Lumen Autumn 2017 - Flipbook - Page 40
story by Ian Williams
Mawson tip proves a
masterstroke for Bill
When celebrated
Antarctic explorer and
University of Adelaide
academic Sir Douglas
Mawson o昀昀ered advice,
you tended to listen.
Y
oung palaeontology graduate
William Riedel certainly did and
it took him down an unexplored
path of study that continues nearly
70 years later.
“I’d started my postgraduate work at
Adelaide and was still trying to figure
out what fossils I was going to study,”
says Bill, now aged 89.
“Mawson had returned from his
Antarctic expeditions with sediment
samples from the ocean floor and was
interested in getting people to work on the
microfossils they contained.
“Radiolarians was one of those groups
and no-one was studying them. It was
a marvellous suggestion and the turning
point in my life.”
Radiolarians occur as zooplankton
throughout the oceans and initially Bill was
the only scientist studying their fossilised
remains and evolutionary progress.
Alumnus William Riedel
giving a TEDx Adelaide talk.
Photo by TEDx Adelaide
38 Lumen | Winter 2017
His research took him to Sweden’s
Oceanographic Institute in Gothenburg in
1950 and then to the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography in La Jolla, California,
where he remained for nearly 50 years.
With a colleague he initiated the idea
of using a commercial drilling vessel to
retrieve sediments from seabeds which
provided a magnificent resource for
studying radiolarian evolution.
Bill retired to the Barossa in 2000 –
just five kilometres from where he was
born – but the wealth of knowledge he
has accumulated during his career is still
in high demand. Only last year he was a
guest speaker at TEDx Adelaide.
“I’ve had such a lucky life and I’m
immensely grateful that Mawson
suggested radiolarians. They are beautiful
creatures and I’ve got to look at them all
my working life. It’s supported me very
well, thank you.”
“Now I’m here retired, in good health
and having a great amount of fun.”
And Bill is still studying “those
little critters”.
“There are said to be about 200 to 300
species of radiolarians in the tropics and
I concentrated on about 50 during my
working life. I still have 150 sitting there
that I don’t know anything about and
I’m looking at those now to see what
I can come up with.”
