1988 Waldo E. Smith Medal to Philip Hauge Abelson

The award of the Waldo E. Smith Medal to Philip H. Abelson honors two men who have devoted their lives to science and particularly to geophysics. Phil Abelson's contributions to science, including his personal research, his remarkable career as editor of Science, and his past presidency of the American Geophysical Union, are well known to all. Perhaps not as well recognized was his role in establishing the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) as the flagship journal of the American Geophysical Union and as the world's premier geophysical chronicle.Having grown accustomed to the some 15,000 page per year volumes of JGR now bending our shelves, if not endangering our buildings, we tend to forget that 30 years ago the situation was far different. During the mid‐1950s, as the International Geophysical Year approached, members of AGU could publish either in one of the several specialized journals of organizations, such as the Seismological Society, the American Meteorological Society, and the Society of Exploration Geophysics, or in the Transactions of the American Geophysical Union. Transactions attempted to serve many functions, including those now provided by Eos. The Journal of Geophysical Research had been maintained as a publication committed largely, but not exclusively, to geomagnetism by the devoted efforts of Merle Tuve.