II. The Research Units
III. History's
Greatest Fishing Expedition:
The Marine Life Research Program
Sardinops sagax[*]
[*] Formerly Sardinops caerulea, and thus designated throughout most of the sardine study.
— the Pacific sardine, sometimes called the pilchard — is a tasty member of the herring family. It is a glittering dark green to blue above and iridescent silvery below. Only occasionally reaching twelve inches in length, it is a smallish fish to have caused so much furor. But it does seem as if the Pacific sardine since 1945 has spawned more initials than eggs: i.e., MRC, MLR, CalCOFI, DCPG, WWD, IKMT. The search for it poured a great deal of money into studies of California fisheries.The figures are staggering: in the 1936–37 fishing season, 726,000 tons of sardines were hauled into California harbors in wee-daylight hours — one-quarter of the total tonnage of fish caught in the United States that year; in the 1946–47 season, even with more fishermen searching, only 234,000 tons could be found.
Why? Of course, everyone had a pet theory: changing currents were carrying off the eggs; water temperatures were changing; adult sardines were migrating to greener
At stake was the livelihood of three thousand fishermen and one hundred canneries in Monterey Bay, Los Angeles, Newport, and San Diego. So in January of 1947 representatives of the fishing industry called a meeting of experts to look into the problem. To that meeting the Sardine Products Institute sent William C. Moorehead, Irwin Isaacs, David Oliver, and Julian G. Burnette; Montgomery Phister, who acted as chairman, represented the tuna fisheries; Oscar E. Sette and John C. Marr attended from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Frances N. Clark and Richard Croker represented the California Bureau of Marine Fisheries; Robert C. Miller and Wilbert M. Chapman represented the California Academy of Sciences; and Harald U. Sverdrup attended from Scripps. Sverdrup was essentially nominated by Chapman, who wrote Phister in December 1946: “In regard to a representative from Scripps … Dr. H. U. Sverdrup, Director, is in my opinion the most competent oceanographer now working in the world. … He is the key man in Pacific Oceanography.”[1]
Within a year the California legislature had established the Marine Research Committee (MRC) of nine members, five from the fishing industry, one public representative, one from the California Fish and Game Commission, and two from the California Division of Fish and Game. The legislature also guaranteed $300,000 for the first year of a three-year study to the University of California, to be used by the Scripps Institution (this was increased to $400,000 the next year). The fishermen, through the California Sardine Products Institute, augmented this by persuading the legislature to impose a tax of 50 cents per ton on sardines for four years, to be collected by the
The organizational meetings were not smooth, as each participating group worked within its own restrictions and needs to establish its role in a complex undertaking. Chapman admitted candidly to Don T. Saxby of the California Packing Company after the first MRC meeting: “The whole damned thing is likely to fly apart before it gets started” — and then worked furiously to see that it didn't.
Sverdrup was a vital participant in setting up the study although he had already announced his intention of returning to Norway. He commented at the time that he might not have left Scripps had he known that such an all-encompassing oceanographic project was about to begin.
The following year, 1948, Scripps was represented by its new director, Carl Eckart, at the second meeting of the Marine Research Committee, held in La Jolla, and he was accompanied by colleagues Carl L. Hubbs, Martin W. Johnson, Roger Revelle, John D. Isaacs, and graduate student J. Laurence McHugh. Revelle had just returned to Scripps from his Navy service and was designated as associate director and given charge of the Scripps portion of the sardine project.
Thanks to the groundwork laid by studies that had begun in the 1920s, including those in which Scripps had participated in cooperation with the California Division of Fish and Game (1937) and with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (1938 to 1941) throughout the California Current, the organizations that came to the aid of the sardine fishermen “were able to get to work with little waste motion. They knew what they were after and the best way to get it.” They already knew that “the sardine is a restless and far-traveling creature. When California, Canada, Washington,
But only the larger and older fish drifted far north; their numbers dwindled first, and were not replaced in a succession of poor spawning years. Canneries in Canada, then in Washington and Oregon closed, soon followed by those in San Francisco. Supported by fish from fairly good spawning in 1946 to 1948, Cannery Row in Monterey hung on. But it too was doomed.
The sardine project that began in 1948 was very much a cooperative one. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, through its South Pacific Fishery Investigations, undertook studies on the spawning, survival, and recruitment of sardines, using its ship Black Douglas. The California Division of Fish and Game, which had been studying the slippery sardine for thirty years, set out to determine its availability to fishermen by studies of the animal's abundance, distribution, migration, and behavior, using its ship N.B. Scofield and later also the Yellowfin. The California Academy of Sciences began laboratory studies on the behavior and physiology of sardines, and Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Laboratory joined the project in 1951 to study the oceanography of the Monterey Bay area in detail.
The Scripps Institution — on which we shall concentrate here, with apology to the others — from the beginning was given responsibility for gathering general oceanographic data in the sardine habitat, as well as information on the organic productivity of the ocean. Sverdrup gave the term Marine Life Research program (MLR) to the Scripps part of the project.
There was not space within the walls of the four research and office buildings on the Scripps campus to contain the envisaged project. But the close ties between Scripps and the Navy research groups on Point Loma made it possible to arrange for facilities there. So the Scripps MLR group was first located in Navy barracks buildings at Point Loma in 1948. The personnel were gradually moved onto the Scripps campus as space became available.
A laboratory of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was first located at Stanford University, but in February 1954 Revelle extended an invitation to John C. Marr to move that research group to Scripps, “to facilitate the integration of the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries program.” That same summer part of the group moved into the director's house (T-16) at Scripps, and others into facilities at Point Loma, where a branch laboratory of the Fish and Wildlife Service was already located. In 1964 the spectacular Fishery Oceanography Center[*]
[*] Sometimes called the “Fish Hilton” because, Sally Spiess recalls, while it was under construction passing tourists often asked when the new hotel would be open.
was completed on land provided by the university at the north end of the Scripps campus, and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moved into it. (The building was renamed Southwest Fishery Center in 1970, and the Bureau was renamed the National Marine Fisheries Service, an agency of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.[*][*] When this organization is mentioned throughout this book, its name at the time cited will be used. The building is generally called the Fisheries Building by Scripps people.
)
Retrieving the bottom fish-trap, 1950; John D. Isaacs sitting on rail, Lewis W. Kidd second from left.
The statewide research project under the Marine Research Committee was referred to as the California Cooperative Sardine Study until 1953, when it became the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (at
Thanks to the state's contribution and the Navy's interest in general oceanographic studies, the sardine study could be tackled with a fleet. In addition to the ships of the other participating agencies, Scripps Institution's Horizon and Crest were assigned specifically to MLR, and indeed their conversion to research vessels was mostly accomplished with MRC funds and university money for that purpose. In addition, the Paolina-T and sometimes the E. W. Scripps were used for occasional special investigations or when one of the regulars was laid up.
The plan of attack devised in 1948 (slightly modified in 1950) was a bold one. It was to survey 670,000 square miles of ocean, from the mouth of the Columbia River to halfway down Baja California and extending outward 400 miles. Through this region flowed the California Current, the mass of water from the great clockwise circulation of the North Pacific that moves southeastwardly at a speed of less than half a knot parallel to the American west coast, warming in the sun, until at about 25° north latitude it swings westward to join the North Equatorial Current. The California Current is complicated by countercurrents and eddies, intermittent and permanent, and by regions of upwelling.
To study the region systematically, a grid was laid out by drawing a line roughly parallel to the coast from which right angle lines were drawn at 120-mile intervals. Along
All this was more easily planned on land than carried out at sea, especially during the winter cruises, and the time schedule often had to adapt to nature's whims.
On one early CalCOFI cruise, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife ship, Black Douglas — a former sailing yacht — was called to aid a burning lumber boat in heavy seas. Directed by Coast Guard helicopters, the yacht reached the scene of distress at night, to find that the ship had broken up and its crew were all drifting in two lifeboats. One of the lifeboat occupants was heard to exclaim: “Christ — a goddamned yachat!” In spite of 25-knot winds, the plunging Black Douglas was held steady alongside the first lifeboat, and as waves raised the boat about level with the gunwales, the survivors were yanked onto the deck of the Black Douglas one at a time. The second boat was awash and beginning to founder when finally located, but its wet, cold occupants were quickly pulled aboard the Black Douglas, which cut short its survey to get the rescued back to port.
Results from the monthly cruises began coming in very promptly. “The oceanographic approach to the sardine problem,” said the progress report of 1950, “is the feature which makes the present work unique; it has never been tried on such a scale before anywhere in the world. What — very briefly — the scientists hope to do is to correlate changes in water conditions with sardine spawning, availability, and abundance.”[3]
The talk by the participants was soon of year-classes, upwelling regions, phytoplankton, and weather. Two major centers of spawning were outlined, one near Cedros Island off Baja California, and a larger one off the boundary between California and Baja California. Both were areas of upwelling, separated by an almost barren region. Two other known spawning areas, in the Gulf of California and off southern Baja California, were considered to be outside the sources of the California catch. Water temperatures between 12.5° and 16° C. proved to delimit sardine spawning. There was talk of last year's weather becoming the key to this year's forecast of spawning because of its effect on currents and upwelling. Certain years were found to produce the majority of caught sardines for several years; the year-classes could be readily identified by growth counts on the scales (now the lines of growth on the otoliths, or “ear bones,” are also used). Experiments ashore showed that antibiotics added to sea water greatly increased the hatch of sardine eggs, suggesting that disease might be affecting the numbers. Laboratory tests showed that sardines could be “herded” by electrical currents. The lateral-line system of fishes came under scrutiny. Attempts were made to determine individual races of sardines so that their origin and extent of mingling could be unraveled.
As graduate student J. L. (“Laurie”) McHugh had commented when the project was being established in 1948: “The resources of both the physical oceanography and the recruitment research shore sections will be taxed to the limit in handling the material collected at sea.” Within the first year of the sardine project, the staff of Scripps was increased 42 percent. It was at that time that the Data Collection and Processing Group (DCPG) made its appearance. Their task was to analyze hydrographic data from approximately 1,500 stations each year, quickly enough for the results to be used in planning the next year's program. At
Thanks to the breadth of the sardine project, MLR money supported some projects and personnel in almost every aspect of ocean studies at Scripps, but chiefly, of course, in biology, physical oceanography, and instrumentation, beyond the considerable costs of running the ships.
The lifeline to the ships: “Nick” Carter in the campus radio shack, in the mid-1960s. Photo by J. D. Frautschy.
WWD made its appearance too — not an abbreviation in this case, but the call letters of the lifeline to the ships, the radio station. Having learned the usefulness of steady radio communication through the work for UCDWR by the E. W. Scripps, the institution wanted its own voice between home base and the fleet of ships running the station grid. Persistent correspondence led to permission in 1948 for the institution to use the frequencies of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for MLR work and Navy frequencies for other traffic. The Fish and Wildlife Service finally persuaded the Interdepartmental Radio Advisory Committee to assign them a station for the sardine project, to be operated by Scripps personnel, at first in a temporary building south of Scripps Laboratory (where it interfered with campus telephone calls whenever it was transmitting). Frank Berberich opened “Willie Willie Dog” in August 1949, and the voice at first was feeble, limited by edict to 125 watts on the 500-watt Navy equipment obtained, while it reported on storms and new fishes and sometimes troubles at sea, but it did speed the work and was a comfort to those ashore. In 1952 WWD was relocated on the hilltop eastward of the main
The radio shack has been renovated in the 1970s, under the leadership of Donal C. Crouch. For many years it was the domain of Arthur B. (“Nick”) Carter — “a professional of vast experience with the enthusiasm of the most dedicated young ‘ham’ operator.” In those days the quarters were cluttered and noisy, with fragments of code and garbled voices drowning each other out, bells and telephones ringing, and teletype clattering. From the apparent chaos Carter would emerge with a bluff, hearty greeting for a visitor that said you were the one person he most wanted to see. Along with the greeting came an offer of thick coffee in a thick mug. After many years, Carter still marveled at the thousands of miles of ocean that his key could span in an instant and draw a response, so that somehow the ocean seemed smaller in that friendly room. In Navy tradition, the typed messages come out of the radio station in cryptic sentences in block letters, and with little punctuation. The spelling is sometimes startling, but excusable when one takes into account the fading of distant transmission and the technical terms used — polysyllabic scientific names of biological specimens, chemical terms, geological descriptions, names and numbers of parts for gears and engines and winches.
The first years of the sardine project were, of necessity, devoted to defining the problem and collecting data. The
There were special cruises as well. In 1955, MLR, along with other groups at Scripps, participated in “the most ambitious oceanographic survey ever attempted” to that time: Norpac (for North Pacific) Expedition. A cooperative synoptic survey of the Pacific Ocean north of 20° latitude was first proposed by Joseph L. Reid, Jr., in 1953, and it grew to include 19 research vessels of 14 institutions from the United States, Japan, and Canada. From July to September, 1,002 hydrographic stations were occupied, and more than 2,000 plankton samples were gathered, for an almost simultaneous picture of the vast region from Acapulco to Alaska and across to Japan. August had been selected as the time least likely to be disturbed by weather, and indeed the “expeditions were remarkably free from bad weather and breakdowns,” reported coordinator Reid,[5] who also recalls that the Scripps ships were among his headaches. Horizon sailed for Norpac on 3 August 1955, Spencer F. Baird on 8 August, and the newly acquired Stranger finally left on 9 August after delays for repairs. From home base Reid monitored messages requesting permission to return because of minor problems, which he firmly denied, so the ships sailed on. Two of the participating Japanese ships rode out typhoons “but pressed on to complete their planned work.” It appeared to one awed reporter that “the ships are measuring anything that might be pertinent to a better understanding of the mysterious sea,”[6] but the observations and collections were actually of temperature, salinity, dissolved-oxygen content, inorganic phosphate-phosphorus,
In 1957, the Marine Research Committee paused to see what it had done in a decade. A special committee summarized the accomplishments, which included: defining four spawning areas of sardines; developing methods of estimating numbers of eggs, larvae, juvenile, and adult sardines; obtaining information on north-south migrations; studying behavior patterns; determining that common nutrients are not limiting to phytoplankton; defining zooplankton areas; accumulating temperature, salinity, oxygen, and phosphate data; and gathering information on the abundance and location of the eggs, larvae, and adults of anchovy, jack mackerel, Pacific mackerel, saury, and hake.
The special committee, which consisted of John D. Isaacs of Scripps, John Radovich of California Fish and Game, and chairman John C. Marr of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, concluded that further studies of the sardine populations and the oceanography of the spawning region should be continued. CalCOFI, they felt, had “made real contributions toward a better understanding of the fisheries but [lacked] effective coordination.”[7] In a reorganization the members of the “three-Johns committee” became the governing technical committee and Garth I. Murphy was appointed CalCOFI coordinator in 1958 (until 1965). John Isaacs also became in 1958 the director of the MLR program at Scripps. Revelle had included the direction of MLR among his duties as director of Scripps, but various people (for example, Paul L. Horrer) had handled the routine running of the project for several years.
John Dove Isaacs — the big man with the beatific smile and courtly air, distinguished with and by white hair and beard — was the guiding hand of MLR until late 1974, when Joseph L. Reid, Jr., became director of MLR and Isaacs continued with the Institute of Marine Resources (chapter 6). If one were to recommend a training course for a future oceanographer, it could well copy Isaac's. Being a bit of a maverick helps, as does a love of literature and a keen interest in questioning nature. Isaacs has these. He once described himself — accurately — as “a naive, enthusiastic sort of person.”[8] Born in Spokane, Washington, in 1913, he began in oceanography as a commercial fisherman, until his boat tangled with a jetty in the Columbia River and he had to swim ashore. With Willard Bascom during World War II, Isaacs tested crashing breakers and measured beaches in DUKWs and other landing craft until the Coast Guard concluded that it was too dangerous. He graduated in engineering at Berkeley in 1944, worked on wave refraction with Sverdrup and Walter H. Munk, and joined Revelle in Operation Crossroads in 1946 (see chapter 15). Isaacs began at Scripps as an associate oceanographer, at Revelle's invitation in 1948, when the MLR program was just beginning. By 1961 he had become a professor of oceanography. Isaacs is phenomenal in proposing ingenious solutions to old problems. His motto may be “Why not?” And indeed, he is often right.
Considering Isaacs's participation in the special committee of 1957, it is surprising that, in summarizing the results of the first decade, more emphasis was not placed on the major contribution of CalCOFI in developing new instruments for use at sea. The classics of marine biological collecting were invented, tested, and modified during the early years of the California sardine program, many of them in the Scripps unit called Special Developments, headed by Isaacs and James M. Snodgrass.
Equipment at sea is the oceanographers' greatest headache. Of things put over the side, some refuse to go down and others refuse to come up. Towed items flutter to the surface, overhead balloons dive into the waves. Cables kink, winches jam — and suddenly the air turns blue. But, there has to be a way. …
Sam Hinton pointed out one of the problems faced by inventors in the early days of CalCOFI: “A good part of the area under consideration is stormy and rough, and the devisors of new equipment aim for a product that can be operated by a seasick technician who must hold on to a stanchion with both feet and one hand while doing his work!”[9] Help was already on the way; James Snodgrass commented in 1949 that “the ability of a man to do competent work at sea is tremendously improved with the use of … the new motion-sickness drug ‘Dramamine.’ ”[10] Sir Edward Bullard once called seasick pills “probably the greatest scientific contribution of the twentieth century to oceanography.”[11]
On the CalCOFI cruises, plankton samplers were not catching the fleetest of the animals, the ones that darted from the disturbance of the towed cable away from the lagging net. So by 1950 the high-speed plankton collector was devised, with a spherical cable clamp that allowed the net to project forward of the point of attachment. A depthflow meter, which could draw a continuous record of the depth and flow of water through the net, was designed to use with the collector. Also, for underway sampling, a bronze depressor was built to hold the towed cable and collecting equipment steadily and uniformly beneath the surface. But strained cables can snap, so a hydraulic dynamometer was added to measure cable stress.
Bringing aboard the Isaacs-Kidd Midwater Trawl, Transpac Expedition, 1953.
The floating fish-larvae trap was another early invention; this was an inverted pyramid of wire mesh, pierced by
California Fish and Game researchers took advantage of equipment developed for wartime — a sonar set and recording echo-sounder — to try locating schools of fish. Although the equipment was considered bulky and expensive and required a trained operator, early tests proved that it could indeed locate schools up to 800 yards away in depths beyond 50 fathoms. The goal was to expand sardine fishing hours, as the custom was to seek the schools only on moonless nights when flashes of phosphorescence betrayed them.
In 1951 another of oceanography's classical tools was being tested, and proving to be a valuable means of exploring ocean depths: the Isaacs-Kidd midwater trawl (IKMT). Although surface fishes and plankton had been regularly collected previously with surface nets, as had some bottom-dwelling fishes and invertebrates with bottom trawls, the vast middle area had only occasionally yielded specimens to science, more by accident than design, and never in the Pacific Ocean. The deep scattering layer that troubled the physicists on their echo-sounders during the war would continue to baffle biologists until a means could be designed to collect within it.
John Isaacs and Lewis W. Kidd took on the design problem, with the experienced advice of Carl L. Hubbs. The trawl consisted of “a net of special design attached to a wide, V-shaped, rigid, diving vane. The vane keeps the
Early tests delighted Hubbs. From the Horizon on Northern Holiday Expedition in August 1951, Isaacs queried by radio:
Took a Macropinna-like fish at 1100 meters in 2400 fathoms X Small fins and entirely flat belly with forward projecting foot suggesting attachment a-la remora X Shall I keep him? X He is not very large X Hauls medium to excellent.
Hubbs replied: “Bring fish back or don't come back yourself.” A few days later he continued:
Macropinna-like fish apparently Opisthoproctus / New for Pacific / One of rarest and strangest types / Two species in Atlantic / Other captures obviously unusual and exciting / Wish I could see them come in / Good luck.
