Charles Wyville Thomson: Oceanographer who discovered life at extreme depths

Born on March 5, 1830, Wyville Thomson, as he was always known, had just celebrated his 52nd birthday when he died on March 10, 1882. In a sense his life’s work was incomplete and had to be finished by others such as Sir John Murray who will be the subject of next Sunday’s Back in the Day, but Wyville Thomson had already accumulated vast amounts of data on the subject which had long fascinated him – the oceans and the life forms they contained. Some call him the father of oceanography, while others award that title to John Murray, though the Americans, probably correctly, ascribe that name to Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-73) who published The Physical Geography of the Sea in 1855.

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Wyville Thomson was born at Bonsyde in Linlithgow, the son of a surgeon, Andrew Thomson, and his wife Sarah Anne Drummond, née Smith. Educated at Merchiston Castle School, Wyville Thomson intended to follow his father into a career in medicine, Thomson senior having achieved a good position in the East India Company. Wyville Thomson graduated MD from Edinburgh University, but his interests had already turned to the natural sciences and he studied botany and zoology. He joined the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, now the Botanical Society of Scotland, in 1847. He also was secretary of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh, before moving to Aberdeen where he soon became Professor of Botany at the city’s university.

In 1853 he moved to Ireland, becoming Professor of Natural History at Queen’s College, Cork, before moving to Queen’s University, Belfast, as Professor of Mineralogy and Geology before he became the University’s Professor of Natural History. He maintained his links to Scotland, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1855.

He was turning more and more to zoology and by extension he moved into the study of the biology of the seas. He was not convinced by the claims of zoologist Edward Forbes from the Isle of Man that no life existed in the oceans below 300 fathoms (550m) and when Norwegian biologist Michael Sars proved that crinoids of the type known as sea lilies could be found at the bottom of Norwegian fjords, Thomson deduced that there might be forms of sea life at even greater depths.

As a distinguished professor Wyville Thomson was able to persuade the Royal Navy to lend him two ships, HMS Lightning and the paddle steamer HMS Porcupine so that he could carry out dredging operations in the seas off Scotland in 1868 and 1869. His findings were astonishing – Thomson proved that animal life existed to at least 650 fathoms (1200m) and that marine invertebrates were present in the sea at this extreme depth. Most importantly of all, he found the temperatures at the bottom of the sea were changeable and thus proved the theory of oceanic circulation, that all the Earth’s main oceans are interconnected.

Having become Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University in 1870, Thomson began to campaign for a British global expedition to make the biggest survey of the oceans in history, and succeeded when the Royal Society took up the cause. This was to become known as the Challenger expedition after the Royal Navy corvette HMS Challenger which conveyed Wyville Thomson and five other scientists including John Murray and Scottish chemist John Young Buchanan on their quest to survey elements of marine life. The heavily modified Challenger had three masts as well as a steam engine, and had 16 of her 18 guns removed to make way for the scientists’ equipment.

The Challenger sailed from Portsmouth on December 21, 1872, and headed south to Gibraltar and then back and forth across the Atlantic before moving to the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In a voyage lasting more than three years, the ship travelled more than 80,000 miles in circumnavigating the globe. The ship made 362 stops, took nearly 500 deep-sea soundings – the sounding on March 23, 1875 in the Pacific was the deepest ever made to that point at 4475 fathoms (8148m) – as well as 263 sea temperature measurements and recovering almost 4000 samples of sea creatures and vegetation before returning to England on May 24, 1876.

It took 19 years for all the data to be published and a special Challenger Office was established in Edinburgh to control the process. HMS Challenger under Thomson’s guidance had effectively established a whole new branch of marine science and samples from the expedition are still studied by scientists today.

The rewards for Wyville Thomson included a knighthood and numerous academic accolades as well as the Royal Medal of the Royal Society. His book The Depths of the Sea was published in 1873, and his Voyage of the Challenger in the Atlantic was a best-seller in 1877.

His health had been shattered by the voyage, however, and the extraordinary amount of work he undertook to collate all the information – it would eventually take 50 volumes to do so.

Wyville Thomson would not live to conclude that work as he died at his home in Linlithgow in 1882. He has a stained glass window in St Michael’s Church in the town where he was buried.

The Wyville Thomson Ridge in the Atlantic is named after him, and both the Challenger lunar module on the Apollo 17 mission to the Moon and the ill-fated Challenger shuttle were named after his magnificent expedition.