THE month of March sees the anniversary of both the birth and death of Sir John Murray, the man who many see as the father of the science of oceanography, not least because he coined the word to describe the study of Earth’s oceans.

Though born in Canada, he was the son of Scots and saw himself as Scottish, spending most of his life here and becoming the creator of one of Scotland’s great national treasures, the Bathymetrical Survey of the Fresh-Water Lochs of Scotland, 1897-1909, which can be viewed online – including the beautiful maps – thanks to the National Library of Scotland.

Murray was born in Coburg in what is now Ontario on March 3, 1841, the second son of an accountant, Robert Murray, and his wife Elizabeth née Macfarlane who had emigrated from Scotland seven years beforehand. In 1858, at the age of 17, he returned to Scotland to live with his grandfather John Macfarlane – he would say in later years how much that voyage home across the Atlantic had influenced his future life.

He completed his education first at Stirling High School and then at Edinburgh University but left before graduating, though he did study enough medicine to be able to gain the post of ship’s surgeon aboard a whaling ship. He doubled as a naturalist, collecting samples from the Arctic seas before returning to Edinburgh University for more study under the likes of Professor of Geology Sir Archibald Geikie and Professor Peter Guthrie Tait, the renowned mathematician and physicist.

As I showed last week, he was recruited by Charles Wyville Thomson on the recommendation of Tait to become a naturalist on board HMS Challenger and he performed many of the scientific studies and sampling that made the three-year expedition such a huge global success. It was Murray who first posited the concept of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and also theorised that the oceans were full of trenches. It was his work on identifying these trenches that led him to the discovery that at the bottom of the Atlantic were sediment deposits that could only have come from the Sahara Desert.

Borrowing from a German word with similar meaning, Murray was the first to use the English word oceanography to described the study of the Earth’s oceans.

After the expedition, Thomson appointed Murray to be chief assistant at the Challenger Office in Edinburgh which was opened to collate all the huge masses of data and reports amassed by the Expedition. When Thomson died in 1882, Murray became editor of the overall series of reports on the Expedition which took him 20 years to complete and amounted to 50 volumes under the title The Report On The Scientific Results of the Voyage of HMS Challenger

His work brought him into contact with all the leading marine scientists of the day and gained him recognition and awards at home and abroad. He also became very wealthy as he had found a huge source of phosphates on Christmas Island which he persuaded the British Government to annexe and lease to him.

Murray made huge contributions to Scotland. In 1883, he opened the first marine laboratory at Granton on the Forth, and 10 years later it moved to Millport on Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde. It was a world-leading research establishment, and was the forerunner of today’s Scottish Association for Marine Science based at Dunstaffnage near Oban.

No sooner had he finished the Challenger report than he began the monumental task of surveying 562 freshwater lochs across the country – he had already researched many sea lochs in 1884. At first he was assisted by the talented meteorologist Frederick Pullar, but after both men had surveyed 15 lochs, tragedy struck at Airthrey Loch on February 15, 1901. Pullar was skating on the loch when the ice suddenly gave way. Pullar saved three people but lost his life along with a young woman he was trying to rescue.

Murray was heartbroken but Pullar’s father Laurence insisted that Murray complete the Survey and gave him £10,000 to do so. That meant he could employ up to 50 people to carry out the Survey, and described his method thus: “In all of the lochs serial temperatures are taken, collections of the plankton are made by means of silk tow-nets dragged through the water at various depths, deposits from different depths are obtained and preserved; observations on the colour and transparency of the water are made by means of submerged discs, the physical features of the land surrounding the lochs noted and photographs taken.”

With an assistant called Parsons, Murray witnessed the first recorded seiche (pronounced "saysh"), on the island of Great Britain. A seiche is a standing wave that occurs in bodies of water in response to changes in wind speed and atmospheric pressure. Murray described what he saw and examined in the entry for Loch Treig east of Fort William.

“I noticed that certain stones on the shore were covered and uncovered by the water with great regularity… Mr Parsons and I found that the amplitude of the seiche was nine-sixteenths of an inch and that the period was nine minutes.”

Knighted for his work, Murray continued to lead the ocean science he had helped to invent and found the time to marry his wife Isabel née Henderson and have five children, one of whom was his son John Challenger Murray.

Murray was killed at the age of 73 when his car overturned on a road between Kirkliston and Edinburgh on March 16, 1914, 108 years ago this week. He is buried along with his wife in Edinburgh’s Dean Cemetery. The granite headstone describes him simply as Sir John Murray, KCB, Oceanographer. Not many Scots, I would suggest, have a word they coined on their tombstone.