Apart from the novelty of the new species of midwater fishes, all the other common fishes of the sardine region were also under study in the program. For some of the fishes were known to be predators of sardine eggs and young, and others were obviously competitors. There was hope, too, of encouraging other fisheries, particularly the northern anchovy, Engraulis mordax, found in similar numbers and sites as the sardine. The fishermen had little choice, as sardine spawning continued at a low level, and in 1952 the combined catch of “substitute sardines” — anchovy, jack mackerel, and Pacific mackerel — exceeded that of sardines. The tax for research of 50 cents a ton was raised to one dollar and was imposed on those fisheries
More than fishes were under scrutiny. To study the countercurrents along the coast, Paul L. Horrer began a drift-bottle project in 1954. Commercial salad dressing bottles ballasted with sand were released on each CalCOFI station every month in the early years, usually twelve bottles on each station. A red postcard enclosed in the bottle explained in English and in Spanish the purpose of the study and requested the finder to send to Scripps the place, date, time of finding, and finder's name and address. Only a small percentage was returned, most of them released not more than 20 miles from shore. But from these returns Richard A. Schwartzlose was able to define the Davidson Countercurrent, 50 miles wide, from central California north to British Columbia, that began in the fall months, built up to speeds of 0.5 to 0.9 knots for several hundred miles, and disappeared in the spring. Elsewhere, he found short countercurrents and intermittent eddies at irregular times. Drift-bottle releases have been continued. Recoveries vary from zero to 23 percent (average 3.4), from points as distant as Alaska and Acapulco, and in 1971 one was picked up on the island of Hawaii.
The second decade of CalCOFI produced preliminary findings on the region that it called its own, and opened doors to speculation. As John Isaacs noted in a meeting of the MRC, as each question was answered, new ones arose.[13] But questions were being answered, in a multitude of reports, scientific papers, and student dissertations, and in that second decade a new philosophy was emerging in MLR.
Nature stepped in to help — or confound — the scientists in 1957, simply by warming the ocean. Not much, only 2° to 4° C. But — “Hawaii had its first recorded typhoon; the seabird-killing El Niño visited the Peruvian Coast; the
Suddenly, off California, sport fishermen were catching more bonito, yellowtail, barracuda, skipjack, and dolphin-fish than ever before recorded, and farther north. Salmon trollers were catching white seabass; marlin and sailfish were reported, and swordfish were caught off Monterey Bay. Green sea turtles were seen off the Farallon Islands, and many hammerhead sharks were sighted off California beaches.
And the sardines? They moved northward, spawned farther north (but not in greater quantity), and in the 1958–59 season were caught in the greatest numbers since 1951:102,000 tons, vs. 22,000 tons in 1957–58.
Because of the unusual conditions throughout the Pacific Ocean that year, Scripps hosted a symposium on “The Changing Pacific Ocean in 1957 and 1958” at Rancho Santa Fe in June of 1958. Attending were physical, chemical, geophysical, and biological oceanographers, fisheries personnel, meteorologists, and an astrophysicist. They came from east coast and west coast, and one came from Japan. For three days they talked of warmed islands and beaches and shifting currents and fishes, until even expert-in-meteorology Jerome Namias expressed it for all: “It is certainly much more complex than I ever dreamed.”[15]
Retrieving a free-vehicle current meter from the Melville on Benthiface Expedition, 1973. Photo by Tom Walsh.
Symposium editors Oscar E. Sette and John Isaacs summarized:
It appears to the Editors that one of the most valuable results of the Symposium is to have pointed out clearly and unequivocally, and from a wide range of evidence, that locally observed changes in ocean conditions, marine fauna, fisheries success, weather, etc., are often the demonstrable result of processes
― 65 ―acting over vast areas. In the case of local Pacific conditions, the changes obviously often are only a part of changes involving the entire North Pacific if not the entire Pacific or the entire planet.It appears that this realization should emancipate many provincial marine investigations and stimulate much thought and inquiry into these vast and critical events that so profoundly influence the local areas of the Pacific.
This is to say, for example, that a basic understanding and subsequent basic forecasting of the fluctuations of a coastal fishery probably can be best achieved by a thoughtfully limited study of the entire ocean, in addition to concentrated concern with the immediate area of the fishery.[16]
The symposium marked a turning point in MLR, carrying its scope beyond the California Current to all of the North Pacific Ocean. CalCOFI in 1960 redefined its objectives:
To acquire knowledge and understanding of the factors governing the abundance, distribution, and variation of the pelagic marine fishes. The oceanographic and biological factors affecting the sardine and its ecological associates in the California Current System will be given research emphasis. It is the ultimate aim of the investigations to obtain an understanding sufficient to predict, thus permitting efficient utilization of the species, and perhaps manipulation of the population.[17]
In line with its broadened goals, the Marine Research Committee adopted the system of awarding contracts to special projects submitted to it by the participating agencies,
The old ships were showing signs of wear. In fact, MLR was an important contributor to wearing out the Crest, the Paolina-T, the Horizon, the Stranger, and the Orca. So, also in 1961, a new ship entered the program, when Scripps acquired a 180-foot light-freight vessel that had previously been operated by the Army Transportation Corps. Following an old tradition, the ship's new name was selected through a contest at Scripps: Alexander Agassiz,[*]
[*] See list of Scripps ships in chapter 14.
in memory of one of Scripps Institution's first ships as well as in honor of the noted oceanographer who had visited the La Jolla marine station in 1905 and had contributed to its library and its morale. Through funds provided by the Regents of the University of California, the Agassiz was outfitted especially for the CalCOFI program, with laboratories and enough deck space for handling the bulky mid-water trawl and other collecting gear, and with glass-covered viewing ports below the waterline.Having acquired many years of oceanographic basic data — in “warm years, cold years, monotonous years, years with strong countercurrents, years with invasion of tropical waters, etc.” — MLR could at last turn to “thoughtful studies of the samples and data already obtained … and
The sardine, which had created CalCOFI and its progeny, was, after all, “a rather minor part of the biomass … like the gold of California, a conspicuous, valuable, easily-harvested element in the midst of less-conspicuous riches of far greater potentialities but requiring painstaking development.”[19]
The phenomenally high catches of sardines during the 1920s and 1930s were historically the result of a major propaganda campaign during the first World War to eat more fish (Ritter had helped on that), at a time when sardines happened to be plentiful, followed by an artificially created market for that same “inexhaustible” resource for fish meal and oil. “What is done with a resource,” pointed out Frances N. Clark and John C. Marr, “is essentially governed by the needs or desires of Man and, in a sense, has little or no connection with the resource per se.”[20] Sardines were caught and canned in tomato sauce originally because it was patriotic — and later because thirty thousand people made their living that way.
But CalCOFI's studies showed that other fishes can gain ascendancy over the sardine, especially the northern anchovy, which appears to have a spawning advantage at lower ocean temperatures, as in the remarkably uniform decade from 1948 to 1957. The larvae of the anchovy, which also spawns farther north than the sardine, also are more likely to be maintained within the California Current and not carried off to unfavorable climes. In 1951 anchovy larvae outnumbered sardine larvae in net hauls on CalCOFI cruises by three to one, but in eight years this had leaped to 45 to one.
The sardine, concluded CalCOFI researchers, “can prosper when there is much variation in the environment, but … under steady conditions, or at least under steady
What may have been the final chapter of the sardine story — but not of the MLR story — came out in the latter 1960s. In an enclosed anaerobic basin off Santa Barbara, cores were drilled through the undisturbed accumulation of sediments that represented a record covering one thousand years. From those cores, Andrew Soutar identified and counted the numbers of fish scales from Pacific sardine, northern anchovy, and Pacific hake, which together constituted 80 percent of all fish scales. The hake, Merluccius productus, already known to be a major component of the biomass, proved to be consistently the most common fish, followed by the anchovy; both were much more uniform in numbers throughout the centuries than was the sardine, which fluctuated through highs and lows. But only once previously, about 800 years ago, did the core record indicate an abundance of sardines like that of the 1920s and 1930s, when California fishermen found their pot of gold.
To adapt to the changing populations, the fishermen changed their ways and, for example, in 1961 landed one million pounds of hake — to feed to mink, to produce fur coats!
Throughout the years, all the varied aspects of the original CalCOFI program continued and expanded. DCPG constantly improved its methods of processing hydrographic data and became the model for all other oceanographic laboratories and for the National Oceanographic Data Center, a credit to the meticulousness of Hans Klein and his training program for technicians. Historical studies were begun, to find documents and records that pertained to
More sophisticated instruments were developed, especially for extreme depths, including the whole family of free-vehicle equipment. The key to this series was simply a link made of magnesium, which, as John Isaacs had noted on 7 April 1947 after conducting laboratory tests, held promise as a release mechanism, as magnesium is corroded by electrolysis in seawater.
Lew Kidd and I [wrote Isaacs in 1967] first worked on autonomous free-fall instruments at Scripps in 1949. Our first model bore a weak but effective light, a piece of yellow phosphorus in a “tea egg” on the mast (this spontaneously ignited after emergence and produced clouds of smoke), a five gallon can of gasoline for buoyancy, a magnesium link timer, and an aluminum mast. Operating around the Channel Islands of Southern California, we had very poor success in retrieval because of the many small boats that also showed masts, lights, and smoke.[23]
One of the early MLR free-vehicle units was a fish trap designed by Isaacs and George B. Schick and put into use in 1959. This device, the benthic trap, is weighted with ballast, and dropped to the sea floor; a gasoline-filled float raises the unit to the surface when the magnesium link on the weight has been corroded through. The trap has proved to be a very effective means of gathering denizens of the deep. For example, Carl L. Hubbs has obtained enough hagfish with free-vehicle traps to identify several new species from the Pacific coast. Hubbs also urged the addition of setlines to the device, by which a number of deep-water fishes have been collected.
By 1966 George Schick and Meredith Sessions had developed the first free-falling camera system, which on its first testing snapped photographs at fifteen-minute intervals down to 3,000 meters. The camera ballast weight carried frozen mackerel to attract potential photogenic models, and suddenly the presumably barren depths proved well populated. MLR's deep-sea cameras have been routinely used down to 7,000 meters, beyond which special housing is necessary because of the extreme pressure. “The thousands of pictures make it clear [wrote Isaacs and Schwartzlose] that much of the deep-sea floor teems with numerous species of scavengers: vigorous invertebrates and fishes, including some gigantic sharks, that are supported by a marine food web whose extent and complexity is only beginning to be perceived.”[24] In the photos have appeared some undescribed deep-sea species and some unexpected ones, such as Greenland sharks, usually found in Arctic waters but caught by the camera in cold depths off Baja California. Sablefish and tanner crabs showed up in sufficient numbers from 600 to 2,000 meters to represent potential large new fisheries.
When the bait and camera reach the sea floor, the authors continue:
Usually the number of fish gathered around the bait increases slowly, reaching a maximum after a few hours. Often the scene develops into one of furious activity, with several species of fish competing for the bait, thrashing and tearing at it and sometimes attacking one another. Shrimps, brittle stars, amphipods and other invertebrates encroach on the melee. In almost half of the sequences from drops down to 2,000 meters the party ends abruptly after three to eight hours, when some creature, usually a large shark, moves in, frightens off the other fish and consumes the
― 71 ―bulk of the bait. In any case the time comes when most of the bait has been eaten. The fish depart, and slowly crabs, sea urchins, snails and other such creatures arrive to complete the task of sanitizing the sea floor.[25]
MLR engineers have also developed a free-vehicle sediment trap, for determining the rate at which surface debris accumulates on the sea floor, and deep-sea current meters. The latter have been used to trace the flow of cold Antarctic bottom water into the Pacific, to measure the flow of water through Drake Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic, to determine that a slow current flows along the bottom of the Tonga Trench, and in various other deep-water sites. The recovery rate of these meters has been exceptionally high, especially for finicky oceanographic instrumentation. Jery B. Graham, for example, who has methodically readied and lowered at least one hundred current meters, has recovered all except one of them. Various release mechanisms have been developed for the several kinds of free-vehicle equipment, as have been a variety of devices for signaling to and from the surfaced item for retrieving it.[*]
[*] A story, perhaps apocryphal, recounts that someone from Scripps dropped a free-vehicle instrument into Lake Tahoe on a research project — and after waiting long after the release time suddenly recalled that fresh water does not corrode magnesium.
Equipment development continues apace; for example, in the early 1970s:
Daniel M. Brown has developed four new systems for sampling marine organisms. One is a conversion of the Isaacs-Kidd mid-water trawl into an opening-closing net. Another is a closing, vertically towed net
― 72 ―built to reduce the handling and “scarring” problems of this style of sampling. The third is a trap that can capture live fish at great depths, hold them in their own cold water, and keep them under pressure. The fourth is a low-cost free-vehicle, drop-camera system developed to photograph schools of fish detected on sonar, thus providing a simplified method of identifying pelagic fish stocks.[26]
Plankton studies have long been an intensive part of CalCOFI studies. Isaacs noted in 1969 that “there is now in the archives at Scripps the greatest and most complete plankton collection of any area in the world.”[27] Since 1967, Abraham Fleminger has been curator of this vast assemblage — more than 60,000 samples. As the collections have grown, taxonomic studies of individual groups have been completed: calanoid copepods by Fleminger; chaetognaths by Angeles Alvariño; Euphausiacea by Edward M. Brinton; pelagic molluscs by John A. McGowan; and Thaliacea by Leo D. Berner.
For many years the spiritual leader of the researchers on plankton was Martin W. Johnson, who became a staff member at Scripps in 1934 and continued to emeritus status in 1962. Besides his wartime work on identifying snapping shrimp cracklings and other underwater noises and on determining that the deep scattering layer was composed of living creatures (see chapter 2), Johnson became interested in identifying water masses through the composition of the plankton organisms within them. These studies were especially cited by the National Academy of Sciences in 1959, when it awarded to Johnson the Alexander Agassiz medal. His particular specialty has long been the larvae of spiny lobsters and of slipper lobsters; through the years he has identified and described the pelagic larvae of all species of lobsters known from the Pacific coast and Hawaii — no
John A. McGowan joined the Scripps staff immediately after receiving his Ph.D. at the institution in 1960. Born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, McGowan had received his bachelor's and master's degrees at Oregon State College. For three years beginning in 1956 McGowan was staff marine biologist for the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, headquartered in Palau. Under the Marine Life Research program, he has been especially interested in gaining more precision in plankton sampling, in order to determine the detailed structure of plankton communities in time and space. Daniel M. Brown and McGowan designed the Opening and Closing Paired Zooplankton Net, nicknamed the “bongo” net. It consists of two parallel nets (that resemble bongo drums) with no bridle, towline, or cable ahead of them that might warn fleet creatures of the approaching net. The nets can also be opened and closed at any desired depth, instead of the former custom of hauling nets from the start of the tow to the surface. From such precise sampling, McGowan and colleagues were able to conclude that communities of animals are found together in a particular water mass, and that boundaries can be drawn for the animal populations just as they can for the separate water masses. By using a drogue that performed diurnal vertical migrations, McGowan and his coworkers were able to sample for the species structure of individual plankton masses and simultaneously for the physical characteristics of the surrounding water.
The region of intensive study during the 1970s, by McGowan and colleagues — including Elizabeth (“Pooh”) Venrick, Lanna Cheng (Lewin), and members of the Food Chain Research Group — has been the North Pacific Central
Edward M. Brinton, also a Scripps alumnus, joined the staff in 1959 and has also participated in detailed plankton studies, with emphasis on euphausiid and sergestid crustaceans. Euphausiids — also known as “krill” — are a significant food source in the ocean, the chief food of the baleen whales and of various commercially valuable fishes. Brinton's group has devoted considerable effort to the taxonomy of these crustaceans, including the identification of the multi-formed larval and adolescent stages. Brinton has also analyzed plankton samples from two expeditions, Piquero in 1969 and Aries in 1971, that were carried out in the same area of the South Pacific at opposite seasons. Using multiple sets of collecting nets, Brinton and colleagues gathered samples from as many as ten depths simultaneously to determine the vertical distribution of plankton within and along the equatorial currents. In the Peru-Chile Current, Brinton found that the “production of life in the surface waters is so great that, upon its dying, sinking, and then decomposing, oxygen is almost completely depleted from a layer beneath the surface.”[29] A localized group of species has developed in this area that is adapted to migrate up and down through the almost anaerobic layer.
Another aspect of plankton studies has been carried out
A new form of summary publication appeared in 1963: the first volume of the CalCOFI Atlas series, under the direction of Hans Klein, “a man of dignity and loyalty, intensely proud of his association with Scripps,”[30] who headed DCPG from 1956 to 1968. The first atlas presented temperature and salinity data for a depth of ten meters for the California Current region, on the data from 1950 to 1959. Others in the series, which in 1976 had reached 24 volumes, presented summaries on the distribution of several zooplankton groups, on the distribution of the larvae of a number of species of fishes, on geostrophic flow, on zooplankton biomass and volume, on temperatures and salinities, on drift-bottle results, and on seasonal sea-level pressure patterns.
Thanks to the fickle sardine, the CalCOFI committee has felt justified in declaring that “the oceanography, the biology of the California Current system, and the variations in these are now the best documented and best understood of any oceanic area in the world.”[31]
To understand that current in its entirety, it seemed appropriate to look even farther, to the forces that push and shape the California Current that in turn determines where the plankton will be that in turn become food for all the living resources from California waters. MLR since the mid-1960s has enlarged its scope to include studies of
Sophisticated equipment and many years of experience and observations — as well as ingenuity — are bringing us closer to real answers to the fluctuations in the weather and in the ocean, to which the glittering sardine responds without knowing why.
NOTES
1. Letter in MLR archives.
2. CalCOFI Progress Report (1950), Introduction, 7–8.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. Letter in MLR archives.
5. Oceanic Observations of the Pacific: 1955, The NORPAC Data (Berkeley and Tokyo: University of California Press and University of Tokyo Press, 1960), Introduction.
6. New York Herald Tribune, 25 August 1955.
7. Minutes of Marine Research Committee, 19 December 1957.
8. CalCOFI Reports, Vol. VII (1 January 1960), 26.
9. News release, 10 January 1950.
10. Letter to Andrew R. Boone, 14 July 1949.
11. Quoted in T. F. Gaskell, Under the Deep Oceans (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1960), 73.
12. John D. Isaacs and Lewis W. Kidd, “A Midwater Trawl,” SIO Reference 51–51 (November 1951), ii.
13. Minutes of MRC, 4 October 1960.
14. CalCOFI Reports, Vol. VII (1 January 1960), 21.
15. Ibid., 211.
16. Ibid., 214–15.
17. Minutes of MRC, 4 October 1960.
18. CalCOFI Reports, Vol. IX (1 January 1962), 9.
19. CalCOFI Reports, Vol. VIII (1 January 1961), 7–8.
20. CalCOFI Progress Report, 1 July 1953 to 31 March 1955, 13.
21. CalCOFI Reports, Vol. VIII (1 January 1961), 7.
22. Los Angeles Times, 22 June 1949.
23. “Remarks on Some Present and Future Buoy Developments,” Transactions, Second International Buoy Technology Symposium, Marine Technology Society (1967), 504.
24. “Active Animals of the Deep-sea Floor,” Scientific American, Vol. 233 (October 1975), 85.
25. Ibid., 86.
26. SIO Annual Report, 1974, 29.
27. CalCOFI Reports, Vol. XIII (1 January 1969), 8.
28. CalCOFI Reports, Vol. XVII (1 October 1974), 15.
29. SIO Annual Report, 1970, 14.
30. CalCOFI Atlas 17 (June 1972), iii.
31. CalCOFI Reports, Vol. XI (1 January 1967), 5.
IV. Making and Chasing Echoes:
The Marine Physical Laboratory
Another project of broad spectrum began in San Diego under the auspices of the University of California even earlier than the Marine Life Research program, but it did not become a unit of Scripps Institution until several years later. This was the Marine Physical Laboratory, the peacetime successor to the University of California Division of War Research (see chapter 2).
The possibility of university scientists' pursuing postwar studies of underwater sound was proposed to President Sproul by the Chief of the Bureau of Ships on 31 January 1946, when UCDWR was about to be dismantled. Roger Revelle, who was serving in the Bureau of Ships office at that time, recalled later that the establishment of the Marine Physical Laboratory “required a pledge of long-term support from the Bureau. This was a radical departure from previous Navy practice and it required much prayerful consideration by the chief of the Bureau, Vice Admiral Edward L. Cochrane.”[1]
Already some of UCDWR's staff members had completed their projects; Francis P. Shepard and Eugene LaFond, for instance, and some of their workers had
It opened on 1 July 1946 with a scientific staff of five people. Under Task 10 of Contract NObs-2074, on 25 November 1946, the Navy Bureau of Ships assigned as research problems of the Marine Physical Laboratory:
Theoretical and experimental investigations of the physical principles governing the generation and propagation of sound in the sea;
Studies of related phenomena as necessary to provide a broad scientific foundation for the above principles;
Investigations of the principles governing the recognition of signals, with special emphasis on underwater sound signals of all kinds.
