I remember Dan for his heart, which was the size of a house, and his ego, which
was the size of a rice grain. Dan contributed big ideas to volcano deformation
and has not been widely recognized for those contributions; he worked
unbelievably hard, driven by the joy he had for volcanoes and volcano
geophysics, but unencumbered by the ambition that drives many of the rest of
us. He has been an absolute joy to work with in the field, a true companero.
The stuff we are doing in the Galapagos is indescribably hard, and Dan has
thrived under those conditions. I will never forget the night that Mike Poland
and I were caught out on the summit of Fernandina, and Dan came around the
caldera with blankets and water for us, hiking by headlamp, despite the
exhausting day he had suffered. It says a lot that he has always been the most
popular person among the locals we have worked with. I loved taking students in
the field with Dan, them engrossed with his repertoire of field stories,
including buried and unburied underwear, hiking with live chickens, and
reference frames for the whole earth. He has provided a mantra that has driven
me for the past 5 years: "I choose not to worry about that right now".
Dennis Geist
Department Chair and Professor of Volcanology and Petrology
Department of Geological Sciences
University of Idaho
Moscow ID 83844 USA
I met Dan on a 7-week cruise
in the cnetral Atlantic in 1992, while he worked with the HMR1 (that's a
seafloor survey instrument) group from HIG (Hawaii Insitute of Geophysics)
abourd R?V Maurice Ewing and I worked at Scripps Institution of Oceanography;
of course there are many memories to be shared of such long cruises;
last i saw Dan at a Unavco meeting. There is memories of long conversations on
a number of topics, which were always good ones.
my thoughts go his wife (who i dont know) - God with her.
Ute Herzfeld
University of Colorado Boulder
am shocked and very saddened to hear of Dan Johnson's death. I
didn't know Tony Qamar, but I can imagine the two of them engaged in
conversation, enjoying the scenery of the Olympic Peninsula up until
the last moment. My heart goes out to Dan's family, and Tony's, too.
I think I first met Dan in 1984 at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory,
then got to know him better when we both worked for Hawaii Mapping
Research Group at the University of Hawaii during the 1990s. I always
enjoyed his company on the long research expeditions and often traveled
with him before or after cruises. His good humor and lightheartedness
were infectious, just what I and others needed at sea. He was a great
traveling companion - always prepared, never complaining or demanding,
had good ideas on where to go and solutions to problems if we got into
D
n 1992-1993, Dan was dating Eileen, whom he later married, and I was
dating Rick, whom I later married, and sometimes we would take a break
from data processing and talk about how to know when you've found the
right mate. We agreed that a good idea for a date was to go on a hike
rather than dinner and a movie, and when you want to give them a good
test, take them camping. Extra bonus if they like volcanoes and
traveling.
Once at sea he played a practical joke on me. He set up the UNIX
command "mail" to display a text file of about 20 email headers that he
edited with my friends' names on them, asked if I wanted to check
email, then watched my reaction as I saw what looked like a jackpot of
messages I got that morning. His practical jokes were like his
personality - fun, uplifting, and a good laugh for everyone involved.
I'm attaching a photo of Dan
with Joel Erickson, Lisa Petersen and
Charley Weiland taken on a magnificent day in Torres del Paine national
park, Chile, on 15 Dec 1992.
Thanks for all the fun times, Dan. Fond memories always.
Lisa Petersen
Owings, Maryland
Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 17:59:10 -0700
From: Bill Chadwick
To: Al Eggers
Remembrance of Dan Johnson October 7, 2005
I first met Dan in the summer of 1981 at Mount St. Helens. He, Kathy
Cashman, Harry Glicken, and I were among the young geology students who
were drawn to the volcano after its 1980 eruption to get involved in
whatever way we could. We called CVO the "University of Mount St.
Helens", because many of us got our first experience working on an
active volcano there. We were a very close-knit group in an intensely
exciting and rewarding environment. Later Dan and I happened to visit
Kilauea in January 1983 with Christina Heliker when the Pu'u O'o
eruption first started, and we were all struck with "red-rock fever" and
hopelessly hooked after that. Later that same year, Dan was an
inadvertent matchmaker for my wife Teresa and I. We each knew Dan
separately and he told us to look each other up when we started graduate
school at UC Santa Barbara. More recently, Dan had been collaborating
with Dennis Geist and I on combined GPS and gravity studies on active
Galapagos volcanoes. That project perfectly highlighted his skills in
volcano geodesy and geophysics. Dan loved international fieldwork
because it inevitably provided more crazy experiences to add to his
collection of outrageous tales.
Dan was famous for his quirky sense of humor and for his skill at flying
under the radar ahead of any potential trouble. When hand-carrying
gravimeters down to the Galapagos Islands he would tell the Ecuadorian
customs officials that they were just gizmos that he had made in his
garage at home, to assure them that they were hardly important and
nothing to be concerned about. Dan delighted in being unpredictable.
In a restaurant, instead of just ordering a hamburger and a coke, he
would order a "ground bovine unit and a sugary soda". The poor waitress
usually looked to the rest of us with a perplexed expression on her
face, as if to say "what?!". Dan had a love and devotion to all things
volcanic, a natural curiosity that fueled his scientific pursuits, and
an amazing attention to detail that ensured the quality of his science
results. In the field, Dan was dedicated to doing whatever it took to
get the job done, even if it meant hiking an extra 5 miles to get that
extra gravity reading. Above all, he loved what he did. There was
never any doubt that he had chosen the right career. He loved being in
the field on active volcanoes. It's where he found the most joy in
being alive. And even when things went wrong or got tough, he never
despaired because he knew it was going to make another great story.
--------
I've put 20 photos of Dan on my ftp site:
ftp://newportftp.pmel.noaa.gov/pub/chadwick/DJ/
Thanks for putting this together.
-Bill Chadwick
What terrible news this is. Especially for someone so energetic and
fun-loving. It seems only a few years ago that DJ and I were grad
students together, even though it was actually 20 years ago.
I've attached a couple of photos taken during the May 1998 Galapagos
Penrose conference. Photo 1 shows DJ and John Sinton admiring a weird
2-person bicycle in Puerto Ayora, the main town. Photo 2 is DJ on the
rim of the Sierra Negra caldera during a conference hike. In the
background is talus at the base of the strange, sinuous ridge in the
caldera (actually the upthrown part of a trapdoor fault). It is that
very feature that DJ was working with the U. Idaho folks to understand.
I remember standing next to DJ in the open back of a pickup truck
driving up the slope of Sierra Negra to start that hike. The truck was
overloaded with ~20 or so of us gringo scientists, and we were weaving
all over the road. It was quite scary because it was just a narrow dirt
road with either a ditch or 'a'a flows on either side. DJ finally had
enough and pounded on the truck's cab to complain. It turned out that
the driver had only learned to drive the previous week! He, being a
male Galapaguen~o, was incensed that we threatened to get out and walk
unless the female cruise-boat guide drove the truck instead. DJ maybe
saved all of our lives that day.
Sincerely,
Scott Rowland