History
The Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics was dedicated in 1964, after a formal decision to develop the Institute in 1960. The original idea for the Institute was hatched in 1959 to "attract able minds away from traditional forms of physics," particularly because new geophysics departments had started to appear in other parts of the United States.
At this time there was no UC San Diego, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was known as the University of California, La Jolla. The Institute was initially to be focused on planetary physics, with an emphasis on the Earth-Moon system.
Read about the early years of IGPP in the words of directors Walter Munk, Freeman Gilbert, John Orcutt , Mark Zumberge, and Robert Parker in this special edition of Oceanography, the official magazine of The Oceanography Society.