Carl Eckart, who liked a university environment and had encouraged the establishment of this university laboratory, became the first director of MPL. In 1942 he had joined UCDWR from the physics department of the University of Chicago, where he had made noteworthy contributions in quantum mechanics, particle physics, and thermodynamics. At UCDWR Eckart turned to the complexities of sonar system concepts and also became associate director there in charge of planning and coordinating research.
The new laboratory was set up on Point Loma, alongside
The first research projects at MPL set the pattern for the nature of the laboratory's studies. Senior Research Associate Russell W. Raitt pursued studies on the reflection of supersonic waves from the sea bottom, assisted by Research Fellow William C. Kellogg, Jr. Research Associate Robert W. Young began work on image interference in the presence of refraction, a project that he soon transferred to NEL. Research Associate Leonard N. Liebermann joined the MPL staff in its first year from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, at Eckart's invitation, to study the effect of small-scale inhomogeneities in the sea — very small temperature changes, salinity gradients, and even gas bubbles — on the propagation of sound.
Director Eckart, whose first project was described as a study of the absorption of sound by liquids, gave considerable impetus to all the laboratory's projects. He was especially interested in determining means of finding sound signals buried in other noise, the field that came to be known as signal processing. He also investigated the problem of how sound is scattered from a rough surface. Eckart was the spiritual leader of MPL from its founding until his death in 1973. He tackled each problem with keen insight — and occasional whimsy, such as defining Kelvin's First Law of Oceanographic Instrumentation as: “There is ample driving power in the sea.”
The four directors of the Marine Physical Laboratory in April 1968. From left: Fred N. Spiess, Sir Charles S. Wright, Carl Eckart, and Alfred B. Focke. Photo by Elizabeth Shor.
A mainstay of the laboratory from its beginning was Finn W. Outler, who began as the marine supervisor in 1946 and continued as the technical superintendent and business
When Sverdrup left Scripps in the spring of 1948, Carl Eckart became director of the oceanographic institution, and simultaneously MPL became part of Scripps. Eckart considered his Scripps post temporary, and yielded it readily to Revelle as acting director in March 1950.[*]
[*] Some say he forced the decision by notifying President Sproul that he would no longer be at the director's desk after a certain date. See also chapter 16.
He continued as director of MPL until his sabbatical leave in 1952. Eckart and Revelle invited Sir Charles S. Wright to serve as Eckart's replacement; they had known this physicist, who was born in Toronto in 1887, in his longtime position as Director of Scientific Research for the British Admiralty and, after the war, as scientific advisor on the British Naval Staff in Washington, D.C. Wright's earliest scientific work had been with the ill-fated Scott Antarctic expedition from 1910 to 1913. During World War I he was occupied in “wireless (Radio now) and later ‘Wireless Intelligence.’ ” With the British Admiralty, Wright said that “most of my time involved Geophysics, detectible properties of ships & submarines & their countermeasures. Mines,At MPL in 1955 his successor was Alfred B. Focke, who had joined the laboratory's staff in January 1954 from NEL, where he had worked on studies of very low frequency airborne sound and on the effects of underwater explosions. Focke directed the nuclear depth charge project, Wigwam, soon after assuming the MPL directorship. In 1958 he became technical director of the Pt. Mugu Naval Air Missile Test Center, and from there became a professor at Harvey Mudd College. Fred Noel Spiess, who had joined MPL in the fall of 1952, became director of the laboratory in 1958. A change in research emphasis in the Bureau of Ships led to shifting the major support for MPL to the Office of Naval Research at about that time, so among Spiess's first tasks was separating the facilities of the laboratory from those of NEL, then still funded by the Bureau of Ships. Spiess, like Eckart, served double duty to institution and laboratory, for he continued as director of MPL while he was acting director of Scripps from 1961 to 1963 and director of Scripps from October 1964 to June 1965.
From the handful with which it began, the Marine Physical Laboratory has expanded to about 150 people, has of course outgrown its even enlarged facilities at Point Loma, and now also has offices on the La Jolla campus, where most of the senior staff teach and continue to direct graduate students. The program of this laboratory, which was generated by military need for basic science studies of a complex liquid medium that covers three-quarters of the globe, was defined in 1970 by MPL's senior staff:
… For over twenty years it [the Marine Physical Laboratory] has supported the work of a group of physicists challenged by a desire to understand the oceans and the earth's crust beneath them and interested in the ways in which man can best work on and within the sea. … The program of the laboratory is generated within the staff, giving due consideration to the relevance of the work to basic marine science and to the national interest. In particular this includes concern for the deep ocean problems of the Navy and the basic understanding of the environment needed for it to operate intelligently.[5]
The key to MPL's work is “naval relevance,” a term defined by Robert W. Morse, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research and Development, when he spoke at the dedication of the Nimitz Marine Facilities in March 1966:
In oceanography especially it will often be the scientist who first senses naval relevance in his research. We must make it clear that the term ‘naval relevance’ is not synonymous with military applied oceanography and its possible security restrictions. The scientist must understand that the Navy's problems
― 86 ―with the environment are as large as the oceans themselves and as long range as science itself.[6]
MPL has concentrated on underwater acoustics:
The study of the manner in which sound travels through the sea and the nature of the noises which occur within it. Such studies bring one quickly into contact with the physical, chemical, and biological nature of the sea itself, as well as to a broader look into two related fields — marine geophysics, in which sound signals provide a major tool, and signal processing, in which the goal is to understand the principles which provide the basis for design of sonar systems.[7]
In its early years a major proportion of MPL's work was classified research. The complications and delays in obtaining security clearances for new employees, and the impact of Communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy on these delays, were frequent topics of conversation throughout the 1950s. The situation gradually eased, and MPL staff members contributed to the easing by urging the declassification of many reports and by encouraging publication of research results in nonclassified locations whenever possible. The proportion of classified work is now relatively small. Rapport with the U.S. Navy continues to be very close.
In its pursuit of sound in the ocean — which Revelle once called a “badly designed auditorium” — MPL has produced a good deal of sound itself, and sometimes fury, usually signifying something. “The sound pulses generated by marine physicists,” George Shor said, “have undoubtedly provided more information about the contents and contours of the sea and sea floor than any other single research tool.” The physicists have recorded and analyzed the background
SIGNAL PROCESSING
MPL has distinguished itself in a field that had not been christened when the laboratory began: signal processing, “the theory and practice of applying spatial and/or temporal transformations to samples of an acoustic wavefield to enhance the measurement of a desired signal in the presence of an interfering background.”[8] In other words, how to select the noise that one wants to hear among many others. Signal processing has led to the development of highly sophisticated sonar equipment.
In the 1940s the field was waiting for new technology, something to substitute for bulky and expensive vacuum tubes. High-speed digital circuits appeared in the mid-1950s, and signal processing was fairly launched. MPL was among the pioneers, thanks to Eckart's leadership.
A major contributor was Victor C. Anderson, a lanky physicist who arrived at MPL as a UCLA student in 1947 to investigate the deep scattering layer under Raitt's direction. Anderson proved to be fantastically adept in electronics as well as highly capable of assimilating theoretical approaches. He combined forces with quiet, unobtrusive
Rudnick expanded the concept of “hard clipping,” which was a continuation of the principle of representing the desired signal merely as present or absent, in a continuing series. From this, Anderson in the 1950s, while working on a postdoctoral with Frederick V. Hunt at Harvard, developed a digital technique of rapidly repeating the stored information. Anderson called his system the DELTIC correlator, for Delay Line Time Compressor. The first one was developed for a project in architectural acoustics, but studies of underwater sound could use the technique, and the Navy was promptly interested.
“Those were truly the primitive days of digital technology compared to today,” said Anderson in 1972. “Quantity prices for vacuum tube shift registers were in the 10 to 20 dollars per bit category. Compare that with today's prices for LSI [large scale integrated circuit] random access memories, which are capable of operating at 10 times the speed of those early vacuum tube shift registers and which are now selling in quantity for one cent a bit. We've seen a reduction of a factor of 1000 to 1 in cost alone, let alone the factor of 10 in improved operating speed within the last 15 years.”[9]
The Navy's interest was in ambient noise in the water, and they encouraged other developments in the study of underwater noises. DIMUS, the Digital Multibeam Steering unit, for example, was assembled at MPL. “This was an extension of the two-channel DELTIC correlator concept into a multiple-channel clipped waveform processor,” said Anderson. “Signals from an array of hydrophones are converted into sequences, or one-bit samples, which are delayed in digital memory circuits and then combined in multiple ‘beams,’ each ‘beam’ representing a reinforcement of signals arriving from a specific direction.” Of a series of
“By 1960,” said Anderson, “we were dealing with multiple channel processors using solid-state electronics as discrete components. By mid-1960s, the integrated circuits were filling the gap, and now, of course, we have the MSI [medium scale integrated circuit] and LSI [large scale integrated circuit] technology which has opened new horizons in the implementation of the more sophisticated signal processing techniques.”[10]
It is a far cry indeed from prewar oceanography, when, as Revelle said: “We even had a slogan that the best oceanographic instruments should contain less than one vacuum tube per unit.”[11]
Anderson noted: “Reverberation in the sea presents a major obstacle to the performance of ASW [anti-submarine warfare] sonar systems on the one hand, while it stands as an open portal to oceanographic research on the other. Regardless of which viewpoint is chosen, the incentive for intensive study of this complex phenomenon remains strong.”[12] He has carried out measurements of the distribution of volume-scattering coefficients as a function of depth and frequency in the hope of classifying the larger contributors, such as schools of fishes and dense masses of plankton. He concluded that bubble resonance appeared to be a “dominant scattering mechanism in the deep scattering layer.”[13]
MARINE GEOPHYSICS
The marine geophysical work at MPL was begun by Russell W. Raitt in 1946 with a project to determine how sound waves are reflected from within the sea floor. He first used oscillograms of bottom echoes gathered by Jeffery Frautschy while at UCDWR. Raitt quickly determined that the bottom reflects sound waves diffusely — indeed complexly. By 1947 Maurice Ewing (then at Columbia University, before Lamont Geological Observatory was established there) had shown that low frequency sound waves would penetrate the bottom and that reflections from layers beneath the sea floor could be obtained, thus providing information on the structure.
In 1948 Raitt began using TNT charges to study sub-bottom layers. At that time, and for a number of years afterward, excess explosives were readily available through the Navy, without cost, for research purposes. Raitt began with five-pound charges, but he soon enlarged his scope to fifty-pound TNT bombs. His first attempt at refraction measurements was with Sofar bombs set to sink and detonate when the ship had moved about ten miles away, but the charges proved to be detonating too deep to produce a signal in the low frequencies needed. Raitt then devised a successful refraction method by using a whaleboat as the shooting ship, by using slow-burning time fuses to set off the charges at shallow depth, and by floating the hydrophones at nearly neutral buoyancy one hundred to two hundred feet beneath the surface, streamed well behind the noisy ship. Those who wallowed in the whaleboat, however, did not enjoy it, and Raitt admitted that “experience of several cruises demonstrated that this technique was practicable only when restricted to areas near islands or other land points where lee from wind and waves provided sufficient protection for whaleboat operation.”[14]
Russell W. Raitt throwing a one-half-pound TNT charge from the Spencer F. Baird, Capricorn Expedition, 1952.
So the Paolina-T or the Saluda (a racing yacht of NEL, also used for research) or the E. W. Scripps was called into service as the shooting ship to accompany NEL's PCE(R)-857, and Raitt began accumulating refraction profiles throughout the southern California borderland. He then joined Midpac Expedition in 1950 for deep-sea refraction work — on which he recorded 1,200 miles of seismic profiles — and for seismic surveys of atolls. Two years later he also sailed on Capricorn Expedition, where he enthusiastically called for larger and larger shots until he had used up 41,409 pounds of TNT, including one single outburst of 480 pounds. As the empty powder boxes accumulated, some of the adept members of the group occupied their spare time with fashioning furniture from them.
George G. Shor, Jr., joined the MPL staff in the fall of 1953, having become interested in Raitt's reports on his deep-sea results, and because the chance of getting to exotic spots like Adak and Rapa seemed much more exciting than analyzing seismic data for an oil company probably based in Houston. He hasn't changed his mind in twenty-odd years. Raitt and Shor, wanderers both, have separately and together crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean from the Aleutians to New Zealand and the Indian Ocean from Mombasa to Djakarta. They are usually planning the next expedition before they have worked up the results of the previous one(s) — and have often departed without even a remorseful glance at the unfinished data. In this they are not alone among oceanographers.
These geophysicists have bombarded the sea floor with sound waves, in the interest of delineating the features within the crust and to the mantle of the earth. Whenever possible they are seeking a signal returning from the Mohorovičić discontinuity, the boundary between crust and mantle. The most satisfactory method for producing the necessary high-energy, low-frequency waves continues
For a while the Arcer was favored; its energy source was electricity. One version — with 60 capacitors and 60 rectifiers producing 10,000 volts — was put together with “the perfection of a fine Swiss watch” by Harold Sammuli and Baron Thomas in 1968 for use on Styx Expedition. Sammuli, who is of Finnish ancestry, believed in reincarnation and approached the Arcer with less trepidation than most others. The Arcer was expanded to reach 18,000 volts, too hazardous for comfort, and it turned out to be not the best sound source, so it was abandoned for other methods. It was spectacular in use, especially at night, for it lit up a patch of sea behind the ship with a stunning electric-blue flash.
Another method, the airgun, has proved to be a very useful tool. Simple and versatile, it creates a succession of bubble pulses under water by means of an air compressor. The records derived from the continuously operating airgun draw a profile of reflections from the upper layers of the sea-floor sediments.
Sonobuoys offer another means of tracing sub-bottom layers while the ship is under way. The sonobuoy was originally devised as a submarine detector to be used from an airplane. It consists of a listening device (a hydrophone) and a radio transmitter to relay the hydrophone output to the airplane. An array of sonobuoys of various radio frequencies can be dropped from an airplane to monitor noises in the ocean. When flung off a ship, a sonobuoy provides a receiver for sound waves generated at the ship and transmitted through the sea floor as the ship moves away. The Navy has been generous with sonobuoys for such researches.
The various seismic reflection and refraction techniques, used by Scripps and by other institutions, have shown that the structure of all the ocean basins is quite similar.
Raitt's early refraction studies established the average thickness of the sediment column throughout the Pacific Ocean, results that were unexpected in the 1950s and were only understood much later when geologists realized that sediments are constantly destroyed as the sea floor shifts outward from spreading centers and into the trenches.
In 1964, Harry Hess of Princeton noted that some seismic records off California and Hawaii indicated that the velocity of sound within the mantle is faster in an east-west direction than in a north-south one. Anomalously, this does not correspond with the structural trends of the Pacific coast. Raitt and Shor set out to confirm the existence of what is technically called anisotropy (which Raitt pronounces “ani so' tropy” while Shor says “ani' sotropy”). The task requires an elaborate pattern of shooting and receiving, such that at least one-half the arc of a circle 30 miles in radius is included in the recording. (Twenty years ago, in the open ocean, a ship wasn't always sure of its position within 30 miles! An expanding Loran network and satellite navigation have made possible much more precise navigation now.)
The most intensive effort at proving anisotropy was in 1966, on Show Expedition, which had five ships, and personnel, equipment, and expertise from four institutions (Scripps, University of Hawaii, Oregon State University, and University of Wisconsin — hence the expedition's
There is a Jekyll-and-Hyde effect in shipboard communication, which is probably caused by Neptune's resentment at the invasion of his realm. Somehow it seems that any perfectly reasonable oceanographer — a fine fellow on land to swap sea stories with, and who sounds most rational there when discussing intricate details of equipment — becomes an impossible tyrant and tyro across a few miles of ocean when he is condensed into a voice or message over the radio. All of one's own shipboard complications are so straightforward to explain; all of the other guy's are beyond comprehension, and could be so easily resolved.
Such a Neptune effect complicated the multiple Show Expedition, as it sometimes has others. Ships became lost; buoys drifted contrary to supposedly known currents; confusion reigned. But the records did confirm anisotropy.
The complications and the costs of multi-ship expeditions have led to designing means of recording anisotropy from a single ship, using moored sonobuoys and balloon-suspended radio transmitters. The rigmarole of simultaneously setting out moorings down to the sea floor as deep as three miles, releasing upward a 20-foot balloon, and casting outward a hydrophone array is very much like a three-ring circus, although rather more colorful in language.
Gerald B. Morris coped with the complications of the balloon-and-buoy system on Scan Expedition in 1969; Morris became chief scientist abruptly, after Russell W. Raitt had to be airlifted to Tahiti when he broke his leg while boarding a longboat at Pitcairn Island. Morris found numerous problems: “The balloons occasionally fell victim to intense squalls, sharks bit through the mooring line setting the buoy adrift, and fish actually ate large parts of the styrofoam floats.”[16]
Raitt's enthusiasm for seismic work at sea has never flagged. From Tasaday Expedition in 1973 he wrote to Shor:
Tasaday leg 6 was extraordinarily successful refraction-wise, having completed 44 refraction stations. … In the western part of the Bay of Bengal, many sonobuoys were rendered useless by a tremendous low-frequency noise, evidently caused by a large current shear between the surface and hydrophone depth, which produced strumming noise on the hydrophones. We had considerable success with primitive hydrophone balancing in which the ship's galley-force were very cooperative by providing us with a fantastic variety of bottles for hydrophone and cable floats. The most successful combination seemed to be a ketchup bottle supporting the hydrophone and Tabasco sauce bottles supporting the leader. Unfortunately, consumption of Tabasco sauce is very small on the T. Washington in spite of my efforts to popularize it and we were forced to resort to unsatisfactory substitutes, such as mustard, pickle and garlic-salt bottles.
Other exciting aspects of the cruise were being chased successively by a Burmese gun-boat, which was seen to man its guns but didn't fire on us, and then by a severe tropical storm, which may have been called a typhoon in other parts of the world. …
HEAT FLOW
The first successful instrument for measuring the flow of heat through the ocean floor was laboriously devised at
One of the disadvantages of the original Bullard probe was the necessity of taking a separate sediment core for thermal conductivity measurements immediately after the probe lowering, which not only required considerable extra time but also could occur some distance from the probe measurement because of ship drift. Scripps and its frequent competitor in creativity, Lamont Geological Observatory, naturally devised slightly different techniques for solving this problem. The Scripps approach was to attach a conductivity needle to a slider on the probe, which measured the conductivity at an average depth of 50 cm below the surface of the sediment. Lamont developed a heat probe attached to the piston corer.
The streamlined instrument devised by Charles Corry, Carl Dubois, and Victor Vacquier in 1968 has proved to be a convenient device at sea, even in weather scarcely comfortable for its handlers: “with the ship rolling up to 35° and in wind speeds up to 60 knots.”[17] The heat probe appears to be more susceptible to breakage or bending on deck than on the sea floor.
The results from the first measurements of heat flow through the sea floor were among several surprises gathered on the first major Scripps expedition, Midpac, in 1950: the temperature gradient was very similar to that measured on land, whereas it had been expected to be considerably less. “The only adequate source of heat that has been suggested is radioactivity within the earth,” noted Bullard,[18]
Other surprises were in store, as scattered measurements of heat flow were taken on various expeditions in Atlantic and Pacific. From Capricorn Expedition in 1952 Maxwell and Revelle reported an unusually high value on the broad topographic feature first known as the Albatross Plateau (part of the East Pacific Rise), which was not recognized until later as having been taken on a ridge. About the same time, Bullard, then at the National Physical Laboratory in England, found a high value in the Atlantic Ocean. As measurements continued, a pattern began to emerge. Heat flow on the crests of the East Pacific Rise and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and in the Gulf of California, was generally higher than elsewhere. Geologists were examining these regions closely and by every means at their disposal, as these anomalous regions appeared to be the foci of intensive sea-floor activity. As theories developed around the concept of sea-floor spreading, the measurements of heat flow fitted into the emerging picture: high heat flow indicated areas of more intensive crustal activity.
