Koci, Bruce R.
MADISON - Bruce Raymond Koci, age 63, passed away on Monday, Nov. 13, 2006, at the Don and Marilyn Anderson HospiceCare Center as a result of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Bruce was born on Jan. 10, 1943, in St. Paul, Minn., the son of Raymond Emil and Hazel Johanna (nee Bauman) Koci. Bruce married Ann Irene Guhman on Aug. 2, 1980, in Fayetteville, Ark. He received a degree in aeronautical engineering and a master's degree in wildlife ecology from the University of Minnesota. Bruce's travels in the far north began on canoe trips with St. Paul YMCA Camp Widjiwagan. After working several years as an aeronautical engineer, his love of the outdoors and travel to remote regions led him to spend the majority of his career designing ice drills and drilling ice. He was a member of teams that drilled in Peru, Bolivia, Tanzania (Kilimanjaro), Tibet, China, Greenland, Antarctica and Baffin Island. From 1977 to 1980 he was a member of the Ross Ice Shelf Project, Antarctica, that drilled the first access hole through the Ross Ice Shelf. During their 30 year partnership he and climatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State retrieved ice cores from the highest ice caps on earth whose layers record earth's past climate. Told that the Quelccaya Ice Cap at 18,600 feet in the Peruvian Andes was too high for human beings and that the technology did not exist to drill it, he went on to design a lightweight solar powered drill and drill a core to bedrock. It was the first (1983), core to bedrock from a high tropical ice cap. The OSU team went on to other firsts including the oldest (more than 700,000 years) ice core record from the Guliya Ice Cap in Tibet, China (1992), cores to bedrock on the earth's highest tropical mountain (Huascaran at 19,840 feet), highest mountain in Bolivia (Sajama at 21,500 feet) and the highest ice field ever drilled (Dasuopu Glacier in the Himalayas at 23,500 feet, 1997). The team's last tropical ice cores were from the three remaining ice fields on Mt. Kilimanjaro (19,200 feet) in 2000. He created the ICECUBE hot water drill now being used at the South Pole to construct the biggest neutrino detector ever built. Lonnie Thompson said the attributes that most distinguished Bruce were his loyalty, endurance, constancy, creative craftsmanship, disheveled wisdom and soft-spoken nature. There will be a Drop-In Celebration of Bruce's life on Tuesday, Nov, 21, 2006, from 7 p.m. until 8 p.m. at LUCKY'S BAR and GRILL, 1421 Regent Street, Madison. Memorials may be made to Bruce Koci Memorial Wood Canvas Canoe Fund, YMCA Camp Widjwagan, 2125 E. Hennepin Ave. Minneapolis MN 55413 or to Nature Conservancy of WI, 633 W. Main, Madison, WI 53703. Cress Funeral and Cremation Service 6021 University Ave. (608) 238-8406
Obituary from Madison Newspapers.com
To all friends of Bruce
I was deeply saddened to learn today of Bruce's passing. I've not seen him in nearly thirty years but hearing this news took me right back to the season we spent together on the Barnes Ice Cap in 1976. There is little I can add to what has been said on this page that anyone who was graced with the privilege of sharing even a small part of his life doesn't already know. But there is one anecdote I would like to share that has remained with me all these years.
It was our first day on the glacier, we had ridden some miles north to the previous years camp to dig out the snowmobiles buried last season. All was going rather smoothly until just as we had the machine out and were preparing to start it a storm blew in. Having never been quite this far north in a raging whiteout I became mildly concerned with my future. Bruce continued working, not seeming to bat an eye at our impending demise (he was without a doubt one of the coolest customers I've ever known) that is until the snow began to pile up and the machine we had labored so hard to retrieve wouldn't start. We tried and tried and nothing worked, finally Bruce gave it one last mighty pull on the starter...the rope snapped in his hand and Bruce lost it. What then began was the most eloquent rant I have ever heard to this day. He started with the combustion engine, technology in a general sense took a broadside, man's hubris, ice, the weather, the meaning of science, and finally to sum it all up, "the sonofabitch who invented the wheel."
We laughed all the way back through the whiteout to camp, Bruce leading the way because I was utterly lost. Never has rage found a better poet, or wild places a more gentle champion. I cherish his memory.
