Emeritus Professor Ronald G. Mason (Physics 1938, MSc 1939)

Provided by Mrs Lesley Goble

Professor Ron Mason, MSc, PhD, ARCS, DIC - Emeritus Professor, Geophysics, Imperial College and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Professor Ronald George Mason, Emeritus Professor of Geophysics at Imperial College, died in hospital in London on 16 July, at the age of 92. He was born in Winsor, Hampshire, on 24 December 1916, but spent most of his early life in Eastbourne, Sussex, where he went to school and met his wife.

After leaving Eastbourne Grammar School, he attended London University. During the Second World War he worked with Army Signals Research - REME to improve the technical function of tanks and communication networks. His projects included finding a solution to the over-heating of tracks on vehicles.

He arranged for a rotating beam to send out a signal which was recorded to provide information on the position of tanks to prevent them getting lost in the North African desert. He also worked with a hearing aid firm to make a miniature radio that was inserted into the dart boards and shoveha'penny boards sent to prisoners of war. He also maintained an interest in investigating the effect of the tropical climate on equipment.

After the war Professor Mason graduated from Imperial College of Science and Technology with an MSc/Advanced Diploma in Applied Geophysics. In 1947 he was appointed Lecturer in Geophysics at Imperial College, under Professor J Bruckshaw.

During his lectureship at Imperial College, Professor Mason worked extensively in the United States with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Scripps sponsored a pioneering expedition to Fanning Island in the Pacific Ocean, led by Professor Mason. This two-year survey studied geomagnetic phenomena believed to be associated with the magnetic equator.

In 1952, Roger Revelle from Scripps invited Mason to join the Capricorn Expedition, an enterprise shared with the US Navy and Atomic Energy Commission, to study the ocean depths across 20,000 miles of the South Pacific. With the magnetometer that he had re-engineered towed behind the ship, Mason recorded more than 4000 miles of magnetic profiles which were used to produce a map showing the magnetic field of the sea floor. While on this expedition he also made detailed surveys of the Tonga Trench. In 1955 the Scripps researchers undertook a detailed survey off the Californian coast in what was the first attempt to make a detailed magnetic map of an extensive area of the oceans. The result of the survey, showing new features in the structure of the Earth discovered by Mason and Arthur Raff, was well publicized in the Geographical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In her book Exploring the Deep Pacific, Helen Raitt, who accompanied her husband Russ on the trip, described Mason as 'a lone wolf, working late at night when there is more space on which to spread out a twenty-three-foot-long record.'

As a result of this work Professor Mason was given the honorary appointment of Research Affiliate of the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Hawaii, which he visited frequently for research, usually during the summer vacations. He also became an Emeritus Professor.

Mason returned to Imperial College in 1962 but the magnetic programme continued under Victor Vacquier.

In 1964 Mason became Reader in Geophysics at Imperial College and, in 1967, he was appointed to the chair of Pure Geophysics.

Duncan Cowan worked with Mason for ten years from 1979 when Mason was Head of Geophysics at Imperial College. He described him as 'a quiet achiever who was only interested in doing good science and did not get involved in university politics'. Cowan acknowledged Mason's achievement in his early work on magnetic striping/sea floor spreading in the North-east Pacific. Mason was well respected for this work and colleagues such as Cowan and Sydney Hall spoke highly of his achievements.

During the 1980s, Mason and his students were very active in accurate distance measurements, investigating crustal movements of the Earth in Iceland, Mount Etna and the San Andreas Fault and subsidiary faults. Cowan recalls that, after one earthquake, 'Ron was on-site in California with his measuring equipment before USGS arrived from Menlo Park, just a few hundred kilometers north of the epicentre'.

Mason formally retired from Imperial College in 1984 but continued to work there as a Senior Research Fellow. In 2002 he received the Gold Certificate from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists after fifty years' contribution.

A keen cyclist and cross-country runner from his youth, he thought nothing of cycling from Sussex to Wookey Hole to undertake a project with students, or from Frant to Eastbourne and back for the day. He maintained his fitness for many years and enjoyed walking across Kensington Gardens to his office. He would invariably decline the offer of a lift and could tell, to the minute, how long the walk would take.

He was married for sixty years to Honor, to whom he was devoted, until her death in 2006.

A keen gardener, walker and traveller, Mason loved playing the role of devil's advocate and excelled in a good argument, hating it if anyone agreed with him.  Sydney Hall, with whom he shared an office at Imperial College, recalled that he loved an argument even on such mundane trifles as the price of goods at Sainsbury's.

Self-effacing and modest, he rarely spoke of his achievements.

He never accepted that his wife's last illness, or his own, was age-related. In his declining years, when ill health and poor eyesight made research impossible, he was interested in the potential link between their symptoms and radiation from their many years of high-altitude flying.