The development of a convenient shipboard device for measuring the flow of heat resulted in the gathering of more measurements at sea than on land. In 1967 Von Herzen (by then at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) and Vacquier estimated that only 11 percent of the 1,300 measurements to that time had been taken ashore. In an ingenious use of the shipboard technique, these researchers carried a temperature probe to Africa and obtained “land” heat-flow measurements aboard a Fisheries Research Unit vessel in Lake Malawi in the east African rift zone. Later Vacquier and John Sclater used a temperature probe in Lake Titicaca in South America. The heat-flow enthusiasts
MAGNETISM
Recording the magnetism harbored in sea floor rocks was a pioneering venture of Scripps and MPL. Jeffery D. Frautschy participated in the early stages of compiling a set of equipment from parts of surplus units, in consultation with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. In 1952, Ronald G. Mason joined Capricorn Expedition, at the invitation of Revelle, following a meeting of the Institute of Geophysics in La Jolla. On that trip Mason recorded more than 4,000 miles of magnetic profiles, although he noted that such lines “have limited application since they give no indication of the lateral extent or direction of anomalous magnetic trends and therefore provide no basis for quantitative geological interpretation.”[19] Also on Capricorn Expedition, Mason made detailed magnetic surveys of small areas of special interest, such as the Tonga Trench.
Sir Charles Wright particularly encouraged the continuation of a magnetic program at MPL, and Scripps ships began towing magnetometers frequently. In August 1955, Scripps researchers seized an opportunity for a detailed magnetic survey by way of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey ship Pioneer on its hydrographic survey off southern California on a series of east-west lines about five miles apart. Arthur D. Raff and Maxwell Silverman, both alumni of Capricorn Expedition, alternated aboard ship to keep the equipment working. The magnetometer was described by Mason as a
The chart of magnetic intensities from the Pioneer survey startled geologists. Before them lay evidence of great north-south lineations and a single right-lateral offset of 155 kilometers along the Murray fracture zone off southern California. The survey was “the first attempt to make a detailed magnetic map of an extensive area of the oceans,” said Bullard and Mason. “The results are of exceptional interest in that they reveal major structural trends of which there is little or no indication in the topography, and they provide evidence for unsuspected horizontal displacements along some of the faults of the north-east Pacific greater than any that have so far been observed over the continents.”[21]
Mason returned to the Imperial College of Science in London in 1962, but the magnetic program continued at MPL under the guidance of Victor Vacquier. During World War II he had developed the flux-gate magnetometer, the most sensitive method then known for measuring a magnetic field — which, among other uses, could detect submarines. Later, with Sperry Gyroscope Company, Vacquier developed highly accurate gyrocompasses. When he joined the MPL staff in 1957, from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, he promptly relieved sea-weary Raff on the Pioneer. He then began his own modifications of a borrowed bulky proton magnetometer, which he first improved by separating the amplifying and tuning equipment from the towed “fish” and placing it aboard ship. To get away from magnetic objects such as automobiles while calibrating and testing equipment, Vacquier found a quiet spot under the eucalyptus trees
In 1958 Vacquier made a magnetic survey along the Pioneer Ridge north of the Murray fracture zone and there found the magnetic anomalies offset 265 kilometers — in the wrong direction, i.e., left lateral or opposite to that of the Murray. The next discovery was the vast Mendocino fracture zone where the greatest offset of all was found: 1,185 kilometers, also left lateral. Revelle later called these results “the most important geophysical discovery of the past ten years.”[22]
The structural geologists found that the magnetic lineations were a valuable addition to the data on the history of the sea floor. In 1963, while analyzing magnetic surveys in the Indian Ocean, F. J. Vine and D. H. Matthews at Cambridge University “suggested that [Harry] Hess' idea that a strip of new ocean floor was continually being formed on the axis of the mid-ocean ridge would provide a double tape recording of the intensity and the reversals of the earth's magnetic field. Each magnetic stripe was magnetized when that piece of ocean floor was formed in the central valley on the ridge axis.”[23]
During the 1960s the Scripps magnetic program became part of the routine shipboard measurements and the data were coordinated and tabulated with other geological information by the Geological Data Center. MPL has continued development work on equipment for magnetic measurements and has carried out special programs using magnetometers. Vacquier, for example, conducted detailed surveys of seamounts for measuring the orientation of their magnetization, surveys that showed that the Pacific plate
PLATFORMS AND VEHICLES
MPL's staff includes several people who, as Spiess said, “want to build something and take it out and run it.” Over the years they have produced an astonishing array of devices, under a collection of contrived acronyms — the kind of ocean-going gear that frequently draws puzzled queries from passing ships.
Flip is the most widely known: the Floating Instrument Platform. It is defined as a manned ocean buoy, and its purpose is to gain access to the relatively calm water below the wave-churned surface. This it does by standing on end, or flipping upright, in which position it exposes 55 feet above water and extends 300 feet below the surface. Upright it becomes a stable platform that moves up and down only a small fraction — about five percent — of the height of the passing waves. Designed originally, and successfully, for fine-scale studies of sound sources in the water, it has proved “more valuable to the Navy than when it was first launched.” Those who work from Flip appreciate her stability for their own sake.
Flip, the floating instrument platform of the Marine Physical Laboratory, in its working position.
Submariners had long known of the advantages of working beneath the wave zone. But submarines are expensive research tools, and do not hold a set depth except under way. Allyn Vine at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution once suggested standing a submarine on end for research studies. In the late 1950s war-experienced
The first trials (with some trepidations) took place in Dabob Bay in Puget Sound in late July of 1962. There the flipping on end and the return to horizontal were entirely successful, and so they have continued.
When being towed in the horizontal position, the craft is stabilized by concrete and steel ballast well below the horizontal center line. The transition to vertical is accomplished by filling ballast tanks with sea water, which takes about twenty minutes. Personnel on Flip always stay on the outside platform during a flip, for safety's sake, each with one foot braced on the deck, the other on the bulkhead, as the craft shifts. All permanent equipment is on trunnions so that everything can manipulate a 90-degree turn. Mistakes rarely happen, but once an unnoticed can of food became lodged under the galley range during a flip, which prevented that unit from turning, so, of course, the simmering stew was flung all over the neatly made bunks.
Flip has chiefly been used for studies of sound propagation in the water; she was designed, in fact, and used by Fred Fisher for studies of the “twinkle” of a sound source
ORB and RUM are a pair of MPL vehicles that often work as a team. The Remote Underwater Manipulator (RUM) was first intended to work alone, crawling about on the sea floor at depths down to 6,000 meters to gather objects and samples, to take photographs, and to install deep-sea instruments. Victor C. Anderson began assembling it in 1958, starting with a Marine Corps self-propelled rifle carrier; to this he added a boom and a steel claw that could be pivoted in any direction out to about five meters to pick up objects. The gasoline engine was replaced with a pair of heavy electric motors in an oil-filled compartment. Sonar was installed, and a powerful light and four television cameras for sea-floor surveillance from a portable shore station (actually a bus). Power for RUM and sensor signals were provided by way of a coaxial cable 8,000 meters long. Early tests in shallow water were only moderately successful, and RUM was set aside for other projects.
By December 1967, ORB (Ocean Research Buoy) had been developed as a platform for suspending equipment and particularly as a service vehicle for RUM. ORB is a barge 45 feet by 65 feet with a large center well through which the ten-ton RUM is operated by means of a constant-tension winch. It has two laboratories, a galley and messhall, and sleeping quarters for twelve people. “Loading RUM is a somewhat unconventional operation,” its designers wrote. “RUM is first lowered to the bottom of the bay by a crane. Then ORB is moved to a position over RUM, divers attach the strain cable, and RUM is lifted up through the well doors.”[24] Unconventional or not, it does work. RUM has been used for taking cores at depths down to 1,900 meters, for measurements of sediment properties in place, for underwater photography, for recovering equipment at depths down to 1,260 meters, and for sampling deep-sea biological communities. It has the advantage of being able to stay on the sea floor at work much longer than manned submersibles. On one of its earliest sea trials, in 1970, RUM placed two small sonar reflectors on the sea floor, crawled away from them, and returned to find and retrieve them. It also found a third sea-floor object:
… a can of a well-known brand of stewed tomatoes. … The can was found to be the dwelling of a small and very frightened octopus. We feel [said RUM's inventors] that this is one of the first times that a mobile biological specimen has been selectively retrieved by a remotely controlled manipulator as well as record of the first sea-going anti-pollution effort by such a unit.[25]
Anderson also developed the Benthic Laboratory, first used as a communications center for Sealab II in 1965 (see chapter 6). The laboratory housed electronic equipment
Another of MPL's novel contrivances is the Deep Tow (an attempt to name this FISH, for Fully Instrumented Submersible Housing, has not been entirely successful, although almost any slender object towed behind a ship is called a fish anyway). The Deep Tow is a mapping and navigation system in the form of a package of instruments that can be lowered and towed close to the sea floor to make detailed surveys. Development of such a unit began early in the 1960s, chiefly by Maurice S. McGehee and Dwight (“Tony”) E. Boegeman, Jr. The first design problem was in the motion of the towed unit, so a roll meter, a pitch meter, and a flow meter were developed. Upward-looking and downward-looking sonars were added, and these were followed by a variety of oceanic instruments.
In 1967 one of the units was lost in 3,000 meters of water when the tow wire parted. Its exact location was known, so “after quick development of some special equipment,” Spiess and others returned to the spot six months later and successfully retrieved their unit with the aid of a second one — no small feat in ocean navigation. A special
Surveys by Deep Tow have been made in trenches and canyons, over seamounts and fans, in the Pacific and in the Atlantic. The array of instruments can include precision navigation equipment, side-looking sonar, a low-frequency sound source for seismic studies, underwater cameras, television cameras, thermometers, and a magnetometer towed behind the “fish.” All these instruments can be put to work on command and be monitored from the towing ship by way of the coaxial tow cable. For precise navigation of the ship and the Deep Tow, acoustic transponders, which answer to sound pulses from the towed unit, are placed on the sea floor. The precision capability of the instrument package was well demonstrated in 1971, when it was able to pinpoint the wreckage of five munitions ships that had been pulverized during munitions disposal. Geologic features as small as ten meters across have been mapped.
As with many of MPL's devices, the Deep Tow has more than one application: its capability of fine-scale surveying makes it equally useful to geologic mapping and to locating objects, such as shipwrecks or patches of manganese nodules, on the ocean floor.
NOTES
1. “The Age of Innocence and War in Oceanography,” Oceans Magazine, Vol. I, No. 3 (March 1969), 12.
2. San Diego Union, September 1946.
3. San Diego Union, 10 October 1946.
4. Letter to Victor C. Anderson, 13 August 1975; written two and one-half months before Wright died.
5. Memorandum of 5 May 1970.
6. Quoted in Larry L. Booda, “Research — But Emphasis on Education,” Undersea Technology (May 1966), 37.
7. SIO Annual Report, 1967, 29.
8. V. C. Anderson, “The First Twenty Years of Acoustic Signal Processing,” Journal of Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 51, No. 3, Part 2 (1972), 1063.
9. Ibid., 1064.
10. Ibid., 1065.
11. “The Age of Innocence and War in Oceanography,” Oceans Magazine, Vol. I, No. 3 (March 1969), 7.
12. “Frequency Dependence of Reverberation in the Ocean,” Journal of Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 41, No. 6 (June 1967), 1467.
13. Ibid., 1474.
14. MPL Quarterly Report, 1 April-30 June 1949, 1.
15. “Explosion Seismology at Sea,” Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, Vol. 48, No. 2 (June 1967), 416.
16. SIO Annual Report, 1970, 15.
17. Charles Corry, Carl Dubois, and Victor Vacquier, “Instrument for Measuring Terrestrial Heat Flow Through the Ocean Floor,” Journal of Marine Research, Vol. 26, No. 2 (1968), 168.
18. “The Flow of Heat Through the Floor of the Ocean,” The Sea, Vol. 3 (New York and London: Interscience Publishers, 1963), 229.
19. “A Magnetic Survey off the West Coast of the United States Between Latitudes 32° and 36° N and Longitudes 121° and 128°,” Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 1 (1958), 320.
20. Ibid., 321.
21. “The Magnetic Field over the Oceans,” The Sea, Vol. 3 (New York and London: Interscience Publishers, 1963), 194.
22. Memorandum to Vacquier, 16 January 1964.
23. Edward Bullard, “The Emergence of Plate Tectonics: A Personal View,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Vol. 3 (1975), 19.
24. V. C. Anderson, D. K. Gibson, and O. H. Kirsten, “Rum II — Remote Underwater Manipulator (A Progress Report),” Marine Technology Society, Sixth Annual Preprints, Vol. 1 (1970), 2.
25. Ibid., 4.
V. Seeing the Light:
The Visibility Laboratory
During 1948 a research group organized and directed by optical physicist Seibert Quimby Duntley at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began a program of research on the penetration of daylight into oceans and lakes and on the visual sighting of underwater objects by swimmers and aviators. This group, which Duntley named the Visibility Laboratory, began its work under a contract from the U.S. Navy's new Office of Naval Research, which had replaced its wartime Office of Scientific Research and Inventions.
The Visibility Laboratory began its research in optical oceanography at sea off Key West, Florida, and in Lake Winnepesaukee, New Hampshire. That pattern of experimentation has continued without interruption to the present time, although the site of the ocean experiments was transferred from Key West to San Diego in 1951 with the beginning of a collaboration with Walter Munk of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Visibility Laboratory research at Lake Winnepesaukee continued through 1966, but Crater Lake in Oregon, Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho, and various sites in California also came into use for certain
In the winter of 1951–52, the Visibility Laboratory was invited to become part of Scripps Institution. Space was not available in La Jolla, but the laboratory was able to obtain the use of a group of unoccupied Navy barracks buildings situated directly across McClellan Road from the Field Annex that Scripps then operated on Point Loma. The Visibility Laboratory's principal operation is still at that site, although it also has facilities and personnel in Sverdrup Hall and in UCSD's Muir College.
Funds for moving the laboratory to San Diego and for equipping and refurbishing the newly rented buildings were provided by the U.S. Navy. Duntley, while continuing his teaching at M.I.T., prepared the necessary Scripps contract proposal for outfitting the Point Loma facilities and conducting research in them. The resulting contract called for equal funding by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force.
The interior of the buildings on Point Loma was designed by Duntley in the winter of 1951–52 and construction began late in April. That month, Duntley employed a longtime friend from college days, John E. Tyler, to represent him at Point Loma while he continued to teach and operate the Visibility Laboratory at M.I.T. Daily telephone conversations with Tyler enabled Duntley to supervise the renovation of the leased buildings and to direct the procurement of the necessary furnishings and equipment with contract funds.
The new facility on Point Loma was completed in September of 1952 when Duntley arrived from M.I.T. with three graduate students and several staff members, to begin operating the Visibility Laboratory as a part of Scripps.
The Visibility Laboratory immediately began coordinated parallel measurements of the optical properties of the ocean and the atmosphere. Scripps ships and an Air
The Visibility Laboratory has always been interested in specific applications, including some needs of the military, as well as a wide variety of interests for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in connection with manned space flights, interests of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the remote sensing of marine resources, and concerns of the U.S. Coast Guard with the optimization of search-and-rescue operations and with the lighting of harbors and waterways at night. The Visibility Laboratory also has studied air collision avoidance for the Department of Transportation, the Department of Justice, and the Airline Pilots Association. In the realm of basic research, the laboratory's continuing research in optical oceanography has long been supported by the National Science Foundation.
The research program of the Visibility Laboratory did not originate in 1948 or in 1952. The program actually began in the autumn of 1940 when Dr. Duntley, then in his fourth year of teaching at M.I.T., became a member of a committee of scientists from M.I.T. and Harvard, chaired by President Karl T. Compton of M.I.T., that was concerned with the technical aspects of defending the continental United States against possible air raids like those that
In the early deliberations of the Compton Committee, Duntley suggested that the ability of pilots and bombardiers to see specific objects on the ground should be predictable on the basis of optical data concerning the objects and their lighting, the clarity of the atmosphere, and measurable threshold properties of human vision. Such predictions would enable defenses to be planned accurately and operated optimally. That suggestion resulted in the establishment of a government-sponsored civilian research organization staffed by Harvard and M.I.T. personnel and called the Passive Defense Laboratory. That organization had three divisions devoted, respectively, to camouflage structures, camouflage materials, and visibility. The latter division was under the direction of Duntley.
The Passive Defense Laboratory existed for only one year. With the advent of war in December 1941, the divisions concerned with structures and materials were taken over by the United States Army and moved to Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. The Visibility division became a section of the Optics Division of the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in President Roosevelt's wartime Office for Emergency Management. Duntley was part of that section. The concept that he had initiated in the Passive Defense Laboratory became the central core of the wartime visibility program.
After the war, Duntley wrote a book about the wartime researches in visibility, and he participated in occasional committee activities concerned with peacetime applications
The visibility of submerged objects is greatly affected by water waves. In seeking information on waves, Duntley met Walter Munk of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and became a frequent visitor to La Jolla. Together they continued electrical measurements of water wave slopes that had been begun by Duntley in fresh water at Diamond Island. The experiments at sea were conducted from the Scripps vessel Paolina-T. Professor Duntley's growing interest in optical oceanography and his friendship with persons at Scripps culminated in moving the Visibility Laboratory to San Diego in 1952.
A purse seiner of San Diego's tuna fleet. Photo by Joanne Silberner.
VI. A Potpourri:
The Institute of Marine Resources
In the early 1950s another fish story began. This one, like the statewide CalCOFI project (see chapter 3), also began at the urging of representatives of commercial fisheries; it became the Institute of Marine Resources (IMR) of the University of California, headquartered at Scripps.
The new project was founded much more slowly than had been the sardine project. In the spring of 1951 Roger Revelle, at the urging of members of the Marine Research Committee, pointed out to University President Robert G. Sproul that marine fisheries required long-term research:
The Committee has been concerned with the fact that the Marine Life Research program, because it was tacitly assumed to be of a temporary nature, has been inadequately staffed with mature scientists of outstanding competence. It is now quite obvious to all concerned that the problems being studied can only be solved by a concerted attack over a period of many years led by experienced and creative scientists. The need for such scientists is particularly great in the biological aspects of the Marine Life program. We
― 118 ―have been unable to enlist such men on temporary research appointments, but there is convincing evidence for the belief that they could be attracted by the prestige and security of Faculty positions.[1]
In enlisting the support of Emil Mrak, then chairman of the Division of Food Technology of the Berkeley College of Agriculture (later Chancellor at the Davis campus), Revelle commented: “I am convinced that a very large percentage of the potential resources of the sea are not now being used for anyone's benefit and that such beneficial utilization could be greatly improved by scientific and technological development.” He went on to note that “the problem is an extremely complex one, however, and involves far more than oceanography.”[2]
The solution, Revelle felt, would be to establish a university-wide institute, which he recommended be based at Scripps Institution and should draw upon the expertise of other campuses as well.[*]
[*] An interdepartmental or an intercampus approach is implicit in the University of California's definition of an institute (but not of an institution).
At that time, such applied research was outside the usual role of the university, except in the field of agriculture, so a certain amount of soul-searching was necessary within the university administration.Among the early supporters of the institute was Wilbert M. (“Wib”) Chapman, then director of research for the American Tunaboat Association, and earlier an active founder of CalCOFI. Chapman proposed a university Institute of Marine Fisheries to the State Assembly Interim Committee of Fish and Game, which met in San Diego in October 1951 to consider legislation that might help the fisheries industry, especially tuna fishing. Chapman's proposal was quickly translated into a college of fisheries by legislators and reporters.
In the early 1950s the California fishing industry was the largest in the United States. Tuna fishing had begun in San Diego before World War I, but only for the albacore tuna; it expanded into the fishery for the wide-ranging yellowfin tuna in the late 1920s. Specialized vessels and improved freezing methods brought a further expansion after World War II. By 1947 San Diego's sixty-million-dollar business made it the “tuna capitol of the world.”
