In Memoriam........................................................


     Cesare Emiliani, one of the seminal figures in isotope
geochemistry and paleoclimatology, died from a sudden heart attack
on July 20 in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.  He was closely
associated with Roger Revelle and many others during the
development of the JOIDES Deep-Sea Drilling Program, which grew out
of his original LOCO (LOng COres) project that drilled the first
long core (68 feet) into Pliocene sediments off Jamaica in 1963.
He was an early member of the University of Chicago "Geochemistry
Mafia" in Harold Urey's laboratory, where he took on himself the
application of Urey's studies of Cretaceous paleotemperatures to
the study of foraminifera in Pleistocene and Recent sediments.  He
arrived in Chicago in 1950, a classically-trained micro-paleon-
tologist (University of Bologna), and moved to the University of
Miami seven years later bearing the full-weight of Pleistocene
paleoclimatology on his shoulders, having created a major
revolution in the understanding of Late Cenozoic glacial cycles.

     Among his many contributions to the use of oxygen isotopes in
the fields of paleoecology and paleoclimatology, he made three
major discoveries.  First, he showed that the oxygen isotope cycles
in long sediment cores corresponded to the carbonate extrema
measured by G. Arrhenius, and proved that these cycles represented
glacial and interglacial periods.  This discovery was the death
knell of the then-classical picture of four major glacial cycles
during the Pleistocene epoch, and led ultimately to the knowledge
that there have been some 36 glaciations during the last three
million years of the Cenozoic era, extending far back before the
Plio-Pleistocene boundary.  Secondly, he demonstrated that these
glaciation periodicities corresponded to the calculated temperature
variations in the Milankovich cycle that had been deduced from the
orbital and precessional effects of the earth.  Thirdly, he showed
that the temperature of the deep ocean had decreased monotonically
from the Late Cretaceous to the present.  The discovery of the many
cycles of Plio-Pleistocene glaciation and their correlation with
the Milankovich cycle revolutionized the understanding of Cenozoic
climatic and glaciation cycles, and stands as one of the most
remarkable examples of the overturning of geological concepts based
on continental studies by new ideas developed from oceanographic
research.

     Cesare Emiliani was a true Renaissance scientist, at home in
classical literature, fluent in many languages, and a dedicated
opponent of dogma and mental rigidity wherever he found it.  He
received many honors during his career including, most recently,
the Alexander Agassiz Medal of the National Academy of Sciences.
In his later years he worked valiantly to introduce calendar reform
to eliminate the BC-AD chronology hiatus caused by the lack of a
Zero Year.  That this was a non-trivial pursuit is demonstrated by
his final publication (Nature 375, 530, 1995) in which he showed
that no less an authority that Pope John Paul II had himself erred
in defining the second and third millennia in his Apostolic Letter
proclaiming the Great Jubilee at the end of the second millennium.
"Sic transit gloria mundi", as Cesare would say.

H. Craig