Walter Adey, the son of Newfoundland immigrants with a long sea-going ancestry, was raised in the "jack-of-all-trades" culture of Depression/World War II-era exurban Boston. He spent his late teen years as a geophysics student at MIT, and for a graduating thesis constructed a cyclotron, adapted as a mass spectrograph for dating rocks. Drawn to his storied marine ancestry, as recounted by an ever supporting seaman turned carpenter Dad, he found a path to marine biology and geology through graduate years at MIT, Harvard and finally the University of Michigan, where he studied under a world famous phycologist.

In his compelling new memoir, "Skating on Thin Ice," Dr. Walter H. Adey reveals the "Sturm und Drang" behind a turbulent fifty-one-year career as a Research Scientist and Curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Far from a conventional academic memoir, the book explores a scientific and marine life lived at the margins of acceptability, where continual adaptation and hands-on ingenuity were essential for success. The title, "Skating on Thin Ice", draws from Adey's youth the Boston outer suburbs. Just as the first skaters on a frozen pond must move fast enough to stay ahead of the undulating waves of thin ice, Adey navigated his career by constantly maneuvering between academic establishment norms and his own rugged, inventive instincts.

An Unconventional Path to Discovery

Dr. Adey's journey is a masterclass in multidisciplinary thinking. His narrative follows a trajectory that is as daring as it is intellectual:

Throughout his career, he utilized SCUBA to study rocky shores from the Arctic to the tropics, from ice-bound shores to coral reefs. He utilized numerous research vessels as floating laboratories; critically the boats were “backyard-built” by himself, repurposed fishing boats or confiscated drug-running boats. With his newly formed Marine Systems Lab, the research vessels were manned entirely by student crews. During a pivotal coral reef decade, he used small aircraft and rock drills to newly uncover the geological and ecological secrets of those reefs; a newly refurbished, amphibious Grumman Albatross helped to cover great distances to previously unknown coral reefs..
 
With his numerous students, he established an on-reef laboratory to solve the long-standing mystery of high coral reef productivity in nutrient-poor seas. The resulting knowledge (ATS, algal turf scrubbing) was used to operate numerous experimental enclosed living ecosystems from coral reefs to cold rocky shores and from the Florida Everglades to Chesapeake Bay.
 
Utilizing his engineering background, Dr. Adey, with his many colleagues, turned the ATS process into water-cleansing systems that were applied at pilot scale to purify secondary sewage, chemical waste, and polluted rivers as well as maintain water quality in large scale fish aquaculture systems.
-In the late 20th century, he developed a mainframe computer-generated mathematical model that explained the distribution of coastal organisms, tying it to the climate fluctuating patterns of Pleistocene glaciation.
 
Late in his career, Dr. Adey utilized his last research vessel, the R/V Alca i, a three-masted motor schooner, to study a domed shaped coralline alga on the Labrador Coast. This organism had the potential to provide a tree-ring kind of archive of temperature, as well as other climate related information crucial to understanding global warming. Over three summers of field and laboratory research an ecological riddle was solved that would lead to millennial age Arctic environmental data.
 
In the synopsis, Dr. Adey reflects on his complex passage through life, analyzing the factors that led to such a fulfilling life in engineering and science. He puzzles why he was so fortunate to have had a lifetime of the joy of discovery and hoping that others might find similar meaning in their lives. He postulates that human society, writ large, would be a happier place with a deeper scientific knowledge more broadly embedded in our culture.