Melvin E. Stern

Melvin E. Stern was a physical oceanographer who developed a mathematical account of the instability now called salt fingering. His 1960 paper The Salt-Fountain and Thermohaline Convection by Melvin E. Stern explained how warm, saline water above cooler, fresher water can become unstable even when the combined density stratification is gravitationally stable.^[ref]

The decisive ingredient is that heat spreads by heat conduction much faster than salt spreads by diffusion. A displaced parcel can lose its temperature anomaly while retaining its salinity anomaly, changing the restoring or overturning density difference. Stern's paper made this into a stability problem and asked whether the resulting motions could matter for vertical ocean mixing. This connected small-scale molecular transport with a possible large-scale oceanographic consequence, while leaving its environmental importance as an observational question. He taught at Florida State University from 1987 to 2006.^[ref]

Portrait: Melvin Stern in the Florida State Times remembrance, page 11.