Ivan Tolstoy dies at 99
Ivan Tolstoy began roaming the Earth early on, first as a stateless refugee from the Russian Revolution in Europe with his parents, then as an avid mountaineer and student of geology. He went on to help map key features of the Atlantic Ocean floor and elucidate how long-distance sound waves travel through the ocean and atmosphere. Tolstoy wrapped up his tour of the Scottish countryside on 18 February, just a few weeks before his 100th birthday. He died after a short illness, according to his family.
Ivan Tolstoy was born in exile on March 30, 1923, one of three children of Andre Tolstoy and Maria Shuvalova second child. His parents were the pinnacle of the Russian nobility. Maria Shuvalova’s father was governor of Moscow, and Andrei Tolstoy’s father was curator of the Hermitage Museum and master of ceremonies at the court of Tsar Nicholas II. The writer Leo Tolstoy was a relative, though only a cousin to Ivan seven or eight times apart.
During the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1923, the family lost their property and escaped from the Bolshevik army. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins have all left to join the expat community. Tolstoy’s parents transferred some of their wealth in the form of securities and valuables, and when Ivan was born they lived in a villa in the German resort town of Baden-Baden.
Ivan Tolstoy at home in Scotland, 2013, aged 90. (Ron Colbros)
They soon moved to the French Riviera, and then in 1929 to the Palace of Versailles on the outskirts of Paris. By that time, the money had already been spent. Tolstoy’s father held a series of administrative jobs at a bank, an insurance company and a furniture manufacturer. The family was well connected with other prominent social figures and Ivan attended private Russian, French and English schools in France and England.
At 13, his parents introduced him to Nikolas Nikolaievich Menschikoff, a prominent geologist living in Paris. Menschikoff became Tolstoy’s second father, sparking his fascination with rocks, discussing physics, and taking him on hikes through the Alps. By the age of 17, Tolstoy was an experienced long-distance hiker and climber, with his eyes on a career in earth sciences.
After witnessing the Nazi invasion of Paris in 1940, Tolstoy began studying mathematics at the university, but things took a turn for the worse. Food and fuel became scarce, Jewish neighbors were forced to wear yellow stars, and eventually people started disappearing. One of his cousins was killed by a misguided Allied bomb, and the Germans deported another cousin to labor in an munitions factory in the East. In 1944 Tolstoy decided to flee to Switzerland.
On his way to the mountainous border, he evaded German patrols using topographic maps and advice gleaned from friends with ties to the French Resistance. After crossing the border, Swiss authorities jailed him until a family friend in Switzerland got him released with loose parole supervision.
As many foreigners entered neutral Switzerland illegally from war-torn countries, many others were in the same boat, including American servicemen who had crashed their planes or escaped from German POW camps.
A few months later, Tolstoy met a Serbian officer who hatched a plan to smuggle Americans into France to rejoin their troops. One night they rowed two American pilots in a rickety dinghy 15 kilometers across Lake Geneva, nearly drowning in the process. This was the beginning of a routine operation; with the covert help of the US consulate, they eventually rescued about 50 Americans from the same route. The consulate pays per head.
After the liberation of France, Tolstoy returned to Paris, where he earned a degree in geology at the Sorbonne in 1945. In 1946, with the help of his American contacts, he sailed to New York to study geology at Columbia University. A summer research trip took him to the wild coast of southeastern Alaska, just the kind of wild place he loved to explore.However, when he met Columbia’s Morris Ewing, one of the most eminent oceanographers of the 20th century. Now on the cusp of the Cold War, and largely funded by the U.S. Navy, Ewing is systematically mapping the Atlantic seafloor and studying the propagation of sound waves in seawater. Ewing convinced Tolstoy to sign up.
Tolstoy boards the research ship atlantiscirca 1947, Mapping the Atlantic seafloor using echosounders. (Photographer unknown; courtesy of Maya Tolstoy)
At the time, little was known about ocean acoustics, and the seabed itself was vaguely understood. The existence of underwater mountains in the mid-Atlantic is known, but the picture is sketchy. Beginning in 1947, Tolstoy was assigned to operate a powerful new sonar device on a sail-driven research vessel. Sounders emit a constant screeching thud that reaches the bottom and bounces back; echo measurements accurate to hundredths of a second tell scientists depth and provide data for topographic mapping.
As Tolstoy described Vivid 2012 Autobiography, he was in awe of the boat as it navigated the blistering open seas, and terrified by the dramatic roll and pitch of the small boat, which at times tipped the boat 45 degrees. Years of repeated voyages by him and others mapped the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, now known to be part of a vast 40,000-mile underwater system of continuously volcanic activity—a then-emerging theory of plate tectonics The key to this theory basically governs geological processes in all regions of the earth.
It’s an exhilarating feeling to watch the echo sounder day and night, to watch the mountains rise to meet you, towering 2,000, 3,000 or even 4,000 meters above the ocean floor, and to know that you’re the first to see these giants man, you are discovering a whole new world,” Tolstoy wrote. In 1949, he and Ewing co-authored the first Contour map of the North Atlantic ocean floorShows mountains higher than the European Alps.