President Sproul was cognizant of these points when he wrote to Chapman early in 1952:
I should like to reassure you, and through you the members of the fishing industry as a whole, that the University of California is well aware of the importance of the industry. … If it sometimes appears that progress is made at too slow a pace, it is only because the University is unwilling to slight a careful study of the complex problems of coordination which always accompany new ventures.[3]
Sproul had appointed a special committee in October 1951, under the chairmanship of Baldwin M. Woods of UCLA, to look into the proposed new unit, already being called the Institute of Marine Resources. That committee soon reported that it was “of the opinion that an Institute of the type mentioned should be established. … The field of investigation proposed by Director Revelle and other members of the Committee is of University type and it is the belief of the Committee that no other agency in the State is so well qualified as the University to undertake the task.”[4]
The function of the institute, as defined by Woods's committee, would be “to foster research, education, and public services by the University of California in the development of fisheries and other resources of the sea for the
In March 1952, the University Committee on Educational Policy of the Academic Senate met in La Jolla to consider the institute, and it also reported favorably. In the 1953-54 university budget, funds were allotted to launch the Institute of Marine Resources in January 1954. The allocation was $22,572 — nowhere near what Revelle had recommended as a minimum, or “core,” budget of $120,000. This was in spite of an earlier statement by the committee chaired by Woods that “the Committee doubts the wisdom of initiating the Institute unless a sum approximately of this magnitude can be had.”
Revelle was optimistic, however, and predicted that “the Institute of Marine Resources may become larger than Scripps Institution in the next five years.”[5]
IMR began and has continued as an interdisciplinary and intercampus organization. Beyond the obvious interest of Scripps in marine-oriented research, the colleges of engineering at Berkeley and at UCLA and members of the Division of Food Technology at Berkeley (now at Davis) were included from the beginning. Projects already established on the Scripps campus were moved into the fledgling institute, for administrative purposes. (MLR was not one of these, in spite of a tacit assumption in the early years of IMR that logically that program would be incorporated.)
An executive committee was established, consisting of the director of Scripps; the director of IMR, who was to be a faculty member at Scripps, appointed by the regents
In January 1954, Rear Admiral Charles D. Wheelock (Ret.) became the acting director of IMR. Wheelock had joined the Scripps staff five months earlier as a research engineer, after some thirty years of Navy career as an engineering duty officer and, just before his retirement, as the inspector general for the Bureau of Ships. He was appointed director of IMR in 1958, and held the post until his retirement in 1961. The following year Milner B. (“Bennie”) Schaefer became the institute's director.
An international fisheries expert, Schaefer concerned himself for many years especially with population dynamics of fisheries, and the economics of the industry. He also did research on marine pollution and on the disposal of radioactive wastes, and he served on committees concerned with the use of ocean resources and with the application of science and technology to economic development. From July 1967 until February 1969, Schaefer served as science adviser to Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall, then returned to continue as director of IMR until his death in July 1970. In April 1971, John D. Isaacs became the director of IMR.
The first two faculty appointments in IMR were Harold S. Olcott in food technology at Berkeley, and H. William Menard in marine geology at Scripps, both in 1955. Menard's studies, long supported under IMR, are described in this narrative in chapter 12.
An umbrella as broad as IMR inevitably takes in projects that began in other ways and places. Its structure is diffuse,
Over the years the philosophy of the institute has inevitably changed somewhat, although always keeping in mind the dictum phrased by Schaefer: “What distinguishes the study of marine resources from other branches of marine science is the fact that the word ‘resource’ implies economic and social considerations.”[6] Those considerations in California have carried IMR researchers to the beach, the market place, and the sewer; to the high seas and the floor of the ocean; and to pondering the law of the sea and the law of the land.
KELP STUDIES
One of the first projects moved into IMR was the study of giant kelp. The verdant forests of this overgrown alga, Macrocystis pyrifera, are found scattered along the Pacific coast (in the northern hemisphere) from Sitka, Alaska, to Magdalena Bay in Baja California, Mexico. The dense growths — rare jungles in the sparsely vegetated ocean — attract many fishes into their protection and provide food and shelter for crustaceans, mollusks, and other invertebrates. Sea lions glide among the stipes after unwary fish, and, in a few places, sea otters loll in the surface fronds or seek their food among the holdfasts.
Kelp itself, on the west coast, was first used as fertilizer, as animal food supplement, and for iodine, inorganic salts, and organic solvents. As early as 1911 the Bureau of Soils of the U.S. Department of Agriculture supported a study by W. C. Crandall, then secretary of the Marine Biological Association (which founded Scripps Institution), to estimate the quantity of kelp off southern California. During World War I, Crandall advised the California Fish and Game, Commission on regulating the harvesting season.
In 1929 Kelco Company in San Diego began gathering the great fronds of Macrocystis for algin, a colloid used as an emulsifier and suspender to stabilize, smooth, and thicken many products such as ice cream, pharmaceuticals, paints, and the foam of beer. The distinctive kelp cutters mow swaths through the kelp beds, mechanically cutting about four feet below the surface and gathering the fronds amidships with mechanized loaders. Because of the plant's rapid growth — determined by Kenneth A. Clendenning to be the fastest of any plant on land or in the sea — an area can usually be harvested again in four months.
In 1948 diver-biologist and graduate student Conrad Limbaugh began a study of the kelp beds on his own, under what he called “primitive” methods of investigation. He was greatly boosted the next year by a fellowship grant from Kelco Company to determine whether the cutting of kelp did, as claimed by sportfishermen, reduce the numbers of fish. (Kelco had provided a fellowship for the kelp studies of J. Frederick Wohnus at Scripps from 1941 to 1943.) Limbaugh studied kelp beds at many points along the coast and islands from Monterey down to the San Benito Islands in Baja California, but he concentrated on the thick La Jolla kelp beds. He was among the first to use self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (Scuba) for scientific investigations, and he was an early Scripps developer of the techniques of underwater photography. On the kelp study
But the beds of giant kelp were declining all along the California coast, to the equal dismay of sportfishermen and harvesters. Controversy swirled over the causes of the decline, so the California Department of Fish and Game, which regulated harvesting, funded a five-year study, beginning in 1956, through IMR. The broad project, directed by Wheeler North from 1958, was intended to determine the reasons for the dwindling of the kelp beds, the effect of pollution on them, the effects of various methods of harvesting, the problems of frond litter on beaches, the possibilities of culturing other strains of kelp, and, again, the effects of harvesting on fishing. Kelco Company continued its support, with emphasis on habitat improvement; the State Water Control Board from 1957 financed a study of the effects of sewage discharge on kelp; and from 1960 the National Science Foundation supported a study on foodchain intermediates in the kelp beds. The kelp program lasted until 1963, through the unusually warm years of 1957 to 1960, which further reduced the vast beds, for they thrive only in cooler temperatures.
Limbaugh, founder of the scientific diving program at Scripps, and among the keenest advocates of safety in diving, drowned in March 1960, while exploring an underwater cavern in southern France. Others of the staff and students went on with the diverse diving project to understand the ecology of the remarkable underwater forests.
Michael Neushul checking the growth rate of Macrocystis, during the kelp project in the 1950s.
The smallest vessel of the Scripps fleet, the 22-foot Macrocystis, was a common sight bobbing its way to and from the kelp beds southwest of Scripps as the diver-biologists tested harvesting techniques, measured growth rates, transplanted Mexican kelp plants adapted to warmer water, and determined that increasing numbers of sea urchins were overgrazing the kelp beds. The urchins had once been held in check by the marine mammal brought almost to extinction for its magnificent fur, the sea otter, long since gone from its former haunts along southern California. David Leighton suggested that quicklime might be effective against sea urchins, and indeed it proved to be, even in doses small enough not to injure abalones and other desirable kelp-dwellers. Quicklime and hammers have now brought the sea urchins under control in some kelp beds, so that the young plants are again becoming established; those beds are returning to their former size.[*]
[*] This kelp research continues under the direction of Wheeler North, now at the California Institute of Technology.
Some researchers suggested harvesting sea urchins, considered a delicacy in the Orient, as another way of controlling these kelp predators, and this industry is developing.In spite of Limbaugh's conclusions, the argument between sportfishermen and kelp harvesters continued, so other marine botanists went on with studies of the kelp environment. Harvesting records of the 45 kelp beds of southern California had been kept since harvesting began in 1916. Kenneth A. Clendenning compared those records and sportfishing returns from specific kelp beds — some cut heavily, others lightly or not at all — and found that the catch of kelp bass, a favorite with sportfishermen, was actually higher in beds harvested regularly. He noted that the populations of kelp bass fluctuated from year to year, but irrespective of kelp harvesting. Numbers of sportfishermen
SCUBA
Although Conrad Limbaugh began the Scuba scientific diving program at Scripps, he was not the first diver at the institution. Ahead of him were two helmeted divers: C. K. Tseng, who collected the seaweed Gelidium in 1944 for cultivation for agar, and Frank Haymaker, who made direct observations of the Scripps submarine canyon for Francis P. Shepard in 1947 (see chapter 12).
At UCLA, the invertebrate section of the zoology department began a program of observations by divers about 1948, first with hand-operated air pumps and helmets, under the guidance and participation of Theodore H. Bullock. That group soon began using the Gagnan-Cousteau Aqua-lung, the self-contained unit that first appeared on the market in 1947. Scripps alumnus Boyd Walker of the UCLA ichthyology laboratory was another early user, with some of his students, of the Aqua-lung. By 1951 the UCLA researchers had established guidelines for using the new diving equipment. “It is our view,” wrote Bullock, “that this powerful research tool for the study of biological and physical marine science should be treated as a potentially hazardous operation. … With caution, with use confined to individuals of cool judgment and gradually acquired experience, it is an eminently safe and useable technic.”[8]
Already the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (Scuba) was coming into use by enthusiastic swimmers and amateurs, a point that worried Bullock. He established safety rules and instructions for university
Scripps people were naturally beginning to use Scuba to study their domain. Limbaugh was carrying out his kelp studies, using the institution's first Aqua-lung, purchased in 1950, and some of the geologists were making firsthand observations using Scuba of sea-floor structure and the movements of sea-floor sediments. James Snodgrass, then with the Special Developments Division, circulated a memorandum on his observations:
It has been necessary for the Special Developments Division to repair the Aqua Lungs used by various Scripps personnel. This brings to light what we believe to be a very serious situation. The Aqua Lungs as manufactured are produced with many defective and unsatisfactory components. Some of these components are in critical positions in which their failure may well cause complete failure of the air supply.
. . . We feel that most of the users of the Aqua Lungs and the departments concerned do not properly appreciate the seriousness of the situation and that the narrow margin of safety under which they have been operating has been practically non-existent in several cases. . . .[9]
A motley crew of divers on Guadalupe Island, November 1954. From left: Earl A. Murray, T. U. Tiess, John Carter, Charles Fleming, Andreas B. Rechnitzer, James R. Stewart. The occasion was a research study of Rechnitzer's. Photo by Robert B. Haines.
Limbaugh was equally concerned for diving safety, and he began teaching classes in safe Scuba diving in 1951. The next year Scripps participated with the Navy in an Underwater Swimmer Panel, at which the use of Scuba for military purposes and the requisite training programs were intensively discussed. When, in 1952, two students from the Santa Barbara and Berkeley campuses of the university drowned while using Scuba, a statewide university
The Scripps diving classes were placed under IMR auspices in 1956. The diving locker was established for servicing the compressed air tanks and other equipment of the growing number of staff and student divers. About a dozen classes are now taught each year for Scripps staff and students, for state and national park naturalists, and for other eligible marine researchers. It is a rigorous program, one that takes into account techniques, hazards, and the hostile environment. The preliminary testing separates the casual from the serious swimmer, for the applicants are required to demonstrate their ability to swim 1,000 feet in a pool in less than ten minutes; to swim around the 1,000-foot Scripps pier in less than fifteen minutes; to swim under water for at least 75 feet; to swim under water for 150 feet, surfacing no more than four times; to demonstrate their ability to use mask, fins, and snorkel; to surface dive to a depth of 18 feet at the end of the pier, and to carry a struggling swimmer 75 feet.
The course lectures and films describe the physiology of diving, the nature and cure of divers' disorders, the varying conditions of waves, currents, and bottom topography, and the hazardous creatures that divers may encounter. The students are instructed on the maintenance of the Scuba gear. In the water and on paper they have to prove their competence before they are certified. Those who have completed the course may qualify for gradually deeper dives, under the supervision of other certified divers.
Swimmers who enter the blue world — the depths below
At depths of 60 to 100 feet the diver enters a realm of stillness [wrote Wheeler North]. No water motion is ordinarily perceived. … The lower edges of the kelp beds lie in this range and the sea floor in these areas is scalloped into fantastic shapes by the activities of mollusks and echinoderms. The diver can now get well down into the upper reaches of the canyons. … He explores steep gorges, hundred-foot cliffs, caves, pinnacles, and the like, and he may feast his aesthetic senses upon gardens of fluorescent anemones or canyon walls covered with lace-like Gorgonian corals.
Working in deeper water is another story:
It requires considerable fortitude [continued North] as well as a thick, foam rubber suit to do productive scientific work in the chilling depths below 100 feet. Illumination is reduced to twilight levels, hazards arising from decompression sickness must be avoided, and mental activities may be retarded by the effects of nitrogen narcosis. Such dives must be carefully planned to avoid accidents and to assure that the required work be accomplished.[10]
James R. Stewart, who began skin-diving in 1943 — well before Scuba gear — has been the chief diving officer at Scripps since Limbaugh's death. Over the years he has used all the common types of diving apparatus: closed circuit, semi-closed, open circuit Scuba, shallow-water mask, hookah, heavy dress, and saturation-diving techniques. He has dived in the Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, and
The early Scripps Scuba divers were inventors and innovators. George Harvey, for instance, devised what he called a Superman suit and described how he made it in a letter to Arthur Flechsig:
… It was as follows:
Purchased surplus army drawers and shirt, sewed zipper in drawers. Shirt was snug pull over.
Purchased rubber latex from Atlas Chemical Supply Co. in San Diego. ($7.50 per gal.) This can be obtained from any large chem. supply house. It comes in several grades, usually preserved with ammonia. The grade containing the largest amount of rubber is what I used. If a small amount of acetic acid is added the rubber will precipitate from the colloid suspension. Tetramethylthiuram disulfide, (CH3)2-N-C-S-S·S-CSN-(CH3)2 accelerates the setting of the rubber and causes some vulcanization. I didn't use this, but mixed a small amount of acetic acid and some H2O2 with about a pint of latex before using.
― 133 ―Put on the suit (drawers and shirt separately) and painted on the latex, saturating the cloth as thoroughly as possible, using a medium large paint brush.
Wore the damned thing till dry. This is very uncomfortable, but gives a very good form fitting job. During drying care is necessary not to allow adjacent surfaces to touch, or they will stick together. Also all wrinkles should be in the right places before drying. The H2O2 is supposed to give a tougher rubber. It would be wise to call a local latex products manufacturer to get his formula, since one suit I made got quite sticky and “runny” after a couple of months.
There is available 1/4″ and 1/8″ thick cellular rubber and also cellular plastic sheet that would make a much warmer outfit. My latex-cloth suit was quick and easy to make, and quite strong, but it only allowed me to stay out about 2 hours, and would have been much better with some of the cellular sheet cemented on. I think the wet type suit is fine if you have plenty of insulation, 1/8″ to 1/4″ of cellular material, and if the fit is snug enough to prevent water going in and out. …[11]
A major contributor to the present wetsuit used by divers (and surfers) was Hugh Bradner, who has been at Scripps since 1961. While he was at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in 1951, he devised a form-fitting underwater protective suit made of elastic foam rubber and provided with “a plurality of slide fasteners so located as to facilitate getting into and out of the suit.” Bradner and his diving acquaintances made the first suits of this kind in 1952; commercial diving companies were very quickly marketing wetsuits of similar design.
Scripps divers are in all branches of oceanography. On Capricorn Expedition in 1952 (see chapter 15) they pioneered in exploring submerged Falcon Shoal in the Tonga Islands. They have participated in the kelp studies, have made geological and biological observations, have studied sand transport and water motion, have explored coral reefs, submarine canyons, and sewer outfalls. They have inspected ship bottoms, fastened and removed equipment thereon; they have investigated pier pilings; and they have developed and tested new underwater equipment and techniques. They have advised on underwater parks. They have helped in underwater rescues and have investigated ocean tragedies. Stewart estimates that since 1965 at least 30 Ph.D. dissertations at Scripps have been completed in which diving was a necessary research tool.
In the early 1950s Scuba divers began finding Indian artifacts along the southern California coast. An especially rich source was the shallow zone in front of the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club about a mile south of Scripps. Divers, including Scrippsians, soon gathered many hundreds of small mortars from that area, and smaller numbers at other sites along the coast. As Carr Tuthill and A. A. Allanson noted: “There must have been a grinding complex almost amounting to a compulsion [among the southern California aborigine culture] to account for the large number of mortars found just in the La Jolla area in underwater sites.”[12] Those authors suggested that the mortars were found in now-drowned early aboriginal sites, and archaeologist and Scripps-draftsman James R. Moriarty later advocated that the sites had been drowned by the steady advance of sea level. Radiocarbon dating established that adjacent landward middens were in use by aborigines 5,000 to 6,000 years before the present, when sea level in the area was probably 40 to 50 feet lower than now.[13]
Several Scripps divers — Earl A. Murray, Arthur O.
The biologists among them had a field day, for the presence of the steel cylinder on the sea floor attracted underwater life in great numbers, estimated to be 35 times the usual density of the sand-bottom locality. Zooplankton swarmed at the lighted viewing ports every night, drawing such numbers of fishes that they cut off the view as they inhaled the tiny zooplankton. Octopi snuggled into hidden corners all over the cylinder, scorpionfish piled up in the entryway (several divers were stung by them), and sea lions became regular evening visitors, startling off the fishes as soon as they appeared.
Other Scripps divers have participated in the later, shallower experiments in sea-floor living, the Tektite series of the University of Miami, which is particularly distinguished by having included women in its roster, three of them from Scripps. James Stewart participated in the Westinghouse Project 600, during which the first dives were made by scientists to a depth of 600 feet on the continental shelf.
The Scripps diving program itself does not include submersible vehicles, but some of the Scripps divers — and
TUNA RESEARCH
It was, after all, the tuna fishermen especially who had urged the founding of IMR. They gained benefits from the organization, in the form of sea-floor charts that provided the locations of seamounts and other submarine features that attract fish. That project, which began under the direction of H. William Menard, evolved into the Geological Data Center and is described in chapter 12.
In 1963 IMR spread its umbrella over another existing group on campus, the Scripps Tuna Oceanography Research program (STOR). This unit had begun in 1957 with support from the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and in cooperation with several other campus groups, for the purpose of determining the distribution, abundance, and availability to capture of the fast, sleek, far-ranging tunas that constituted San Diego's major fishery. Maurice Blackburn directed STOR until 1971, and then joined the Coastal Upwelling Ecosystems Analysis (a project supported by the International Decade of Ocean Exploration). STOR ended in 1973.
This program concerned itself with all the tunas — “large, active, predatory, pelagic fishes that inhabit the upper layers of the World Ocean in tropical and temperate latitudes.” Under intensive study by STOR were the yellowfin and the skipjack — the worldwide favorites when packed in small flat cans. The bluefin, caught, as are the yellowfin and the skipjack, chiefly by purse seiners, and the albacore, caught by line from coastal small vessels, were less intensively
Blackburn said that “STOR had its most productive period from 1962 to 1969, when its effort both on tuna ecology and pure oceanography was high. Research included effects of temperature and food on tuna distribution, seasonal change in biological oceanographic properties of the tropical ocean, vertical distribution of zooplankton, and very detailed descriptive and heat budget studies in physical oceanography. A method was developed for measuring sea surface chlorophyll continuously from an underway ship, which has been very widely used. … There was also a laboratory-experimental project in which phytoplankton cultures were grown under various nutrient conditions. It helped to identify nitrogen as the principal element limiting oceanic phytoplankton growth.”[14]
STOR's program of studying the environment of the tunas was correlated with the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), which was established in 1949 by a treaty between the United States and Costa Rica. The objective of IATTC, as defined in its founding convention, is to maintain “the populations of yellowfin and skipjack tuna and of other kinds of fish taken by tuna fishing vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean … at a level which will permit maximum sustained catches year after year.” Other fishing nations — Canada, France, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama — have become members of IATTC, which recommends appropriate conservation measures for and carries out an extensive research program on the tunas and the bait fishes and other species taken by the tuna vessels. The commission offices were first located at the Scripps Field Annex on Point Loma, and were moved into the Fishery Oceanography Center on the Scripps campus when the building was completed in 1964. Milner B. Schaefer, who, in the interest of international fisheries research and
Both STOR and IATTC were deeply involved in the program called Eastropac, a series of three surveys in the eastern tropical Pacific in 1967 and 1968. As grand in scope as Eastropac was, it was but a portion of the study originally proposed in 1961, which was to have been a cooperative eight-year survey of the eastern tropical Pacific, including studies in meteorology, geology, geophysics, and physical, chemical, and biological oceanography, including fisheries. But it soon appeared that the costs were prohibitive and “some parts of the program had not attracted the scientists who would be required to carry them out.”
