William Cromie, Gazette science writer, dies at 84
When William J. Cromie was 15, the call of the sea became too strong to resist. So he ran away from home to work on a freighter. That impulsive act began a lifetime quest for new places, people, and ideas. As a young man, it meant visiting the world’s oceans, followed by a Columbia University geology degree. It meant a 1,450-mile traverse of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf and having a peak in Antarctica’s Bush Mountains named for him. It meant spending months exploring the Arctic Ocean seafloor while drifting toward the North Pole in a lab built on a melting ice floe. The lifetime quest also meant eventually swapping the world of geology for that of journalism, publishing articles in magazines and newspapers across the United States, Canada, and Europe before taking an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship in the late 1980s. After that, he came to Harvard, in 1989. He spent...