Henry Bryant Bigelow (1879-1967) was a Harvard–trained zoologist who first went to see on an expedition to the Maldive Islands with Alexander Agassiz in 1901.

He later participated in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Expedition also organized by Agassiz. He first led an expedition in 1908 when he took the schooner Grampus to study Gulf Stream waters and collect various faunal samples. After four years of writing and publishing the results from these expeditions, the desk-bound Bigelow embarked on a groundbreaking series of research cruises in the Gulf of Maine in 1912. He spent the next 15 years, interrupted briefly by service as a navigation officer on an army transport, doing repeated studies of the Gulf of Maine in the manner pioneered by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) in Europe twenty years before. He studied the fish, plankton and hydrography of the Gulf, repeatedly taking many measurements over the years including temperatures, water samples, water color and transparency, currents (using an Ekman current meter), salinity (using the ICES method of titration and their Standard Water), quantitative and regular plankton hauls, and dredging and trawling. In later years he would release drift bottles to deduce the overall Lagrangian circulation pattern in the Gulf.

Bigelow was an American pioneer in that he was the first to apply the ICES methods of repeated measurements over many years to American waters. The results of the Gulf of Maine studies were published in separate monographs for the fish (1915), plankton (1926), and physical oceanography (Bigelow [1927]). Bigelow also published an autobiography (Bigelow [1964]) and an economic overview of oceanography.

Further Reading:

• Physical Oceanography Index
• Henry B. Bigelow. Memories of a Long and Active Life. The Cosmos Press, 1964.
• Michael Graham. Henry bryant bigelow. Deep–Sea Res., 15:125–132, 1968.