John Murray

John Murray enrolled at Edinburgh Medical School in 1864 but did not complete his studies and left to be a ship’s surgeon before graduating. He went on to become the ‘father of oceanography’.

John was born in Canada in 1841 to Scottish parents. At the age of 17 he moved to Stirling, Scotland to live with his grandfather and began his studies at Edinburgh Medical School in 1864. 

In 1868 he joined a whaling ship as the surgeon. During this time, he discovered his preference for studying the world’s oceans over medicine and went on to join the Challenger expedition as assistant scientist with Edinburgh professor of natural sciences, Charles Wyville Thomson. They embarked on a four-year tour of the deep oceans of the world and discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the existence of deep ocean trenches and observed how wind-blown Saharan sand changes the chemistry of deep ocean sediments.

In 1893, John addressed the Royal Geographical Society with a lecture entitled ‘The Renewal of Antarctic Exploration’. He presented a speculative map of what he proposed might be a continent, derived from soundings and dredgings, and called for the British Empire to lead the way in mapping the blanks. He also proposed that the Anglophone world follow the Germans and call this hypothetical continent ‘Antarctica’. From simple observations at sea, he deduced the polar plateau, its high-pressure weather systems and the volcanic range of mountains down one side. His paper inspired Scott’s Discovery expedition of 1901–4, which found exactly what Murray had expected it to.

John died in a car accident in 1914 and his buried in his local graveyard just outside South Queensferry.