations when he finished his work at the IOC and could return to the Soviet Union. He used the first Soviet-manufactured STD (salinity, temperature, density) probes to continue the work begun with Stommel. This resulted finally in his doctoral dissertation, defended in 1973.

The eventual acceptance of this new view of the ocean’s structure, Fedorov readily admitted, owed a great deal to the desire to achieve specific objectives. For example, the layering of the ocean disrupted the effectiveness of sound transmission underwater, so the navies in the United States and Soviet Union had every reason to try to understand these structures. Previously heterogenous masses of water were considered instrument errors, not indicators of changes in structure. Now it became a major field, sometimes called micro-oceanography, or oceanic microstructure. The very thin layers that occupied Fedorov’s attention were called fine stratification, or finestructure. In 1978, Fedorov published a book emphasizing the role of this arrangement of the ocean, called thermohaline finestructure, synthesizing his own work and the contributions of other oceanographers such as Carl Eckart, Kurt Kalle, and Leslie Hugh Norman Cooper.

Space Oceanology . It was a testament to Fedorov’s international reputation that in 1974, the year after he received his doctorate, he became the head of the Shirshov Institute’s laboratory on mesoscale hydrophysics. He also continued to be active in international projects; for example, he went to sea aboard the Akademik Kurchatov as part of the Soviet Union’s contribution to the U.S.-Soviet Polymode program in 1977 and 1978. This collaborative project was designed to study mesoscale dynamics at sea, particularly large (50–100 kilometers) eddies. He remained in his post at the Shirshov Institute until 1979, when he took on the chairmanship of a new unit devoted to using space satellites in oceanology: the Department of Experimental and Space Oceanology. By the early 1970s, oceanographers in several countries had begun to use satellites to take synoptic data. This term referred to observations in several different areas at once, and it was the long-standing yet unrealized dream in every international cooperative investigation. Satellite data complemented more detailed information from shipboard work (like water sampling) and provided expansive portraits of the oceans from space, using both visual information and remote measurements of wave heights. Like many leading oceanographers, Fedorov and others at the Shirshov Institute tried to make the most of the new technology, beginning the entirely new field of space oceanology.

One of the results of this reorientation towards remote sensing was Fedorov’s discovery of eddy dipoles. A satellite managed by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Meteor 30, provided the crucial data. Images of the Sea of Okhotsk showed ice floating in a distinct mushroom-shaped pattern. Fedorov, who viewed the ice fragments as tracers to help identify current patterns, interpreted these shapes as evidence of a special kind of whirlpool effect (oceanographers called whirlpools eddies, or ocean vortices). In a paper with Anna I. Ginzburg, Fedorov likened them to the shapes of mushrooms and naturally enough called them “mushroom-like currents.” They reasoned that the water from a current, when interacting with another current moving in a different direction, might be deflected to each side, resulting in two vortices of water on the current’s flanks. The vortex dipoles, or eddy dipoles, as the phenomena were called, looked like the stem of a mushroom (the current) billowing out into a mushroom cap (the twin vortices). In the Soviet Union these phenomena sometimes were called Fedorov structures.

Later Years . In the 1980s, Fedorov turned his attention more fully toward oceanic fronts and climate change. Oceanic fronts seemed to hold the key to understanding many of the ocean’s major processes. His previous work on finestructure emphasized the existence of small-scale structures defined by differences in temperature and salinity (or other properties), and the boundaries separating these structures (whether small-scale or large-scale) were called fronts. Just as atmospheric fronts created dynamic and turbulent meteorological conditions, oceanic fronts contributed to the major physical processes in the oceans, albeit on a slower time scale. Fedorov made oceanic fronts a major priority for Soviet oceanographic research in the 1980s, and he published a book on the subject. He also conducted research on the effects of El Niño in the early 1980s, helping to promote study on the role of the oceans in climate change.

His final major project was his edited volume with Anna I. Ginzburg, his colleague and spouse, on the near-surface layer of the ocean. The premise of this book was to analyze the relationships between surface activities and the deeper circulatory processes in the oceans. During these years Fedorov also remained involved in international matters. Between 1976 and 1980, he was the president of the Scientific Committee for Oceanic Research (SCOR), an advisory body for the IOC that was composed of leading scientists from all over the world, and he continued his involvement with that organization in the 1980s. In 1987, he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and around the same time he became the deputy director of the Shirshov Institute. He trained many leading researchers in the Soviet Union and taught courses on finestructure and space oceanology at Moscow University in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps in these years he found more time to pursue his other interests, such as poetry and woodcarving, though Anna Ginzburg wrote that he really only pursued these side interests during the long hours spent at sea.

Ten years after he died in 1988, Fedorov’s former colleagues organized an international symposium on oceanic fronts in his honor, drawing together scientists from over twenty countries. Perhaps this was testimony that Fedorov’s involvement in international activities helped to bring global attention to his scientific work and to the marine sciences in the Soviet Union. Certainly he was one of a very few Russian oceanologists whose names and reputations were known outside the Soviet Union, and his books and articles (translated) were widely cited in the oceanographic literature. And yet his research on finestructure, fronts, and physical oceanography in general was closely linked to naval operations and therefore to the strategic interests of the Soviet Union. As an administrator in international organizations, he spent years walking the fine line between serving the interests of his nation and the interests of UNESCO, making his career a remarkable blend of science, politics, and international cooperation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY FEDOROV

With Henry Stommel. “Small-Scale Structure in Temperature and Salinity near Timor and Mindanao.” Tellus 19 (1967): 306–325.

The Thermohaline Finestructure of the Ocean. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1978.

The Physical Nature and Structure of Oceanic Fronts. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983.

With Anna I. Ginzburg. “‘Mushroom-Like’ Currents (Vortex Dipoles) in the Ocean and in a Laboratory Tank.” Annales Geophysicae 4 (1986): 507–516.

With Anna I. Ginzburg. The Near-Surface Layer of the Ocean. Utrecht, Netherlands: VSP, 1992.

OTHER SOURCES

Ginzburg, Anna I., and A. Zatsepin. “Konstantin N. Fedorov (1927–1988): Contributions to Physical Oceanography and International Cooperation.” Paper presented at the International Congress on the History of Oceanography, Kaliningrad, Russia, 8–12 September, 2003. Available from http://vitiaz.ru/congress/en/thesis/.

Hamblin, Jacob Darwin. Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.

“Konstantin Nikolayevich Fedorov.” Oceanology 28, no. 6 (1988): 806–807.

Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. Records. UNESCO Archives, Paris, France.

Jacob Darwin Hamblin