Farewell to a funny, brilliant scientist

Glenn Shaw died on Feb. 28, 2025, in Tucson, Arizona.

The atmospheric chemist was for years a scientist and professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. He was funny and irreverent and brilliant. Just seeing him approach down the hall you made you smile, because you knew you’d soon be laughing.

Following is an excerpt of a yet-to-be-published history of the Geophysical Institute. In it, I describe how Shaw’s interest in everything led to his solving a mystery that involved a strange northern form of air pollution.

In 1971, a 32-year old atmospheric scientist completed his Ph.D. in Tucson, Arizona. Director Keith Mather was impressed both with the presentation and the interview Glenn Shaw gave at the Geophysical Institute.

Mather called Shaw and reminded him of the recent Prudhoe Bay oil discovery and the wealth about to flow Alaska’s way. Shaw chose Alaska over other opportunities. His curiosity led to the discovery of the origins of a strange blob of pollution that visited the far north every spring.

Murray Mitchell was an Air Force officer stationed in Alaska who wrote a paper in 1956 on murky bands on the horizon noticed by pilots who flew over Alaska. He called it Arctic Haze.

Shortly after Shaw reported for his new job at the Geophysical Institute, a colleague from Australia called him and asked if he might go to Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), to observe the execution of a scientific mission.

Shaw said yes. For the first time in his life, he traveled north of the Arctic Circle on the 1.5-hour flight north from Fairbanks.

Shaw carried along a small sun photometer, something he used to measure the number of tiny particulates in the air. Having used the instrument many times in the clear air of Arizona, he thought he might be able to record a world record for air clarity around Barrow, a town of just a few hundred people on top of the world.

Walking just outside of Barrow, Shaw set up his photometer on a block of snow-covered sea ice. He was shocked to find the air contained more dirty particles than the air outside Tucson.

“Where is all this haze coming from?” he remembered asking people from Barrow. No one, though, had noticed it.

The director of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory in Barrow helped Shaw charter an airplane so he might determine the source of what Shaw by then knew was called Arctic Haze.

He thought the pollution might be related to oil-industry activities at Prudhoe Bay to the east, but as he got up a few thousand feet, he noticed the faint band of darkish air was “ubiquitous and uniform, except being broken up into distinct vertical layers.

“I was irritated that I couldn’t trace down the source of this strange Arctic Haze,” Shaw wrote in his autobiography. “I stayed awake thinking of it.”

On a follow-up flight, Shaw asked the pilot to fly through the layers of murky air. Using a hand-drawn pump he extended through a window, Shaw pulled air through a paper filter. He removed the filter and held it to his nose. It smelled to him like a coal-fired power plant.

Later on that same trip, Shaw sat down on the back porch of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory. He stared toward the sun, low in the northern sky over the Arctic Ocean.

“Suddenly it came to me very gently, but powerfully, that this is pollution from Russia or Europe,” he wrote. “It managed to remain in the air because the air is so stable and has so few clouds and removal mechanisms.”

Shaw then had a theory about the origin of what he described as a soup of pollutants housed within the polar air mass — an amoeba the size of Africa that hovers over the top of the earth. As the cold air mass drifts around, he thought, it picked up air pollution from one northern part of the globe and escorted it to another.

Shaw collected more air samples on filter paper from Barrow. Some of them showed elements that indicated the haze particles were indeed emitted by the burning of coal, putting the finger on Russia and eastern European nations. The samples also showed that Arctic Haze arrived mostly in spring, but also in the wintertime.

With Shaw’s fingerprinting of Arctic Haze, he proved the aerosols had managed to remain airborne for as long as a month, and that aerosol pollution was a worldwide phenomenon. Reporters for the New York Times, London Times, Chicago Tribune and other newspapers interviewed him. A local television station produced a documentary on Shaw and Arctic Haze.

“Being an only child, I of course loved all that attention,” he later said.

In his autobiography, Shaw remembered when he first came to Alaska, to interview for the job at the Geophysical Institute:

“What I noticed most was that the people were friendly and welcoming. There was Carl Benson, asking something about the relevancy of this lidar thing to some glacier on a mountain. There was Neil Davis, asking whether it could probe into the mesospheric layer. There was Al Belon, with his French accent, asking if I could get funding for this research. And there was Sartie Parthasarthy, telling me how he wanted to try and domesticate the yak in Alaska.

“I, frankly, had never seen such a bunch of mentally active, half-nutty people. And so that evening I called Gladys (his wife.)

“‘I really would like to come to Alaska,’ I said to her. ‘These are my kind of people.’”