On 29 October 1957, word was received of the death of Dick Hubley while leading the International Geophysical Year glaciological programme on McCall Glacier, Brooks Range, Alaska.
Richard Hubley was born on 1 June 1926, in Tacoma, Washington, and received his early education in the schools of the Seattle-Tacoma area. He entered the University of Washington in 1946 and was graduated with a B.S. degree in 1950. Having developed an early interest in the high mountains of western Washington, he became fascinated by their natural characteristics and especially by the glaciers that adorn their slopes. Returning to the University of Washington he received his Master’s degree in meteorology in 1952. By this time Dick had recognized the significant relationship that exists between the various forms of snow and ice and climatic environment. By this time, too, his love of the high outdoors had become magnified, and much of his time was spent climbing and living among the glacier fastnesses of the Cascade Mountains and those of the Olympic Peninsula. There was thus engendered one of those natural affinities that lead some of us to combine an environmental preference with a professional career. He thereupon extended his graduate studies at the University of Washington in the field of micro-meteorology, and under the stimulating guidance of Phil E. Church and Franklin Badgley he was awarded the Ph.D. in 1957.
Although Dick’s consuming interest in glaciers embraced all facets of their scientific study, his own research led him more and more towards an understanding of the exchange of mass and thermal energy that takes place between a glacier and its meteorological environment and from such studies to seek the relationships that exist between fluctuations of the glacier and those of the regional climate.
In 1953 and 1954 Dick served as glaciologist of the Juneau Ice Field Research Project of the American Geographical Society and in the two succeeding years he received grants-in-aid from the Arctic Institute of North America to continue his pioneer work on the Blue Glacier of the Olympic Mountains. The fruits of this research were such that he was persuaded, somewhat against his will, to share in the planning and administrative phases of the U.S. program for the International Geophysical Year. As coordinator of the glaciological program of the USNC-IGY he encouraged the concept of conducting concurrent glaciological studies throughout a wide range of latitude and environment and it was as a result of his urgings that the McCall Glacier became an object of I.G.Y. study under his scientific direction.
Dick’s death has come at a time when he had assumed national—and even international—leadership in his chosen field. North American science has been slow in building a coterie of scientists in the field of glaciology. Of those we have, Dick Hubley was one of the most distinguished. Science can as ill afford his loss as can we who knew him as a companion in the office and among the high snows.