Scott Frost
Lonnie Thompson's summary
Bruce's polar projects--Pre-AMANDA
Bruce's non-polar projects with Lonnie, Ellen and the OSU ice core group
Lonnie Thompson
I wanted to be sure to send my condolences to the IceCube folks and to you personally on losing Bruce. He was a dear friend and an unique individual and I sense that you will miss him as much as I will. Please pass my regrets to the entire team. I am sure everyone who worked with Bruce will miss him terribly. His was an unrestrained creative imagination for which very little was considered impossible... a unique capacity rarely encountered in life. We'll have many occasions to recall him to mind in the coming years as work on IceCube and the DISC drill continues. I hope we will pause occasionally to reconsider yet again how much we owe to his unique intelligence and imagination.
Joan Fitzpatrick, USGS, Denver, CO
I just wanted to pass to you my condolences about the loss of your great friend and to give back to you one of the little pearls that rolled off his tongue like the never ending comments by Yogi Berra. Upon noting that for some odd reason the wind seemed to shift direction twice a day so that we often would walk both to the drill site and back to the dome with the wind behind us, Bruce once remarked "Some folks say 'May the wind be at your back'. We do something about it.". Many times since this comment has caused me to remember fondly those bitter walks and also helped me find silver/humorous linings in otherwise uncomfortable situations. I imagine you have a full repository of such pearls, but I thought you might like this one too.
Seth Danielson, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Bruce was probably my biggest contribution to glaciology, despite having taught the subject for many years, publishing a multitude of papers on the subject, and training half a dozen PhD students in it. Bruce called me one day in the early 1970s and asked about taking my course in glaciology. I warned him that it was not for the mathemetically challenged, and he said no problem. His work was typical Koci, a phrase you can readily appreciate. He dropped by my office at the end of the course and said, "That was a good course." I said, "What are you doing this summer?" and getting an encouraging response told him that if he got some training in small engine repair, he could go to Barnes Ice Cap with me. And that developed into a multi-year association in which he cut his teeth on drilling. He became a MS student under me, but it was clear that his talent was in seat-of-the-pants engineering and not in the more exacting scientific aspects. He applied to NSF to work in their drilling office. The then OPP director, whose name escapes me, asked me for my opinion, which I freely gave. Later the director told me that they never would have hired Bruce based on his hand scrawled resume, but that my recommendation had persuaded them, and the rest is history.
I learned a lot from Bruce, and he changed my life for the better in many ways.
Roger LeB. Hooke, Deer Isle, ME
I was very fond of Bruce, he was definitely one of a kind, 'they broke the mould' as they say. I remember many nights in the back of science chatting with Bruce about music while sipping a whisky or two. He used to show me his pictures of his travels around the world. Always drilling holes in crazy places. As well as his other skills, Bruce was an brilliant photographer. I told him he should publish his pics which were not just amazing scenery but moving pictures of sherpas and other native people in places most of us will never visit.
He also told a good yarn, I remember one story about a bunch of climbers high in the Himalayas who were in trouble, suffering from altitude sickness. Bruce was drilling on a glacier, spotted them and carried them to safety all without oxygen. He was a real tough guy and it is awful to think of someone so strong, struck down by cancer.
Simon Hart
It is with great sadness that I tell you that Bruce Koci --driller extraordinaire --passed away on Nov 13, 2006 after a heroic two-year battle with cancer. Francis Halzen remarked that three things made the IceCube experiment possible: The South Pole Station, the clarity of the deep south pole ice, and Bruce Koci. Bruce was involved with all the AMANDA holes, the 4 AMANDA-A boreholes and the 19 AMANDA-B boreholes. He made AMANDA work, and thus paved the way for the IceCube facility.
John Wiley, our chancellor at UW once remarked that IceCube is akin to some of the wonders of the world. The biggest neutrino detector ever built will be located at the South Pole. Stepping back from this, it does compare in some respects with the pyramids, hanging gardens, lighthouse at Alexandria, etc...and Bruce was one of the major architects.
Bruce was so modest in his pronouncements that we tend to forget that the present IceCube drill was purely the creation of Bruce Koci. Many people made wonderful contributed to the drill, but like the many who assisted in painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, we all knew that Bruce was the Michelangelo whose vision guided us there.
