Owen Phillips is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He has held academic posts at Cambridge University and the Johns Hopkins University. He was awarded the Sverdrup Gold Medal of the American Meteorological Society for his contributions to oceanography, and a fellowship in the American Geophysical Union for his contributions to geological fluid dynamics. His Last Chance Energy Book, published in 1979, anticipated the first global energy crisis of the 1980s, while his recent research has been on subsurface aquifer flows, the dispersal of cont...