The geological and geophysical work was omitted, and the meteorological program was reduced. Warren S. Wooster was appointed coordinator in 1966, under the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and he began the complex job of enlisting agencies and groups and nations into the program. Alan R. Longhurst assumed the post the following year. Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico all provided ships and personnel, as did several United States organizations and universities.
From Scripps the Argo and the Thomas Washington sailed separately for Eastropac. The Argo, which sailed on 24 January 1967, “returned to San Diego on 6 March after a successful cruise of 340 oceanographic stations, the routine having been broken only by an emergency rendezvous with a commercial vessel in the early part of the cruise so that the surgeon carried by ARGO could perform an appendectomy at sea on a crew member of the commercial vessel.”[15] Among the researchers on Argo were observers provided through the Smithsonian Institution to take all-daylight observations on surface fishes, on cetaceans, and
The chief goals of Eastropac were to gather data to help define the relationship of fishery yields to ocean conditions and to search out unexploited skipjack tuna resources. A distinctive feature of the survey was its adherence to the original plan. “All participating ships undertook to perform a standard and basic suite of physical and biological observations, using standardized gear. . . .”[16] This simplified reducing the data to a consistently usable form.
Eastropac carried out three oceanographic surveys, six months apart, of the area from 20° N. to 20° S. latitudes and from the coast westward to 119° W. longitude — six million square miles of ocean. Survey cruises and monitor cruises by 16 ships gathered meteorological observations, water samples and analyses, and biological collections. The sorting of the extensive zooplankton and micronekton samples was handled at the Fishery Oceanography Center, aided by STOR and IATTC participants. The Data Collection and Processing Group of the Marine Life Research program assisted in the processing of the basic oceanographic data.
It quickly became apparent that “the data derived from the expeditions were so numerous as to render classical data reports impractical” — so the data were archived on magnetic tape at the National Oceanographic Data Center, which had been established in 1961, and were processed by computer. The results, compiled chiefly by Bruce A. Taft, are being published as a series of eleven Eastropac Atlas volumes, the first of which appeared in 1972.
A full program of research on tuna has continued through the years, particularly on the yellowfin tuna. Schaefer concluded in 1967: “Due to the very intensive and closely programmed research of the IATTC. . . and the results of the research of other agencies, the yellowfin tuna population of the eastern Pacific, concerning which very little of importance was known in 1951, has, during
FOOD CHAIN STUDIES
The Food Chain Research Group began at Scripps in June 1963, with the advent of British-born John D. H. Strickland from Nanaimo, British Columbia, originally a chemist, who was invited by M. B. Schaefer to establish the group within IMR. The goal of the research group, simply stated, has been to predict the formation and transfer of nutrients through the full cycle of life in the ocean.
For the good of the fishing industry and for the guidance of those charged with the disposal of atomic wastes [wrote Strickland], we need to know what makes the aquatic environment ‘tick.’ … The basic stumbling block is one of sampling. Even in small ponds or lakes, where boundary conditions are generally well-defined and, in some circumstances, populations are relatively simple compared with field or forest, the problems are great. The medium is alien. … Much of the sampling has still to be done from top side, with the worker unable to see what he is doing, and studying only a minute fraction of the whole. When the area under investigation becomes an ocean, or even a fairly small fraction of an ocean, the size of samples relative to that of the environment becomes ludicrously small and, to compound our troubles, the environment will not keep still. Imagine the troubles of a field ecologist if the field he investigates one week moves by the next week into the adjacent county and splits into several segments in the process.[18]
Tall, red-bearded John Strickland, “a man of boundless energy, . . .set a challenging pace and delved with enthusiasm into the myriad facets involved in the comprehensive study of plankton communities.”[19] He died in November 1970, after a heroic and stoic battle of several years with kidney disease (he was the first patient of the UCSD hospital to be trained in home use of an artificial kidney machine). Since then the directing of the group has been handled by rotation among its senior staff, which includes John R. Beers, Angelo F. Carlucci, Richard W. Eppley, Osmund Holm-Hansen, Michael M. Mullin, and Peter M. Williams.
The problem for the Food Chain Research Group to solve, felt Strickland, was “a serious imbalance between observation and explanation” in understanding oceanic productivity. He went on to note: “Our information about the mechanisms responsible for what we observe is so inadequate that a crisis has developed.”[20]
So, the researchers scrutinized bacteria, phytoplankton, zooplankton, and the constituents of sea water. Diurnal rhythms of diatoms and other minute plants were tampered with, aided by a searchlight bright enough to bring complaints from residents on Mount Soledad, four miles away. Minute organisms were kept alive in laboratory jars, but at first they were annoyingly uncooperative in reproducing. Plankton communities were placed in a 70,000-liter tank for controlled-environment studies. An Autoanalyzer was developed that “revolutionized the procedures for performing chemical analyses aboard ship.”
Michael M. Mullin, Jonathan Sharp, and Ralph A. Lewin — none of them ichthyologists — examining a fish collected on Southtow Expedition, 1972. Photo by Elizabeth Venrick.
The planktologists also went to sea. As soon as their laboratory was equipped, Strickland announced, in the true spirit of oceanography: “We plan to spend a week on a shake-down cruise this fall when as many people in the group as possible will attempt to measure as many things as possible at two or three stations in deep and
It was but a beginning. Members of the group took to the T-441 for weekly monitoring of the waters off La Jolla (shades of Erik Moberg on the Scripps in 1936), for studies of the cycle of “red tide” organisms, for investigations of the ecology of sewer outfalls, and for photographs of plankton in situ. They boarded larger ships to sample the California Current, the nutrient-rich waters of Peru, and the also-rich, cold waters of the Antarctic. Members of the Food Chain Research Group have been analyzing the structure of the microplankton population in the central gyre region of the North Pacific Ocean and also the structure of the population near the San Diego sewage outfall. Some have been investigating the effects of chlorine on phytoplankton, and others are in studies of microorganisms.
In 1973 the group participated in the multi-institutional project CEPEX (Controlled Ecosystem Pollution Experiment) — the “big bag experiment.” This study was designed to help forecast long-term effects of pollutants on marine life. The “laboratory” is a group of large underwater enclosures (2.5 meters by 15 meters) located in Saanich Inlet off Vancouver Island, British Columbia. In these the natural phytoplankton communities are enclosed and sampled over a long period for comparisons with the surrounding water so that effects of measured amounts of introduced pollutants may be determined.
The program of the Food Chain Research Group is “open-ended,” the members feel, “with no immediate end in sight to the work that needs to be done before the population dynamics and trophodynamics of the plankton is understood to a degree that will enable man to exercise satisfactory control of the environment and make useful predictions.”[22]
OTHER IMR PROJECTS
One of the very extensive projects of the Institute of Marine Resources since its inception has been the food technology researches by Harold S. Olcott and his colleagues. This program, concerned especially with the handling of marine food resources and with the changes that occur in them during processing and storage, is skipped over here because it is other-campus; from 1955 to 1970 the researchers were located at Berkeley, since 1970, at Davis.
Some ocean engineering studies, in the department of civil engineering at Berkeley, have been under IMR. API Project 51 at Scripps, described in chapter 12, was administered through IMR from 1954 until the end of the project in 1962. Douglas L. Inman's work on nearshore processes (also in chapter 12) was partly supported by IMR for some years. Theodore R. Folsom's study of the Hyperion sewage-treatment plant (see chapter 13) was handled through IMR. Various studies on the economics of marine resources have been supported through IMR, which for a few years administered funds for studies by Carl L. Hubbs on the hydrographic history of southern California and for studies by Harmon Craig on water-vapor and carbon-dioxide analyses.
The Center for Marine Affairs, established in 1970 with Warren S. Wooster as director, was located in IMR from 1972. It was set up “to involve specialists from the social sciences, government, and other fields outside of the natural sciences in consideration of the scientific aspect of marine affairs.”
From 1971 IMR has been the managing agency for the University of California's Sea Grant Program, part of an all-encompassing effort under NOAA to apply research to everyday use of marine resources of all kinds. Scripps established a Sea Grant program in 1968, and two years
One of those projects, worked out by John Isaacs and Richard Seymour, is a dynamic breakwater that uses tethered floats. Waves passing through the rows of floats cause them to oscillate out of phase with the water motion, and the drag from these oscillations removes energy from the waves, thus reducing their height. In 1974 an experimental model, consisting of 20 floats fabricated from foam-filled scrap tires tethered to a floatable platform, was installed off San Clemente Island. In 1975 a tethered-float breakwater 150 feet long and 20 feet wide was tested in San Diego Bay.
The experience and expertise of the Institute of Marine Resources has been tapped at times by the state of California. In 1965, under the leadership of M. B. Schaefer, IMR prepared a significant report entitled “California and the Use of the Ocean”[23] for the State Office of Planning. This report, edited by Roger Revelle, which drew upon a large number of University of California researchers, summarized a study “of the problems and opportunities in the utilization and development of the resources of the sea, and the ways in which the sea and the utilization of its resources interact with the growing population of the State.”
NOTES
1. Letter of 7 May 1951.
2. Letter of 8 June 1951.
3. Letter of 8 January 1952.
4. Draft of committee report, 16 November 1951.
5. San Diego Union, 20 July 1953.
6. “On the Policies and Program of the Institute of Marine Resources,” statement of September 1962.
7. “Preliminary Résumé of Results of Investigations Conducted from 1948 to 1953 Concerning Fish Life in the Kelp Beds and Effects of Kelp Harvesting on the Fish Populations,” SIO Reference 53–41 (1953).
8. Letter to University Safety Supervisor T. E. Haley, 31 October 1951.
9. Letter to Revelle, 10 October 1951.
10. “Scientific Diving,” Yale Scientific Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 3 (December 1956).
11. Letter of 15 March 1953.
12. “Ocean-bottom Artifacts,” Masterkey, Vol. 28, No. 6 (1955), 226.
13. James R. Moriarty, “Submarine Archeology,” Science of Man, Vol. 1, No. 4 (June 1961), 134.
14. Manuscript in SIO Archives.
15. Eastropac Information Paper 5, 19 June 1967.
16. Eastropac Atlas 1, 1972, xii.
17. “Fishery Dynamics and Present Status of the Yellowfin Tuna Population of the Eastern Pacific Ocean,” IATTC Bulletin, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1967), 91.
18. “Between Beakers and Bays,” New Scientist (2 February 1967), 276.
19. IMR annual report, 1972, 2.
20. Ibid., 1963, 27.
21. Ibid., 1964, 31.
22. Ibid., 1968, 16.
23. IMR Reference 65-21 (1965).
“Spring Stirring,” by Donal Hord.
VII. Watching Waves in Land and Sea:
The Institute of Geophysics
and Planetary Physics
The redwood laboratory that houses the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics on the Scripps campus — and the variety of projects there carried on by researchers — are the result of the persistence of one enthusiastic man, Walter H. Munk. He was described by Chancellor Herbert F. York in 1963 as having been “unceasing in his drive and efforts to bring about the realization of his dream.”[1]
As noted in chapter 2, Munk had been a prewar and postwar student of Harald U. Sverdrup. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1947, Munk became an assistant professor at Scripps. When he became professor of geophysics in 1954, Munk also became associated with the intercampus Institute of Geophysics.
That institute, which had been established in 1946, was headquartered at UCLA. From 1947 to 1961 it was directed “with vision and energy” by Louis B. Slichter, who always had a keen interest in Scripps projects, and in fact had provided support for the Scripps Institution's first major expedition, Midpac, in 1950. Upon Slichter's retirement, Nobel Laureate Willard F. Libby became state-wide director. The institute has carried out a vigorous
On the Scripps campus during the latter 1950s, the institute's sole representative, Walter Munk, was anticipating an expansion in geophysics. He was also considering an offer from Harvard. Roger Revelle asked, “What is it that you really want to do? Why is it that you could not do this better here than at Harvard?” So Munk consulted with Slichter, with Revelle and others, and in June 1959 he presented a proposal for the university's consideration:
The tremendous publicity of the [International Geophysical Year] and the increasing activity in rocketry as a means of investigating physical conditions between the planets for eventual space travel have made geophysics and planetary physics fashionable sciences. … Because of the small number of outstanding workers, the competition for good talent will be fierce until more investigators and teachers are produced. In this difficult transitional period it is essential that the University of California maintain its favorable position in geophysics by keeping and attracting first rate men and by providing them with facilities and especially with the environment in which they would be most productive.
Our university's position is favorable because it already has a nucleus of capable geophysicists and an
― 151 ―administrational framework which has served them effectively. But we need to provide room for new blood. … We propose that as part of the expansion of geophysics at the University of California a branch of the Institute of Geophysics on the UCLJ [= UCSD[*][*] For a short time UCSD was known as the University of California at La Jolla.
] campus be established.The Institute of Geophysics at UCLA (IGUCLA) has demonstrated how an intimate group of first-rate scientists can raise the standard of an entire campus community and be successful in attracting leading young people. The principal cause of its success is of course the quality of its senior members. However, the effectiveness of most of them is increased several fold by daily association with one another, which is difficult to bring about in too large and too diverse a group. To accommodate the diversity of interests in geophysics we propose to take advantage of the state-wide aspect of the Institute of Geophysics. By creating a branch of the Institute on the La Jolla campus, the Institute of Geophysics can grow without suffering from elephantiasis.
. . . The establishment [of a branch on the La Jolla campus] will benefit the expanded campus at La Jolla in the same way as it has benefited UCLA, by providing opportunities for graduate and postdoctoral research for outstanding young people.
. . . Emphasis is to be placed on appointments of young men. Large project-type research activities are to be avoided. The field of research is, of course, the concern of each senior investigator. Initially the appointments might reflect the activities of the senior investigators available for the formation of its nucleus.
― 152 ―We suggest that it be planetary physics with initial emphasis on the Earth-Moon system.. . . We thus envision an institute located near the Scripps Institution … which by 1964 might consist of a dozen senior investigators and be about 10 per cent the size of Scripps. The combined Los Angeles and La Jolla branches of the state-wide institute would possess a faculty in Earth (and planetary) science second to none in the country.[3]
Munk's proposal, favorably received by university officials, led to the establishment of the La Jolla branch of the Institute of Geophysics in 1960. As a modest beginning, Slichter provided $2,500 for a student fellowship and $1,000 for “unrestricted use in meeting minor needs” at the new facility in its first year. Munk was appointed director of the La Jolla branch and associate director of the statewide institute, which, also in 1960, added “and Planetary Physics” to its original name. Since then the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics has been referred to usually as IGPP.
Munk stated his objectives:
We plan to study the planet Earth, its atmosphere, oceans and interior, using the methods of experimental and mathematical physics. … We propose to form a group that is at the same time small and non-specialized, and it is this unusual combination that will make our institute distinctive. … By our insistence to remain small we shall form a closely knit (though heterogeneous) group, requiring a minimum of administration and permitting all of us, including myself, to devote our time to teaching and research. … Dr. Revelle has suggested twelve senior investigators as the ideal ultimate size.[4]
Within its first year the new branch of IGPP had results to show. George E. Backus joined the staff and began mathematical approaches to the problem of rotational line splitting. Richard A. Haubrich arrived, and set up a precise seismic station on Miramar Ranch, once the home of E. W. Scripps. Munk and Gordon MacDonald (of the UCLA branch) undertook a study of atmospheric tides. The direction of arrival of ocean waves was also under study, and from the records Munk was able to identify long swell that had been generated halfway around the world in the Indian Ocean. Records from earthquake-generated sea waves, tsunamis, were scrutinized; the resonant oscillations along the California coast were recorded. Visitors came, some for a few days and some for many weeks. The first of these was the already frequent visitor to Scripps, Sir Edward Bullard, who began developing a generalized program for the analysis of geophysical time series. That computer program was named BOMM for its several devisers: Bullard, Florence Oglebay, Munk, and Gaylord Miller.
The earliest members of the IGPP staff at La Jolla did not easily have “daily association with one another,” as they were scattered throughout the Scripps Institution buildings. In 1960 the institution was serving as the staging area for the School of Science and Engineering and for the incipient UCSD, and everyone had office space problems. At the end of the first year of the new organization, Munk's complaint was that “we have no home.” He set out to find one.
Estimates indicated that a fully equipped laboratory of appropriate size would cost about one million dollars. Because the institute appointments were to be joint ones with teaching departments, the regents of the university agreed to match funds acquired from outside sources. Munk's efforts brought in contributions of $200,000 from the National Science Foundation, $20,000 from the
Meanwhile, a scenic site was found for the new building overlooking the sea, near the wooden cottages on the upper slopes of the Scripps campus. University architects commented that a building on that site could someday slide into the sea (an admittedly awkward disaster for geophysicists, who should know better), and advised against redwood, as such material would last only a century. Munk and his wife Judith, an architectural designer and sculptor, insisted on the site and the material — and won, chiefly on the leverage of the funds Munk had obtained from outside sources. Judith Munk advised on the building's design throughout the planning sessions. When the split-level building, stepping up the slope, was completed in 1963, the Munks were gratified that it had been built at the lowest cost per square foot of assignable space ($20.90) for a university laboratory in many years. The redwood building contains laboratories, offices, a machine shop, a library and reading room, and a conference or lecture room within its four levels.
The redwood laboratory of La Jolla's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, in 1969.
To enhance the grounds of the new building, philanthropists Cecil H. and Ida Green offered to buy a sculpture that Judith Munk had long admired: “Spring Stirring,” by San Diegan Donal Hord, under whom Judith Munk had studied sculpture. The massive work, carved from black diorite from Escondido, and mounted on a matching base, was installed in the patio of the building in the fall of 1963. It represents a huddled figure, partly shrouded and stirring from sleep; at its feet, as though pushing from the earth, are small sprouts. Cecil Green, equipment manufacturer and founder of Texas Instruments, noted that “this gift arises out of our very high regard for the unique ability and valuable contributions being made by Professor Munk to
Within its first few years the new laboratory reached the size advocated by Revelle and Munk, about twelve faculty appointments. As stipulated by the university regents for an institute, faculty appointments in IGPP are joint ones with a teaching department of the university. Because of the proximity and similarity of interests, many of the appointments at the La Jolla branch of IGPP are jointly with Scripps Institution. The remainder are with the upper-campus teaching departments of applied mechanics and engineering sciences (AMES) and physics. In addition, several Scripps researchers not officially part of IGPP, but whose studies are related, have offices in the IGPP building. Carl Eckart was one of these for several years prior to his death in 1973. A number of graduate students, working under the faculty members in their respective departments, have office and laboratory space there also.
To all intents and purposes, the La Jolla branch of IGPP operates as a laboratory within the Scripps Institution. The geophysical studies carried out in the redwood laboratory are selected by the senior scientists. Under the theme that “land geophysics and ocean geophysics are part of the same subject,” these studies have been aimed at both the restless ocean and the quivering earth. With ships and equipment, ashore and afloat, for fifteen years this group of geophysicists has been seeking answers to puzzles from the surface of the sea to the core of the earth.
Walter Munk's own studies have been chiefly concerned with the ocean in motion: its waves and its tides. As noted in chapter 2, during World War II he had devised the means of forecasting sea and swell for amphibious landings. After the war he continued with studies of ocean waves. Using records from wave meters installed outward from the pier, he worked out the relationships for computing the travel time and distance of a storm. He also developed equations for estimating the forces and motions exerted by waves on vertical beams. Munk's colleague, Frank E. Snodgrass, an ingenious engineer, designed sensitive pressure meters to track wave trains across the ocean. In 1963 a series of six tide stations was set up from Alaska to New Zealand, five of them on islands and the sixth on Flip, on station north-east of Hawaii. Munk and his family lived for three months in a native village in American Samoa, tending one of the stations. From the array of stations Munk could trace waves generated by storms in southern waters as they moved northward, to reach the northernmost station two weeks after their origin.