In 1947 Tolstoy married a Columbia University classmate and they had a daughter. He was granted US citizenship in 1948. In 1949, Ewing founded Columbia’s Lamont Geological Observatory (now Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory), Tolstoy would be one of the first alumni.
The following year, 1950 Tolstoy Published papers First systematic description of the so-called T-wave, a mysterious pulse of energy first observed hitting ocean shores in the 1920s. He demonstrated that it was a slow-moving sound produced by distant earthquakes, traveling at specific depths, and arriving after better-known, faster-traveling seismic waves. The description of T waves is still being studied today, not only for the understanding of natural phenomena, but also for the monitoring of nuclear explosions.
After Tolstoy received his doctorate. In 1951, the family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Tolstoy worked at the Standard Oil Company research laboratory. He hated the job, the flat plain, and what he believed to be widespread racism and gun worship. Six months later, his wife left him with their daughter.
Tolstoy (left) holds a scientific meeting with Maurice Ewing, founder of Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory, in the mid-1960s. (Photographer unknown; courtesy of Maya Tolstoy)
In 1953 he moved back to New York to work at the Hudson Laboratory on the outskirts of Columbia, run by the university’s physics department and funded by the Navy—in some sort of connection with the Ewing Lamont Geological Observatory, just across the Hudson River. Competitors to an extent. Here he experimented with the propagation of sound in the ocean and later in the atmosphere. In the 1960s, with funding from the Secret Military Advanced Research Projects Agency, he and colleagues built arrays of atmospheric sound sensors in suburban New York and New Jersey to detect distant nuclear tests by France, China, and possibly the Soviet Union. During these years Tolstoy began to write books, some of them technical texts and others aimed at the mass market.
In 1967, Columbia University invited him to serve as director of the Hudson Laboratory, which has more than 300 employees, and awarded him a tenured professorship. Baffling colleagues, he demurred. He later explained that he had no appetite to go head-to-head with Ewing for money and prestige and just wanted to continue his research.
Instead, he accepted a professorship at Florida State University. Now remarried and with two daughters, he vacationed with his family in Northern Maine and fell in love with it. FSU required him to teach only three months a year in Tallahassee; the rest, he was free to live and work as he pleased. The Tolstoy family purchased 50 acres in the woods of Maine and built a house.
By the early 1970s, Tolstoy was increasingly disillusioned with life in America, the Vietnam War, continued racial and political violence, and what he saw as rapacious consumerism and a corrupt political culture. Much of his extended family also immigrated to America and saw it as the Garden of Eden, but Tolstoy wanted his children to grow up seeing the wider world. In 1974, Tolstoy sold his Maine property and he accepted a professorship at the University of Leeds in England.
When they arrive, the promised professorship somehow evaporates into a three-year part-time appointment. With American bridges now burned, the family bought an old stone house in the Galloway countryside in south-west Scotland, set among old pastures and rocky hills. Tolstoy traveled to and from Leeds regularly and continued to write. Unsure of their livelihood and whether they would still be able to stay in the UK three years later, the family planted a garden, raised chickens and bought a goat, which they learned to milk. To earn extra cash, Tolstoy worked as a freelance tutor to students at the Open University in Scotland.
In 1977, almost running out of funds and about to move again when the UK granted them residency, they were rescued and Tolstoy was offered a one-year post at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California. Here he renewed his military connections and left with an 11-year contract that allowed him to conduct theoretical work on acoustics and wave theory in the comfort of Scotland and travel to international scientific conferences.
Through such gatherings, Tolstoy developed friendly relations with prominent Russian scientists who admired his work and his command of old-fashioned formal Russian. Several times they invited him to Russia for scientific lectures and trips.
The visit was bittersweet. He makes contact with a long-lost cousin, but learns that most of the rest of her family went missing during World War II. At the grave of his ancestor Mikhail Kutuzov, commander of the Russian army that ousted Napoleon in 1812, he felt a surge of pride — then reprimanded To boast in vain of the exploits of others.Seeing the well-preserved remains of Vladimir Lenin on display in a public hall next to the Kremlin, he wrote: “I thought, what a difference he made in our lives, like [I] Staring at the thin, shrunken figure. Cruel, merciless, a symbol of fear throughout my childhood. In a 1989 interview, when he was accurately quoted by a newspaper in eastern Siberia, he was delighted to say that one day national borders would cease to exist and human life would be much better.
Tolstoy retired from active research in 1990, but continued to publish scientific papers for the next 20-plus years. He has written six books. Along with his autobiography, these include two technical books on ocean acoustics and wave propagation, widely used from the 1960s to the 1980s; two booklets on the history of Earth science; and James Clerk Maxwell Biography of the 19th-century Scottish mathematician who pioneered the modern understanding of electricity, magnetism, and light. He completed a revised version of his autobiography a few months before his death, but it has not yet been published.
Tolstoy was married twice, to Marie-Louise Simon in 1947 and to Maggie Lugerhardt in 1964. Both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his companion of 32 years, Maureen Biggar, and his three daughters: Alexandra Tolstoymathematicians and acoustic scientists; Erin Tolstoyan astronomer who studies dwarf galaxies; and maya tolstoya marine geophysicist who studies deep-sea earthquakes; and a grandson.