He deeply loved the AMANDA and IceCube projects, and the doing of good science. He was a taciturn man, who would only offer his advice up to the listener once, and you ignored it at your peril. When drill questions came up, the more experienced would always ask "What would Bruce do?" Second guessing Bruce and getting it right was an art form in itself. He was a wonderful intuitive man, and he will be profoundly missed.
I know that many of you that worked with Bruce must share this sense of loss that I feel.
With great respect and sadness, Regards, Bob Morse
This is horrible news - the world lost a legend. Is it possible to call the IceCube Drill the Koci Drill in his honor?
Steve Barwick
Bidding farewell to a great friend and colleague! I have thought a lot about those early days some 30 years ago when I first met Bruce and we began to talk about the potential for ice core drilling in the high mountain regions of the world. I am sure my life today would be much different if Bruce and I had not met and quite likely my career would have taken another path. In those early days there was no federal agency like the National Science Foundation that provided research funds to drill and analyze ice cores outside the Polar Regions. As importantly, there were no light weight ice core drills capable of being taken by pack animal or human to the Earth's highest peaks in order to recover ice cores. Our first proposals to drill in these areas were not well received and some reviewers simply wrote that the Quelccaya Ice Cap which sits at 18,600 ft in the Andes of Peru was too high for human beings and the technology did not exist to drill it.
Fortunately, Bruce did not believe that and in 1983 he completed a solar powered drill that we used to collect the first ice cores to bedrock from a high tropical ice cap. Quelccaya was just the beginning for Bruce and our team. With continued improvements to the technology we went on the drill the first ice cores from the Tibetan Plateau on the Dunde ice cap, China in 1987. A string of successes followed, including in 1992 the oldest ice core record, dating back more than 700,000 years, from the Guliya ice cap in the far western Kunlun (Tibet, China). We preserved to improve our technology and in 1993 we recovered cores to bedrock on the Earth's highest tropical mountain, Huascaràn (19,840 ft). In 1997 we had a marathon year. We successfully recovered cores to bedrock on Sajama, the highest mountain in Bolivia (21,500 ft) and then went to the Himalayas where we recovered ice cores to bedrock from the highest ice field ever drilled, the 23,500 ft high Dasuopu Glacier. The last tropical ice cores that Bruce and the OSU team recovered together were in 2000 when we drilled 6 cores from the three remaining ice fields on Kilimanjaro (19,200 ft) in Tanzania, Africa.
Bruce was an integral part of The Ohio State University ice core paleoclimate team for nearly 30 years, although he never resided in Columbus. Bruce Koci was indeed one-of-a-kind. The attributes that most distinguished Bruce were his loyalty, endurance, constancy, creative craftsmanship, disheveled wisdom and soft-spoken nature. He was as interested in the science as much as the engineering. He loved the wilderness and the mountains. I like to think that he has left on yet another expedition, a pioneer to some remote and beautiful part of the universe and in time we will all join him there.
Lonnie Thompson
I worked with him in the 70's during his days as an aeronautical engineer. He and I both worked for then Rosemount Engineering in Eden Prairie, MN. He was envied by those of us who wished they could follow along on his trips. One such trip was down the Mackenzie River and to the Arctic Ocean. His canoe, Girtie, tasted the salt water and he was hooked. He returned with a slide show to knock your socks off. Even then, he was nearly that of a professional photographer.
Another time he and his dog followed a flock of migrating Honkers from MN into the Dakotas and wasn't heard from for days.
He once marveled at how cold it must have gotten the night before to freeze a bottle of Canadian Club in his tent.
It was about this time when he and I began talking about electrically melting glacial cores; I then knew he was off on a new road in life. He went back to school never to return.
Such was Bruce, a never ending passion to spark his interest.
Bruce - I wondered why you came to mind last summer. We exchanged those few emails and reminisced a bit. I just read of your early death and now know why you came to mind. Farwell, Bruce, following seas.
