III. The Disciplines
X. Life in the Sea:
Studies in Marine Biology
For approximately its first quarter of a century, the laboratory by the sea was the Scripps Institution for Biological Research. Biologist-Director William E. Ritter considered chemists and physical oceanographers to be chiefly contributors to the total biological picture. Even dynamic oceanographer Harald U. Sverdrup said, “The major duty of a physical oceanographer is to provide a background for biologists.”[1]
Times have changed, as the physics, chemistry, and geology of the sea have become disciplines of their own, rather more than “background for biologists,” at Scripps and at other marine institutions. Biology at Scripps now involves approximately one-third of the staff researchers, scattered through several administrative units. Among the groups that deal primarily with biology but have been covered separately in this book are the Marine Life Research Program, the Physiological Research Laboratory, and portions of the Institute of Marine Resources.
Within the very broad field known as biology, the major contributions of Scripps have been in systematics, distribution, and ecology of fishes, of innumerable ocean
In 1953, soon after the great expansion of oceanography immediately following World War II, Carl L. Hubbs noted:
In general the physical sciences have been supported more generously than the biological by contract grants from the Department of Defense. The biological sciences at Scripps have profited to a limited extent directly, and to a larger measure indirectly from such support. A more auspicious balance would result if major support could be obtained for biological work at Scripps.[2]
Major support for biology was already being sought, and in 1954 resulted in the awarding of one million dollars by the Rockefeller Foundation “as an outright grant to the University of California for the development of a research program in marine biology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.” The Rockefeller grant was in response to a formal proposal prepared in 1953: “Proposed development of marine biology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography,” which opened:
The ocean and life within it are among the last frontiers of exploration — not a mere fringe but by far the largest habitat on the earth. … We must concede that the mere description of the ocean and of its inhabitants is in its infancy. The ocean still keeps a stupendous wealth of mysteries well guarded in its abysses, its vastness, and in the surprising biologies of its creatures.
…In spite of inherent obstacles, however, our insight into the ocean's movements, chemical
― 203 ―constitution, bottom structure, and interactions with the atmosphere has deepened during the last few years.By contrast, marine biological knowledge has not kept pace with the progress of physical oceanography, nor has it taken full advantage of the experimental approach, which has brought about sweeping advances in other fields of biology. Marine organisms have provided tools for important advances in experimental biology, but marine biology as a whole, with few exceptions, has remained at a descriptive level. … At present, thanks to the greater familiarity with the sea, to the development of new tools and theoretical approaches, and to the deeper insight into general biological problems obtained by biophysicists, biochemists, geneticists and microbiologists the time is ripe for a planned, broad, frontal attack on the problems of marine biology.
Such an attack will have to be commenced on many fronts, in various waters, in several laboratories, taking advantage of the international cooperation, traditional for this field of biology. But a nucleus of activation of this field is needed. This function, we think, could be well performed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The Rockefeller funds, which were intended to be used over an eight-year period, established four new professorships in biology, one visiting professorship, several graduate and post-doctoral fellowships, and were also used for laboratory equipment and to add to the resources of biology staff members. At the end of the eight-year period, by previous agreement, the university assumed responsibility for the salaries of the new faculty appointments. These four were researchers in widely varying aspects of biology: E. W. Fager in ecology, Per F. Scholander in physiology,
The Rockefeller Foundation funds also contributed to an international symposium, “Perspectives in Marine Biology,” held in the “swank bungalow-type” La Jollan Hotel in March 1956, under the auspices of the International Union of Biological Sciences and sponsored jointly by Scripps and the Office of Naval Research. Adriano A. Buzzati-Traverso “organized the program, took the brunt of intricate diplomatic problems, and directed the large staff in managing a complex function.”[3] More than 170 scientists from 14 nations arrived for the eight-day meeting, to present and discuss papers, and to talk shop in small “idea groups.” Four invited Soviet scientists who had accepted the invitation failed to appear. Their leader, L. Zenkevich, had previously suggested that a biological program should be added to the forthcoming International Geophysical Year, and his suggestion was formally proposed to the meeting by Roger Revelle, whereupon the members of the symposium enthusiastically endorsed the idea. “The sense of the meeting,” summarized Joel W. Hedgpeth, “as I got it from my own inevitably biased viewpoint, was that marine biology, if it can be said to have one perspective rather than several, should be directed toward the study of life in the sea as an organically interrelated complex, as an ecological unit.”[4]
Let us look at some of the people and projects in biology at Scripps Institution, starting in 1936 when Harald Sverdrup became director.