For studies of tides in the deep ocean, Snodgrass in the early 1960s designed an instrument capsule in the form of a pair of aluminum spheres that could be dropped free-fall to the sea floor, where it could be left for as long as several weeks and could be recalled by an acoustic command that causes the release of a link to the weighting storage batteries. On magnetic tape in the capsules could be recorded pressure fluctuations as small as the equivalent of one one-hundredth of an inch in sea level at a depth of three miles, temperatures to a resolution of a few millionths of a degree, and tidal currents as slow as ten feet per hour. The first tide capsule, launched in 1965, was christened Judith, at the suggestion of her husband; each succeeding one was christened by one of the project's participants for his wife. Despite many early problems with the capsules
In 1969 Snodgrass boarded the National Science Foundation research ship Eltanin to set out three tide capsules at depths of 12,000 to 18,000 feet in the Antarctic Ocean, an area in which the tidal configuration was unknown. Munk joined Snodgrass during the Antarctic summer to participate in the successful recovery of the instrument packages. Analysis of the Antarctic data indicated that the tides generated in that ocean did not create as high tides in mid-ocean as had been previously guessed.
An international survey of deep-sea tides was proposed by Munk in 1967, but it was indefinitely postponed because the complex instrument capability was not that nearly ready. Munk's comment to science writer Daniel Behrman was: “You know, there are times I think we may have started too soon and gone too quickly on the deep-sea tide survey. But we have time. At the rate that tidal friction is changing the configuration of the solar system, we have a billion years to finish our measurements before something happens.”[6]
The deep-sea tide measurements by Munk and Snodgrass ended in 1971, and the capsules were modified for studies of internal waves in the ocean. One more capsule was built then and placed on the sea floor for a year for a longterm record of low-frequency fluctuations of pressure, temperature, and water velocity.
Four of the free-fall capsules used during the latter 1960s by the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics for deep-sea tide measurements.
Also concerned with the characteristics of moving water was John W. Miles, who joined the La Jolla IGPP in 1963 from UCLA, and turned to making waves. By means of hot-wire anemometers, he measured the disturbances in the airstream above waves generated in the wind-water tunnel in the Hydraulics Laboratory, in order to determine the transfer of energy from wind to waves. These measurements were compared satisfactorily with theoretical predictions. Miles also undertook calculations on rotating flows of liquids in which Coriolis forces are dominant, and on the resonant response of harbors and bays to earthquake-generated tsunamis.
Microseisms — the minute, continuous quiverings of the earth — have been recorded on seismographs and pondered by geophysicists for years. At the Scripps IGPP Hugh Bradner in the mid-1960s developed a free-fall seismometer to measure microseisms directly on the sea floor. Also interested in these tiny tremors has been Richard A. Haubrich, who in 1970 determined that some microseisms are caused by traveling storms at sea.
Much larger earth motion — that is, earthquakes — became a major study at the La Jolla branch of IGPP during the late 1960s. In 1969 and 1970, following the installation of the seismic station by Haubrich and others at Miramar Ranch, a station was set up on Navy land at Camp Elliott, twelve miles inland from the institute, by Ralph Lovberg and Jonathan Berger. At this recording station a laser-interferometer strain meter capable of measuring the compression in rocks down to one part in a billion was installed, to record strain, tilt, and vertical movement caused by earthquakes, earth tides, ocean and atmospheric loading, or nuclear explosions. In the early 1970s another complete geophysical station was installed, under Berger's direction, at Piñon Flat in San Bernardino National Forest, near the San Jacinto and San Andreas
Seismologist James N. Brune, who joined the Scripps staff from Caltech in 1969, was provided with an office in the IGPP building, and he became a participant in the earth-motion studies. Brune also became an associate director of IGPP in 1973. His interest has been in the total system of earth strain in the general southern California region, from the San Andreas fault southward through the Gulf of California to the East Pacific Rise.
The chain of undersea mountains known as the East Pacific Rise, extending from Antarctica to the edge of the North American continent, is one of the active spreading centers of the world. From its motion, the peninsula of Baja California is being pushed away and northward from the mainland of Mexico. As Brune said, “What happens in the Gulf of California determines what happens in Southern California.” Brune enlisted the cooperation of the University of Mexico in setting up a network of seismograph stations around the Gulf of California, to try to determine the total input of energy into the fault system by the relative movements of the North American and Pacific tectonic plates.
Brune and his associates also prepared an array of portable seismic recorders to transport to the site of earthquakes to record the aftershocks. Brune, Hugh Bradner, and William A. Prothero set up a system of recording earthquakes on the floor of the ocean by means of ocean-bottom seismometers and sonobuoys. These have been deployed both in the Gulf of California and on the crest of the East Pacific Rise about 150 miles south of the tip of Baja California.
Other researchers at the Scripps IGPP have turned their attention to the nature of the solid earth itself, its internal constitution and its oscillations. George Backus, the first appointee to the branch institute, has pondered the geophysical inverse problem: Given the frequencies of the earth's normal modes, what can be inferred about the interior distribution of density and the elastic contents? Freeman Gilbert, who joined the IGPP group in 1961, applied the inverse theory to a study of the earth's normal modes, the mechanical structure of the earth, and the source mechanism of deep earthquakes. Barry Block and Robert D. Moore developed a low-frequency accelerometer to record the normal modes of the earth and to determine the threshold at which surface waves can be detected.
Richard A. Haubrich measured the tilt of the earth by ocean loading and investigated possible causes of the wobble of the earth. He could find no correlation of the wobble with major earthquakes, as had been proposed at times.
Robert L. Parker, who arrived in 1967, set out to determine the electrical conductivity deep within the earth from measurements of the slow variations of the geomagnetic field. Also, working in cooperation with the Deep Tow group of the Marine Physical Laboratory, he investigated the direction of magnetization of seamounts to determine their drag by tectonic movement along the sea floor. To speed up the time required for calculating great quantities of data on magnetism from intensive surveys, Parker developed a method of using Fourier transforms for handling the data. His general computer program, called Supermap, for plotting worldwide geophysical data using any conceivable projection, has proved useful for establishing the relative motion between two crustal plates.
Parker got drawn into an extracurricular project in 1967 while sharing bachelor quarters with a vigorous coffee-stirrer. Continued observations and experiments resulted
A regular visitor to the La Jolla IGPP since its establishment has been Sir Edward (“Teddy”) Bullard, whose name, said Willard F. Libby, is one “to conjure with throughout the world of geophysics.”[8] Bullard entered that world in its infancy when the few participants built, hauled, and repaired their own sometimes hazardous recording devices. “I migrated from physics to geophysics in 1931,” he wrote, “and spent some years learning the techniques of applying physics to the earth and trying to understand the modes of thought of geology. My initial idea was that geophysics should be used to solve specific geological problems, the paradigm being the applications to prospecting for oil. Gradually I realized that, important as such applications were, I was more interested in major problems of earth structure and history.”[9]
In 1949, on a visit to Scripps, Bullard developed the heat-flow probe with Arthur E. Maxwell (see chapter 15). A graduate of Cambridge University, Bullard was assistant director of Naval Operational Research for his native England in the latter years of World War II. He was professor of physics at the University of Toronto in 1948-49, and then director of the National Physical Laboratory in England until 1956, when he became assistant director of
NOTES
1. Letter to Cecil H. Green, 27 November 1963.
2. Director's Report of IGPP, 1965–70, 3.
3. Original proposal, 2 June 1959.
4. Proposal to Max C. Fleischmann Foundation of Nevada, January 1960, 1.
5. Letter to University Vice President Thomas J. Cunningham, 14 November 1963.
6. Daniel Behrman, The New World of the Oceans (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, & Co., 1969), 138.
7. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Vol. 65 (1969), 365–67.
8. Letter to University President Clark Kerr, 30 September 1964.
9. “The Emergence of Plate Tectonics: A Personal View,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Vol. 3 (1975), 8.
Harbor seal in one of the research pools of the Physiological Research Laboratory.
VIII. A Different Point of View:
The Physiological Research Laboratory
Per F. (“Pete”) Scholander brought an idea when he arrived at Scripps Institution in 1958 as a professor of physiology:
For several years I was able to watch the progress of oceanographic biology at Woods Hole and other places, and I always had the strong feeling that this discipline is greatly in need of a vigorous experimental approach through physiology and biochemistry.[1]
To Scholander the “vigorous experimental approach” required a laboratory and a ship. The ship, which to him was to be a seagoing laboratory, must have “space and sophisticated equipment that would permit the study of physiological phenomena in live specimens at or in their natural habitats.”
In 1962 the National Science Foundation agreed to provide money for a building, for adjacent pool facilities, and for a laboratory ship. NSF guaranteed the ship-operating costs, and the National Institute of Health guaranteed funds for operating the laboratory for seven years.
With these generous funds promised, the Physiological Research Laboratory was established in 1963, with Scholander as director. Its four chief projects were to be: “cardiovascular and respiratory research on large marine vertebrates and ‘aquatic’ man; studies of various transport mechanisms on cellular and organistic levels; neurophysiological studies, in collaboration with UCLA; and behavioral studies of marine mammals, also in collaboration with UCLA.”[2] The new laboratory was expected to form a bridge between physiologists at Scripps and biologists at the new School of Science and Engineering of UCSD and the medical school to be established at UCSD.
“Because of the extent, uniqueness and international scope of the operation,” said Roger Revelle, “I am appointing an advisory board [named the National Advisory Board at the request of NSF] of distinguished scientists from outside the University to advise Professor Scholander and me on the scientific program and optimum use of the facilities.”[3] A. Baird Hastings was appointed the first chairman of the advisory board; a professor emeritus from Harvard, Hastings was then with the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla and also a Research Associate in the UCSD Medical School with an office at Scripps Institution. It was not only a wise appointment, it was also just, for Hastings had advocated the need for an advisory board to Revelle on the basis that one person — Scholander — could not be both ashore and afloat simultaneously, attending to everything. The other distinguished members of the National Advisory Board were Eric G. Ball (Harvard), Lawrence R. Blinks (Stanford), Theodore H. Bullock (then UCLA), Wallace O. Fenn (University of Rochester), Knut Schmidt-Nielsen (Duke University), and H. Burr Steinbach (University of Chicago).
To staff the new research unit, PRL, Scholander wanted “persons with proven accomplishments and perspective in
Scholander had found early support for his goals in the staff of the Brain Research Institute at UCLA. In fact, they obtained the funds that made possible a third story on the proposed building and additional pool facilities. The title of Marine Neurobiology Facility was given to the UCLA laboratories that occupied the third floor. Susumu Hagiwara from UCLA transferred into these quarters as soon as the building was completed, to be in charge of the Marine Neurobiology Facility and to be Associate Director of PRL. He was recruited as a full professor on the faculty and was the first appointee under the unique arrangement whereby the UCSD Medical School supports certain Scripps faculty members in marine biomedicine. The Marine Neurobiology Facility has operated from the beginning as a joint facility between Scripps and the Brain Research Institute; it is directed by a Scripps faculty member who is also a member of the Brain Research Institute. Since 1969 Theodore H. Bullock has headed the unit.
The Physiological Research Laboratory building (sometimes jokingly called “Per's Porpoise Palace”) was completed in June 1965, just seaward of the Aquarium-Museum. Alongside it was built a doughnut-shaped pool, ten meters in diameter, equipped with a trolley for instruments and a center island containing a wet laboratory and a dry laboratory. A round pool and a rectangular one for holding aquatic animals were also constructed, as well as a
[*] The highly regarded Scripps Clinic in La Jolla and the widely known Scripps Institution have often been confused with each other. One story relates that a doctor arrived at the San Diego airport and asked a taxi driver to take him to “Scripps.” He was delivered to the front door of old (and deteriorating) Ritter Hall on the campus. After walking past a musty aquarium room, down a dingy hallway, and through a lingering odor of formalin, he stopped short and exclaimed: “This can't be a hospital!”
Finding a suitable research ship was its own problem. Scholander first explored the possibilities of converting an available Navy yard freighter into a laboratory vessel. While on a visit to Norway, he concluded that a Norwegian trawler was the type of ship most suitable for his purposes. He brought back ship plans, and then found that American shipyards could not build the vessel as inexpensively as the home country. An American version of the ship was designed by Lawrence M. Glosten and Associates, and J. M. Martinac Shipbuilding Company of Tacoma, Washington, was selected as the builder.
Some referred to the proposed ship as “Schoboat.” Scholander almost named her “Caprice,” then “Baluga,” then “Proteus,” but before the launching he had settled on Alpha Helix in honor of the helical configuration of protein molecules.
The launching of the Alpha Helix was unique. Directly afterward, Baird Hastings, who had discovered on arrival that he was chairman of the launching ceremony, recounted the tale:
The pools used for studies for marine mammals by the Physiological Research Laboratory.
She was conceived in 1959, she was designed in 1962, she was funded in 1963, she was constructed between December, 1964 and June, 1965, she was scheduled to be launched and christened the Research Ship R/S “Alpha Helix” at 6:30 P.M., June 29 — but at 5:30 P.M. she took matters into her own hands and launched herself — practically unobserved. She did it expertly, safely and expeditiously.
At 5:25, Professor Per (“Pete”) Scholander, Mrs. Susan Scholander, Mrs. Grey Dimond, Isp (a Spitz) and I arrived in Scholander's car at the gates of the J. M. Martinac Shipbuilding Company in Tacoma. I stopped to take a picture of the two ladies while Pete went to find a way into the shipyard. As we entered through the front gate, there was a resounding noise — part crash, part thump — from the huge shed that housed our unlaunched lady, a new type of sea-going laboratory.
Almost immediately Mr. Glosten, the designer, appeared running from the shed toward the office, blanched and shouting, “It's a catastrophe!” We ran toward the shed. I scurried down its east side to the waterfront just in time to see the “Alpha Helix” slide quietly, on even keel, with unpardonable pride and unperturbed dignity, across the river toward the other bank.
A small tug, which had been steaming by, had responded to Mrs. Glosten's timely call to “Get a line aboard her!” and took the lady in tow. With some coaxing, he persuaded her to come with him, and with gentle prods and pulls he brought her back to our side of the river. There, with the help of professional hands, who had arrived from nowhere, and two larger tugs, the as-yet-unchristened, newest lady of the seas was secured alongside a more sedately launched sister ship of the Martinac yard.
Meanwhile, her shattered cradle — something akin to her placenta — had been recovered from the river by three men in an oversized skiff. They had come running, jumped into the boat and were at their job of clearing the river of flotsam in what seemed one motion. I couldn't hear their words, but from their expression and relieved laughter, I could tell that they were thankful that they had not been working under her when she took it into her head to be born.
It was now six o'clock, still half an hour before the scheduled launching time, but Mr. Martinac, many of his staff and yard personnel, as well as early arrivals for the ceremony had arrived. Though all were surprised and somewhat shaken by the turn of events, the mood was one of gratitude for the absence of injuries or damage which had accompanied the self-executed launching. With efficiency, the program was revised from “a Christening and Launching of the Alpha Helix” to a program of “Christening, after Launching, of the Alpha Helix.”
Speeches were shortened and revised to fit the new circumstances and Susan Scholander, the sponsor, with the platform party, was conducted to the bow of a large tug, which was maneuvered to the bow of the now quiet and high-floating lady. There, Susan with “I do christen thee Alpha Helix” anointed the well-reinforced prow and herself with champagne from an expertly shattered bottle. Pete and I managed to get a few drips into our hands and thence to our mouths so that we could henceforth say that we shared her christening carbon dioxide.
Thus ended an unpredicted incident in the birth of the “Alpha Helix.” Since she thus began her marine living in the manner of the Prince of Serendip, may her
Scholander consoled a much-upset Mr. Martinac with: “Everybody expects a few irregularities in matters in which I am involved, and we all think the launching was charmingly distinctive.”[6]
The ubiquitous Captain James L. Faughn took on the task of supervising the ship's completion at the shipyard, from seeing that the lab floors were level to checking on the painting and the engines, and the installation of laboratory equipment and ship's gear. Finally, on 26 February 1966, Faughn and a Scripps crew, accompanied by shipyard personnel, took the ship to sea for trials:
About five miles seaward of Tatoosh Island [Washington, wrote Faughn in his daily log] slowed to steerage way on cse. due west, then together with Mr. Skewis [chief engineer of Martinac Shipbuilding Company] and Joe Martinac [president of the company] went over documents for signature and those to be presented to the vessel by the builders. At 1547 zone +8 time and with final signatures on transfer papers, took delivery of the vessel from the builder in Latitude 48°26.7' N Long. 124°57.3' W, depth of water~110 ftm, about nine miles W X N of Tatoosh Island.[*]
[*] The transfer at sea, outside territorial waters, was arranged in order to avoid the requirement ashore of paying Washington state sales tax.
…Because of a slight attack of Mal de Mer on part of Mr. Martinac no ceremonies were held at time of delivery. On way back in to port, Joe turned in on my bunk and Ed turned in on Ch. Scientists bunk.
Scholander called the vessel a floating laboratory. Its purpose was to provide laboratory facilities for physiological studies where the animals themselves were, as previous experience had shown that most marine animals could not be carried alive for very long. The 133-foot ship was — is — equipped with a main laboratory, 24 by 26 feet, on the main deck, an electrophysiological laboratory below deck, a freeze laboratory, photographic darkroom, and a machine shop. The vessel can carry a scientific party of ten, members of which are rotated by air to and from the laboratory's location. The ship is designated a national facility, to be used by scientists throughout the country and abroad, when their projects have been approved by the Alpha Helix Review Committee, successor to the National Advisory Board.
On 11 March 1966, the jaunty Alpha Helix shared dedication ceremonies with the Thomas Washington and the Chester W. Nimitz Marine Facilities. Eight days later the Alpha Helix departed on Billabong Expedition on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. There, alongside a bit of land dubbed “Botany Spit” in the Flinders Islands group, she served as laboratory and support base for six months for 44 scientists who came from around the world to analyze and study the corals and the mangroves, the ghost crabs and mud crabs, the python and the skink, mudskippers and pufferfish, giant clams, dugongs, crocodiles, and many more denizens and growths of the stunning reef region. On shore the researchers set up a small village, in the form of two six-man tents, a tent messhall and storage area, and laboratory facilities. In spite of the land comforts, the ship and her crew represented life to the expedition participants, Captain Faughn concluded, “and a ready source of general assistance which even our most rugged staff are reluctant to let out of sight.”[7] The ship provided fresh water from its evaporator, and electrical power for the camp facilities. Her
The Alpha Helix was built for all climes, and she has visited the extremes and the in-betweens. After Billabong Expedition in 1966, she sailed the next year to Brazil and twelve hundred miles up the Amazon River to a jungle base camp for seven months. Among the subjects scrutinized there by 86 scientists from 12 countries were boa constrictors, electric eels, piranhas, cicadas, sloths, freshwater dolphins, tropical plants, and more mangroves. Enroute home the ship paused at the Galápagos Islands for collecting and field work, especially on fishes.
The Alpha Helix on station in the Antarctic in 1971. Photo by Edvard A. Hemmingsen.
The 1968 trip was a six-month voyage to the Bering Sea, where, accompanied by the Coast Guard icebreaker Northwind, the Alpha Helix worked her way through light and heavy ice, amidst seals, walruses, and sea birds until firm ice forced her back to open water. “There,” wrote Scholander and Laurence Irving (his father-in-law, another noted physiologist), “we were removed from the concentration of life prevalent within the Bering Sea ice, and the
In 1969, Alpha Helix turned to the tropics again, this time to New Guinea, “for broad investigations into the comparative physiology and behavior of a wide variety of mammals, birds, and fishes; the comparative biochemistry of proteins in vertebrates; and the phenomenon of bioluminescence, the heatless light produced by fireflies, fungi, certain fish, and other organisms.”[9] Alongside the ship a comfortable shore camp was established at Maiwara Mission, ten miles north of Madang.
Shortage of funds for operating the Alpha Helix and its program for visiting scientists necessitated cutting short the New Guinea expedition, and the ship returned home. She was used for local trips until the latter part of 1970, when she sailed for Central America and again, the Galápagos. In 1971 the sturdy ship headed south, to the Palmer Peninsula in Antarctica for two months of icy summer.
The National Science Foundation in 1972 changed the funding system for the Alpha Helix to one of single grants, to be selected by the advisory board and put together into a unified expedition. A trawl winch and an A-frame were added to the ship in 1970 for additional oceanographic studies, which allowed for a greater variety of programs. In 1973, for example, the Alpha Helix again went north to the Bering and Chukchi seas, for investigations on marine mammals, then turned south to Hawaii for work on deep-sea fishes, and en route home was used for plankton studies.
