Clyde Martz - CU Foundation

A tireless attorney, CU professor, carpenter and water gardener, Clyde Martz passed away on May 18 at home in Albuquerque, N.M., after a long illness. He was 88. Martz taught at the CU law school from 1947 to 1962, writing the first natural resource law casebook. He saw the big picture, pioneering a new area that creatively combined water law, mining law and oil and gas law.

Born on Aug. 14, 1921, in Lincoln, Neb., he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska where he was president of his fraternity. His time at Harvard Law School was interrupted by service on the submarine USS Tilefish during World War II. He married Ann Spieker in 1947, the same year he received his law degree from Harvard. He and Ann were inseparable until her death in 2004.

During his 15 years as a professor at the CU law school, he published the first natural resources law casebook, Cases and Materials on the Law of Natural Resources. Martz also helped found the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation and was a guest professor at several other law schools.

He departed CU in 1962 to join the Denver-based Davis Graham & Stubbs law firm. Clyde was also a dedicated public servant who served in what arguably are the two most eminent positions for any natural resources lawyer, assistant attorney general of the lands and resources division of the U.S. Department of Justice (1967-69) and U.S. Department of the Interior solicitor.

During this time he was involved in a dispute involving the treaty fishing rights of the Yakima Indians as well as one involving condemnation of lands needed for the NASA facility in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and numerous mining claim cases. In 1987, Colorado Gov. Roy Romer (Law’52, HonDocHum’06) appointed Martz his natural resources director, calling him one of the nation’s top lawyers.

In 1982 Martz helped found CU’s Natural Resources Law Center to promote intellectual discourse over crucial natural resources law and policy issues and foster practical and effective solutions to problems. The center is best known for its ground-breaking work on management and conservation of the West’s water resources.

Part of being a giant in the field of natural resources law was his mentoring of so many students and young lawyers.

“Those of us who had the honor of working with Clyde,” says Natural Resources Law Center director Mark Squillace, “will long remember him for his dedication and passion for the practice of law, and for the support that he gave us as we began our careers.”

Martz had a son and a daughter with whom he spent a great deal of time. He climbed the Third Flatiron and Grand Teton with Robert Martz and rode horses with Nancy Martz. All through his life but especially when he retired he built innumerable gardens and ponds. A creative and prolific carpenter, he built several additions to the family home by himself. A carpenter indeed.

Go here to contribute to the Clyde Martz Endowment Fund.

Marc Killinger is assistant editor of the Coloradan.

This view of Mars was taken from Earth by the refurbished NASA Hubble Space Telescope in 1997. NASA

Mars may have been home to an ocean and microbial life, according to CU scientists Brian Hynek and Gaetano Di Achille. The LASP researchers studied the elevations of several dried-up river deltas on Mars and found that 17 of 52 of the deltas lie at similar elevations. Similarly, Earth’s deltas lie at the same elevation and reflect the current sea level.

Hynek explains the ocean would have existed 3.5 to 3.7 billion years ago and lasted several million years — the time it would have taken for deltas to form.

“If Mars had oceans for even a couple hundred million years, it gives me hope that we’ll find evidence of past microbial life on Mars,” he told National Geographic.

In other space news, three of CU’s biomedical payload devices traveled on NASA’s Atlantis shuttle in May. One device will hopefully help scientists determine why slimy, troublesome microorganisms called biofilms flourish in space. Biofilms can negatively impact the spacecraft and astronaut health. The space crew carried out experiments and returned to Earth with samples.

The National Science Foundation awarded CU $840,000 to build the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment.

“The aerospace engineering sciences department has been a leader in the development of hands-on learning at all levels of the curriculum, and this is another big step forward,” says associate professor Scott Palo (MElEngr’90, PhD’94), co-principal investigator.

In other news, NASA awarded CU $3.3 million for a detailed one-year concept study for a landing mission to Venus. It has been 25 years since a spacecraft landed there.

While Venus and Earth were similar at birth, Venus has turned into “Earth’s evil twin” because of its extremely harsh and inhospitable conditions, says Larry Esposito of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. NASA

“We are very interested in what sent Venus down this hellish path, including its runaway global warming,” says professor Larry Esposito of astrophysical and planetary sciences, referring to the planet’s harsh conditions. “Understanding the physical and chemical reasons for this uncontrolled warming may help scientists better understand the eventual fate of Earth.”

In addition, the $2.2 billion orbiting Herschel Space Observatory is finding galaxies that ground-based telescopes never could detect. Images from the observatory “have revealed thousands of newly discovered galaxies in their early stages of formation,” says associate professor Jason Glenn, a co-investigator on the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver, a CU-Boulder-designed device riding aboard Herschel. Glenn is among more than 100 astronomers from six countries analyzing data from Herschel, which is 1.5 times the diameter of the Hubble Space Telescope and is orbiting nearly 1 million miles above Earth.

Glenn says a major goal of the Herschel mission is to discover how early galaxies formed and evolved to give rise to present-day galaxies like our own. Distant galaxies imaged by Herschel are so far away that astronomers are looking at conditions as early as just over a billion or so years after the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago.

The grants will enable researchers to study the cosmos from moon observatories and conduct science and safety investigations on the moon’s dusty surface and atmosphere. Some of the money — $5 million — will lead to the creation of the Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies, headed by professor Mihaly Horyani of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Aiming for NASA’s 2011 exploration mission to the moon, campus scientists will build a high-tech lunar dust detector to provide more information on the physical characteristics of the moon’s dust, which will help researchers better evaluate astronaut safety concerns as well as how dust interacts with the atmosphere and solar wind. They also will design antennas to be placed on the far side of the moon that could help scientists detect sounds from the first half-billion years of the universe’s estimated 14 billion-year history.

“This shows once again that the University of Colorado is among the world’s leaders in space science,” professor Jack Burns of CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysical and Space Astronomy says.

In other space news, hundreds of students living on Colorado’s Front Range and in several communities in Texas remotely monitored spiders and butterflies on board a 15-day NASA space shuttle Endeavor mission in November. It was the third shuttle flight of CU-Boulder BioServe’s K-12 educational program that allows students to view video, still images and data from the space station.