Walter Heinrich Munk was an American physical oceanographer. He was a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla. Born to a prominent Austrian family, in 1932 Munk was sent to school in the United States at age 14. Abandoning a New York banking career, Munk obtained a scientific education at the California Institute of Technology and his doctorate from Scripps.