Since early 1973 the ship has been under the auspices of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS), and the National Advisory Board was reconstituted as a UNOLS Review Committee. The complex coordination of the Alpha Helix expeditions became
The researches carried out in connection with the Alpha Helix have involved hundreds of scientists from the United States and from many other countries. The work is almost entirely biological, with the emphasis on physiology. Among the demands on an Alpha Helix scientist is that he must present an abstract of his research accomplishments before leaving the ship. This has been obeyed faithfully, and the printed outcome is impressive.
A large and important scientific literature has resulted from the research conducted aboard the Alpha Helix [noted Garey]. Not directly reflected by the publications, however, are the significant concomitant personal learnings and appreciations gained through the inquiry and cross-fertilization processes; as participants, commonly representing different disciplines, work and live together in a wholly stimulating scientific and intellectual environment free from the intrusions of telephone calls and administrative concerns.[10]
PRL is unique. The spark for the unit has always been Per Scholander, a man whose interests and enthusiasm are boundless. Among other accomplishments, he “sings Scandinavian drinking songs with verve and plays the violin with sensitivity.”[11] Born in Örebro, Sweden, on 29 November 1905 to a Norwegian mother and a Swedish father, he earned both an M. D. (1932) and a Ph. D. (1934, in botany) at the University of Oslo, where he continued as a research fellow until 1939. Scholander then came to the United States as a Rockefeller Fellow at Swarthmore College. After wartime service in the Air Corps (from captain to major) and service as an aviation physiologist until 1946, he
Scholander's tendency is to study “situations where life hangs by a thread.”[12] He began with lichens in Greenland, went on to the respiration of diving mammals and birds, then to that of sloths and man. Recording and analyzing adaptations to adverse conditions have long appealed to Scholander, and have led him from the tropics to the poles, from the Andes to the beach. While at Swarthmore he developed an inexpensive gas analyzer that became standard throughout the country; at Harvard he developed the Scholander respiration method, a simple, accurate, and economical means for measuring respiration in small samples; the following year he devised a means of measuring the oxygen consumption of single cells during division — a feat never previously accomplished. This device was dubbed Scholander's Bubbleometer.
Scholander's interests are catholic. “During the year 1959,” for example, Hastings noted, Scholander “worked on such diverse problems as dating the age of Greenland's glacial ice, the bradycardia that accompanies diving, the reason that fish in subzero sea water do not freeze, and how the blood pigment hemoglobin facilitates the passage of oxygen through membranes.”[13] At that time Scholander found his office at Scripps “so full of secretaries [two] and alligators [one large one, in a bathtub] that he had no room to do his work,” so he availed himself of space in Hastings's new laboratory at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation for his hemoglobin project. At the same time he and Hastings had the opportunity to discuss the laboratory that Scholander envisioned.
Plants and animals have received equal time from Scholander. One of his longterm studies has been on the mechanism of osmosis in mangrove trees as they thrive knee-deep in salt water. His chief interests are in how living systems function, and his philosophy is that “there is much to be learned from the ocean, not only about the ocean.” He has yearned to devise a means of getting to the ocean depths himself to determine how abyssal creatures manage to survive there.
The work of other staff members at PRL has also ranged throughout physiology. Robert Elsner for some years concentrated on diving physiology and asphyxia in marine mammals, man, and pregnant sheep. Gerald Kooyman has also worked on respiratory adaptations of deep-diving animals — birds, sea turtles, sea snakes, and various mammals, particularly the Weddell seal of Antarctica. Harold T. Hammel has studied regulation of body temperatures in various vertebrates — seals, penguins, dogs, and turtles — and has studied osmosis as well. Edvard A. Hemmingsen has investigated the respiratory and circulatory physiology of fishes, and the properties of gases in solution, in an effort to understand the mechanism of the formation of bubbles during certain conditions of decompression. A. Aristides (“Art”) Yayanos has concerned himself with the effects of temperature and pressure on amino acid molecules; he devised a collecting device that can maintain specimens in their native pressure and temperature, including bacteria from 7,000-meter depth. Arthur L. DeVries has studied the physiology of certain fishes, especially those of the Antarctic, which are capable of resisting freezing in waters below the freezing point.
Human subjects for PRL's studies are volunteers, who are persuaded that their metabolic reactions in time of stress are of significance to science. Thus, graduate students
Early in 1970 a committee was appointed to consider PRL's role at Scripps, and to find a replacement for Scholander, who was about to leave on sabbatical and wanted to be relieved as director. Andrew A. Benson was selected as the new director of PRL. The committee learned that some at Scripps felt that PRL's work was not sufficiently marine-oriented and that there was a lack of communication between the laboratory and the rest of the institution. They also found the Physiological Research Laboratory to be “a real asset … both to S.I.O. and to the world of science”; they complimented the laboratory on the high quality and the impressive number of its publications. PRL's physiological studies and its rapport with the UCSD Medical School have continued apace.
NOTES
1. Memorandum to Acting Director Fred N. Spiess, 17 October 1962.
2. Announcement to Staff Council by Roger Revelle, 1 August 1963.
3. Ibid.
4. Memorandum to Acting Director Fred N. Spiess, 17 October 1962.
5. Memorandum of 2 July 1965.
6. Letter of 9 July 1965.
7. Journal entry of 14 August 1966.
8. “Introduction,” R/V Alpha Helix Bering Sea Expedition, 1969.
9. SIO Annual Report, 1970, 17.
10. “The Alpha Helix Kona Expedition,” Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Vol. 52B (15 September 1975), 5.
11. Mary Harrington Hall, “Inside UCSD. Part II. Scripps: Where the Four Winds Blow,” San Diego Magazine, Vol. 16, No. 7 (May 1964), 46.
12. Daniel Behrman, The New World of the Oceans (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, & Co., 1969), 25.
13. Manuscript in SIO Archives.
Lionfish on display in the Scripps Aquarium — and those spines are poisonous.
IX. “Let's Visit Scripps”:
The Thomas Wayland Vaughan
Aquarium-Museum
A public aquarium has been a feature of the Scripps Institution since before it was an institution, because the members of William E. Ritter's summer study sessions, which began in 1892, always had a few display tanks for interested visitors. When the Marine Biological Association of San Diego set out to establish Scripps Institution in 1903, they listed as one of their objectives: “to build and maintain a public aquarium and museum.”[1]
In 1905, in the “little green laboratory behind the bath house” in La Jolla Cove park, a few shelves were set aside for a museum display, and a central counter held open containers of live specimens (some of which vanished with visitors). Five years later the public aquarium was located on the ground floor of the institution's first permanent building, the George H. Scripps Laboratory.
In 1915 a separate public aquarium was built, a wooden building 24 feet by 48 feet, just north of Scripps Laboratory; it held 19 aquarium tanks, in capacities from 96 to 228 gallons. The following year the museum, previously located on the second floor of Scripps Laboratory, was moved into the ground floor of the newly completed library
Barnhart's usual technique of acquiring exhibits for the aquarium was by fishing from the pier. In the 1930s some specimens were gathered from the Scripps and the E. W. Scripps, and, during World War II when the institution had no ship, Barnhart kept a trap set off the end of the pier for gathering new material.
As early as 1925 the curator was complaining, in his annual reports, that the aquarium tanks were gradually disintegrating, and that “bad water, cracked glasses and broken tanks [were] a constant source of worry and aggravation.” He pointed out that the wooden structure had been intended only as a temporary site for the aquarium. In 1931 he added that the museum location would soon be required by the library.
So — while repairing tanks, making plaster casts of some large fishes and skin mounts of others, storing the biological collections, walking through the aquarium at nine each night and at five each morning to check for leaks and other problems, building new shelving, writing a book on the fishes of southern California, and answering visitors' questions — Barnhart also dreamed of the ideal aquarium-museum. His vision was a building in which brightly lighted display tanks would form a periphery around a central museum room. That vision became the design theme of the new aquarium-museum.
Barnhart retired in 1946, while his dream was still only in the planning stage, and Sam Hinton, who had joined the staff a few months earlier, became the next curator.
Hinton is a versatile person: folk singer, illustrator and artist, reptile fancier, curator (versatile there too, for one post was with a desert museum and the other with the marine aquarium), and helpful adviser to high school students. His first job in San Diego was as editor and illustrator at the University of California Division of War Research (see chapter 2). In his 18 years at Scripps, besides handling the aquarium duties, Hinton answered the endless questions of visitors, served as the public information office for news media, and designed the lighted exhibit explanations above the aquarium tanks. He also drew many a certificate for a Scripps expedition, equator crossing, or any other special occasion. On outside time he became a nationally renowned folk singer, and he has livened many local occasions with folk songs from around the world and with an occasional ditty of his own, all cleverly presented.
Hinton began at his new post in 1946 with planning the new building. This led him into “meetings with the University architects and engineers, extensive correspondence with museum people in all parts of the country, research in the literature on the subject, and direct observation of the behavior of visitors in the present museum and aquarium.”[3] Hinton also collected specimens from the E. W. Scripps, and he obtained others from local commercial fishermen. He and Claude Palmer, the only other aquarium employee then, gathered sand crabs and red worms to supplement the fish purchased to feed to the aquarium inhabitants. When the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science met in San Diego in 1947, Hinton gathered enough fresh fish for a fish fry, and he directed a grunion hunt for the group afterward.
The new aquarium-museum building was completed and occupied in October 1950. Its dedication was hailed as a major occasion and was set for the University's Charter
Hinton, who had put considerable thought into the planning, later qualified the result:
… The staff of this Aquarium-Museum is very well satisfied with our aquarium, but there are a few things that we should do differently, given the opportunity. Perhaps one of the strongest restraining factors in the design of aquariums is the fact that so few people ever have the chance to design two of them![5]
The old aquarium as it appeared in 1933, when it was, to Percy S. Barnhart, “a constant source of worry and aggravation.”
The new building was three times the size of the previous space for the aquarium and museum, but not all of
As the Aquarium-Museum has never been supported by research funds, attempts to make it self-supporting have periodically led to the suggestion of charging admission. Hinton wrote eloquently against the idea in 1954:
… Many La Jollans have a proud sense of proprietorship in the Scripps Institution, and enjoy bringing their visitors to see “their” aquarium and museum. For example, last summer when we had trouble with our water supply, and were losing fish steadily, a number of local people made daily visits as if to a sickroom, inquiring anxiously as [to] the welfare of our creatures. Many local youngsters start nearly every summer day with a routine tour of inspection of the aquarium; these boys and girls are always delighted with new specimens and new exhibits, and frequently conduct their parents on guided tours on weekends. Lots of groups of families organize beach picnics and parties with the Aquarium as a meeting place; a tour of the place before and after is usually the order of things. These examples of the public attitude are individually small, but they add up to the fact that we enjoy a position of high prestige, and are considered by the community as a whole as part of the civic family. It would be most regrettable if this standing were to be lowered, as I feel it would be if each person were required to pay for admittance. It is surprising to realize that a considerable amount of
― 191 ―bitterness still exists because of our having closed the pier to public fishing, nearly fourteen years ago[*][*] The Scripps pier was a favorite public fishing spot from the day it was built in 1915 until 10 December 1941, when wartime studies (and pier disrepair) put a stop to public fishing. An occasional oldtime La Jollan used to present his “lifetime” permit to fish from the pier, but these too were turned away.
; the exacting of a toll would arouse even more ill-feeling.[6]
The issue of charging admission was shelved at that time. Some proceeds were derived from the sale of books, shells, and postcards that Hinton instituted in 1953.
Carr Tuthill joined the staff as a museum preparator in 1952 and was later put in charge of the aquarium exhibits. Richard H. Rosenblatt became overall director of the Aquarium-Museum in 1961, and Sam Hinton continued in charge of the museum displays until 1964, when he transferred to the UCSD office of relations with schools. In January 1965, Donald W. Wilkie became director of the Aquarium-Museum.
A native of Vancouver, British Columbia, Wilkie had taught mathematics, science, and physical education in his native province before earning a B. S. in zoology and an M. S. in ichthyology at the University of British Columbia. He had served as assistant curator at the Vancouver Public Aquarium and curator in charge of mammals and fishes at the Philadelphia Aquarama before becoming director of the Scripps Aquarium-Museum. In his new post Wilkie soon established a laboratory for researches on fish ailments, with microscopes and “behind-the-scenes” aquariums for ailing or for new specimens. The aquarium staff has made significant contributions in diagnosing and curing the ailments of marine creatures and in the handling of them from sea to shore.
In addition to researches on ailments of aquarium fishes,
Sea-water aquariums are much more difficult to maintain than fresh-water ones. Corrosion of pipes, growths of barnacles and other fouling creatures inside the piping, toxic “red tide” blooms, compatibility of various creatures, and ailments and diets of the aquarium inhabitants create constant problems. Under Wilkie's direction, records have been kept of the food preferences and intake of the animals in every tank, and the water has been monitored daily. The use of sub-sand filters has provided more flexibility in the sea-water circulation, which helps to control red tide problems and makes it possible to maintain warm-water fishes throughout the year.
The score of illuminated display tanks, in several sizes up to 2,000 gallons, have presented a colorful array of inhabitants through the years. Recently the displays have been composed of natural habitat groupings, chiefly of the San Diego area and of the Gulf of California region, where a much more tropical fauna dwells. Much admired by visitors are the orange garibaldis, dubbed the “La Jolla goldfish,” and their blue-spotted young. An especially popular aquarium personage for some years was Harvey, a 100-pound grouper, who majestically circled a large corner tank from 1956 until his death in 1973. Morays, as they stretch open their mouths to display an array of needle-sharp teeth, draw awed gasps from viewers. At times sea turtles have swum the rounds of the larger tanks, and at least briefly one tank displayed highly venomous
Visitors sometimes fail to find the well-camouflaged flatfishes and skates against the matching sand. Certain sea anemones provide stunning color in some of the displays, and gracefully undulating nudibranchs — so unlike their relative, the garden slug — add natural artistry. Local fishermen like to compare notes on some of the species that they regularly catch. Whenever an octopus is among the inhabitants on display, it brings pause to most of the visitors, especially when it flashes through remarkable changes in color.
The sea-water line was renovated in 1964, to increase the capacity and improve the filtration system. Sea water for Scripps needs, including the aquarium, is drawn in from the far end of the pier, by means of two vacuum-assisted pumps that lift the water to a wooden trough that slopes to the landward end of the pier. It passes through a sand-bed filter and is then stored in two tanks near the aquarium building. From one the water flows by gravity through the Aquarium-Museum, the Experimental Aquarium, the Physiological Research Laboratory, Ritter Hall, and Scripps Building. From the other storage tank sea water is pumped up to the Hydraulics Laboratory and the Southwest Fisheries Center. At Wilkie's suggestion, a duplicate polyvinyl-chloride (PVC) line was installed on each section; these are used alternately, to hold the growth of barncles, mussels, and other clogging creatures to a minimum. Charles J. Farwell, who joined the aquarium staff in 1969, has, among his other duties, carried out studies on water quality and its control.
As a convenience to the public, a sea-water tap was installed at the landward end of the pier in 1972. Home aquarists stop there regularly to fill jerry cans, bottles, and buckets. One woman takes home sea water to use in cooking — and one man drives to Scripps twice or oftener each
An especially useful service of the aquarium personnel for many years has been the supplying of specimens to other Scripps researchers — some of whom are “softies and laboratory bound,” according to one of them, but dependent upon “a steady supply of live material for daily experiments.” Since 1966 Robert S. Kiwala has been the official collector, and he is often aided by aquarium helpers and other Scripps assistants in the gathering of several thousand marine specimens annually. This group can tell many tales of marine creatures that, for one good reason or another, they did not catch. Collecting trips by the aquarium staff have been as far afield as the Gulf of California, and sometimes collectors have joined more distant expeditions of other researchers. Much of the collecting has been carried out with the aid of Scuba gear in recent years. Rare specimens are sometimes exhibited and observed in the display tanks before they are preserved for the fish collection.
The Aquarium-Museum is the institution's door to the public. In 1950, while the present building was under construction, 50,000 visitors filed through the old wooden structure. One staff member estimated that at least two groups of school children each month were conducted through the aquarium. Within the first month after the new building opened, visitors from all 48 states and from Hawaii, Alaska, and the nation's capital had signed the visitor register. In fiscal year 1975–76 the numbers had reached 411, 914, plus 61,364 students in conducted school groups, from San Diego, from Tijuana and other points south, from Los Angeles and other points north and east.
When the issue of charging admission was again raised in the late 1960s, Wilkie suggested that a voluntary donation box be tried instead. This has proved satisfactory — indeed,
Wilkie has emphasized the educational role of the Aquarium-Museum. Soon after his arrival, he found himself inundated with 800 school children on one frantic morning. The solution, he felt, was a docent program, which he instituted — with one docent — in 1966. The docent group has expanded to number sixty or more each year. Since 1970 Patricia A. Kampmann, who was one of the first docents, has supervised the group. These enthusiastic volunteers primarily conduct school groups, but some visit classrooms and hospitals with displays, and others help with exhibit preparation, collecting, the sales desk, and even patrolling the Scripps Shoreline Reserve to advise visitors not to remove invertebrates from the protected area. The docents and the aquarium staff have prepared lesson packages for visiting school groups, which include study material to be used before, during, and after the group's tour of the aquarium and the museum.
In cooperation with area schools, Wilkie set up a career-training program for high school students interested in aquarium or marine biology careers. Several “graduates” of this program have become student employees at the aquarium, and some have gone on to advanced degrees in biology. The aquarium staff also offers short summer courses for several age groups of school children and organizes symposia on marine subjects for teachers.
The very popular Junior Oceanographers Corps (JOC), for students from fourth to twelfth grade, is also under the auspices of the Aquarium-Museum. Roger Revelle and Sam Hinton began it, originally as a means of allowing enthusiastic young fishermen to fish from the pier and as a source of specimens for the aquarium tanks. Hinton
The central museum area was given a major face-lifting in 1968, when, thanks to several generous donations from local citizens and businesses, it was possible to set up a large number of new exhibits in the rearranged central room. San Diego's Mayor Frank Curran presided at the ribbon-cutting ceremonies in August of that year.
To represent the variety of researches within oceanography, new exhibits are prepared frequently for the museum. Many oldtimers recall the large oarfish and other hand-painted specimens prepared by Percy S. Barnhart. In more recent years exhibits have illustrated and explained scientific concepts such as sea-floor spreading and ocean circulation, the undersea vehicles of the Marine Physical Laboratory, the programs of the Deep Sea Drilling Project and of Sea Grant, and such processes as wave motion and action (by means of a small wave tank). An unusually large manganese nodule has been displayed for many years. Models of the offshore bathymetry and of the submarine canyon that heads just beyond the Scripps pier have also been museum features for some time.
Looking down one corridor of the Vaughan Aquarium-Museum, early 1970s.
In the spring of 1975 the Aquarium-Museum opened its outdoor tide pool exhibit, which was based on a design by Wilkie and supervised by Farwell. The tide pool “rocks” were formed by pouring concrete into latex molds taken
Aquarium tenders learn to avoid the poisonous stonefish and lionfish, and the threatening gape of the morays (only Ben Cox regularly petted those, during his many years of feeding the fishes). They have found the octopus to be the most troublesome aquarium inhabitant, as it is inclined to wander. Several times octopi have been found on the floor by startled janitors or staff. Late one night a restless — or hungry — octopus crawled from his own tank into his neighbors', inadvertently dragging along his probably life-saving refrigeration unit. The neighbors were crabs, which the octopus was eating when discovered. A hastily called aquarium crew wrestled for twenty minutes with the 35-pound octopus, prying loose the 2,000 suckers of his eight arms. As they lifted him out of the tank, he reached back to snatch one last crab.
NOTES
1. Helen Raitt and Beatrice Moulton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography: First Fifty Years (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1967), 21.
2. Report of the Scripps Institution for Biological Research, 1 July 1916, in Annual Report of the President of the University of California for 1915, 222.
3. Aquarium-Museum report to the director, 1946–47.
4. La Jolla Light, 29 March 1951.
5. Brochure of the Vaughan Aquarium-Museum (May 1954), 1.
6. Memorandum to business manager C. Earle Short, 25 March 1954.