Jon
The discoveries that Bruce Koci made along with Lonnie and Ellen Thompson from The Ohio State University and the teams of people that worked with them could be more important to our lives and our children's lives than those of anyone else in the world. But that depends on whether we are willing to hear the message-science and politics don't always agree. They are glacial geologists who recovered ice cores from glaciers all over the world, and from the polar ice caps. The cores reveal what gases were in the earths atmosphere in the past and their percentages. And by examining the oxygen isotopes in the ice you can tell what the temperatures were at different times in history. Bruce said their goal in the beginning was to learn more about weather history but soon realized that global warming was proceeding at an alarming rate, faster than at any time in the 700,000 years of history presented in their cores.
I asked Bruce once if he thought the current global warming is just another cycle in the history of the earths warming and cooling or was it happening as the direct result of human activity. He said the scientific community agrees that the current warming is our responsibility because it has progressed so rapidly over such a short time. "In simple terms global temperatures rise when the carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the air rise and they go down when CO2 levels drop. And man now puts most of the enhanced CO2 in the air."
Bruce's wife Ann says that there were two qualities that made Bruce special for his work. "When he was on the staff, Widji helped him to realize how much he loved the out-of-doors and nature and he wanted to work in those places. And he was a gifted engineer -especially "hands on" in the field." She adds that he had another gift, his hands rarely ever got cold.
Bruce developed ice-coring drills and joined expeditions to help with the coring. His 30 year partnership with Lonnie started in 1976. Lonnie wanted to take ice cores from the 18,000 foot high Quelccaya Ice Cap in the Andes of Peru near the equator. But funding sources thought it was too high for humans to work and the technology didn't exist to drill it. By 1983 Bruce along with the OSU team developed a solar powered drill that was light enough to carry that high and the first ice cores were collected from a high tropical ice cap.
Bruce and Lonnie worked together on several other ice coring projects together. They recovered the first ice cores from the Chinese Tibetan Plateau on the Dunde ice cap, in 1987. In 1992 they recovered the oldest ice core record, dating back more than 700,000 years, from the Guliya ice cap in western Kunlun (Tibet, China). In 1993 they took cores at 19,840 feet from the Earth's highest tropical mountain, Huascaràn in Peru. In 1997 they recovered cores to bedrock on Sajama, the highest mountain in Bolivia at 21,500 ft. And then they went to the Himalayas to take ice cores from the highest ice field ever drilled, the 23,500 foot high Dasuopu Glacier. Their last trip together was in 2000 to the 19,000 foot high ice fields of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania to take ice cores from the three remaining ice fields left on the mountain -the only cores ever taken in Africa. Working hard at elevations above 18,000 feet (referred to by mountain climbers as the "death zone") is an incredible feat all on its own.
In addition to high elevation expeditions, Bruce also made several trips to the artic and Antarctica. In 1980 he was a team member on the Ross Ice Shelf Project, Antarctica, drilling the first access hole through that shelf. He also made two trips with Ellen Thompson, one of them to the geographic center of Antarctica where the lowest temperatures on earth have been recorded. For his last project he invented the hot water drill for the ICECUBE project, being one of 3 people who brought this project, currently in progress, to fruition. It is located at the South Pole and will be the largest neutrino detector ever built (neutrinos are one of the building blocks of matter, having no mass or electrical charge).
Lonnie says that Bruce was an integral part of The Ohio State University ice core paleoclimate team for nearly 30 years, although he never resided in Columbus. "He was indeed one-of-a-kind. The attributes that most distinguished him were his loyalty, endurance, constancy, creative craftsmanship, disheveled wisdom and soft-spoken nature. He was as interested in the science as much as the engineering and he loved the wilderness and the mountains. He adds that Bruce frequently said "Nature bats last"—a simple way of saying that it really doesn't matter what any of us think, only what is!"
If you "Google" Bruce's name you will find 32,600 references to him and be transported to another world. I urge you to do it. You will learn about ice coring, weather history, global warming, searching for neutrinos in Antarctica, and more about his fascinating life.
Lonnie hopes to use the information they gathered to define how and where the processes that drives the Earth's great weather systems originates.
Bruce lost his battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma cancer on November 13, 2006. He visited some of the most beautiful and remote places on earth, enduring extreme elevations, winds, and temperatures. And now there are beautiful cliffs overlooking McMurdo Sound in Antarctica that bear his name.
Joe Nasvik