MARINE VERTEBRATES
Francis B. Sumner was the senior biologist at that time. He had begun his professional career with fishes, and he
Carl L. Hubbs was invited to Scripps from the University of Michigan to replace Sumner in 1944. The appointment elicited the comment from University President Robert G. Sproul: “[Hubbs] is an exceptionally prolific writer, having published more than three hundred papers since 1915. His fertility in producing sound ideas is as amazing as is the energy he brings to his work.”[5]
Born in Williams, Arizona, Hubbs had spent most of his childhood in southern California, and had in fact lived in San Diego from the age of two months until he was thirteen years old. As a boy he relished hunting horned toads on the hills around the small city of those days, and he paddled a “sneakboat” through the unspoiled bird-filled marshlands of San Diego Bay and False (now Mission) Bay. He attended Stanford University, and has always been proud to have co-authored papers there with David Starr Jordan. From 1917 to 1920 Hubbs was assistant curator of ichthyology and herpetology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and he then became instructor of zoology and curator of fishes at the University of Michigan, which conferred upon him a Ph.D. in 1927 (unsought, and without requiring of him a dissertation, on the record of his publications). In 1940 Hubbs became a professor of biology at Michigan.
Hubbs's major contributions have been in the taxonomy of fishes, a subject that represents about one-half of his
At Scripps Hubbs also became interested in marine mammals. Soon after his arrival, he began taking notes on the annual migration of gray whales, which were slowly recovering from near-extinction after intensive whaling. In 1948 he enlisted the support of actor Errol Flynn (son of marine biologist T. Thomson Flynn) for a plane and helicopter flight to the whale breeding grounds in Baja California. That was a near-disaster, for the helicopter had three forced landings from engine troubles and the Piper Cub tangled with a chubasco. Undaunted, Hubbs continued his studies of the gray whale. He lined up volunteers for the annual census of whales as they passed Scripps southward to the breeding lagoons each December and January; for this the chief watching post was the “whale loft” atop (old) Ritter Hall, a small room equipped with a pair of powerful binoculars. From 1952 to 1964 Hubbs and his wife Laura flew to the Baja California lagoons almost every February to count the whales and their calves, usually piloted by colleague Gifford C. Ewing. Hubbs helped persuade the Mexican government to set aside the major breeding lagoon, Scammon's, as a wildlife preserve.
Carl L. and Laura C. Hubbs on a research trip to Baja California, 1954.
He also rediscovered the Guadalupe fur seal, thought to have been exterminated in the early 1930s, at least until George A. Bartholomew (of UCLA) tentatively identified one on San Nicolas Island in 1949. In 1954, on a trip to Guadalupe Island, Hubbs finally found a small harem of the elusive fur seal among the rugged rocks on the eastern side of the island, and he greeted the defiant roar of the bull with his own equally loud roar of discovery. The fur seal survivors have proved prolific: the herd, protected by Mexican legislation, has increased to more than 500 individuals.
Guadalupe Island and Baja California have been favorite study areas of Hubbs for many years. To determine the temperature profile of the water along the shore, and its relation to upwelling, he carried out monthly temperature runs from 1948 for some years, from San Diego on the spine-jarring road down the Baja California peninsula to Punta Baja, just southwest of El Rosario, stopping at 61 stations to record ocean temperatures along the coast. Allan J. Stover, who often went along on those trips, took over the grueling task in the later years.
Facets of natural history other than temperatures also appealed to Hubbs on the monthly trips: birds, mammals, cacti and other peninsular plants, and evidence of early human occupation. That led him into a long archaeological study of the middens of La Jolla and Diegueño Indians, the early inhabitants of southern California and northern Baja California. When Hans E. Suess established the La Jolla Radiocarbon Laboratory in 1957 (see chapter 13), Hubbs was able to acquire, through precise analyses by that laboratory, the dates of occupancy of many of the middens. He
Other stamping grounds for Hubbs have been the California deserts and the western basin-and-range domain. These interests began in his college days under John Otterbein Snyder, with whom he carried out a survey of the fishes of Utah in 1915. Over the years Hubbs often returned, with his family, to the Great Basin and desert areas, to work out the patterns of stream flow that in Pleistocene time formed a vast network of waterways, and, as the climate changed, dried to trickles and remnants in which a few species of fish survived. Hubbs persuaded the federal government to set aside Devils Hole National Monument to save the last handful of the Devil's Hole pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis, and he has persisted in efforts to save other endangered species and subspecies of relict fishes throughout the western United States and in Mexico.
A Ph.D. project by one of Hubbs's students created surely more voluntary cooperation than has any other student project at Scripps. This was Boyd W. Walker's study of the habits of the silvery scaly grunion, the coastal fish that chooses to spawn in the moist sand left by a retreating high tide, during several nights after full and new moons from February to August. During his three-year study Walker enlisted the aid of more than 250 people, many of them from Scripps, who cheerfully paced the beaches late at night to look for, gather, count, sex, and tag grunion. On one April night more than one hundred volunteers watched for grunion on the beaches from San Francisco Bay to San Quintín in Baja California; and on one busy weekend Walker and thirty-odd assistants gathered 5,000 grunion from the Scripps beach by hand and surf-net, tagged them by fin-clipping, and returned them to the sea.
This is science? Volunteers coping with a good grunion run, for Boyd Walker's dissertation research in 1949. Photo by Lamar Boren.
In recognition of valued services, each volunteer received a certificate of merit, drawn by Sam Hinton, which read:
Neither surf nor sand nor wee small hours
have held terror for this brave worker in the
cause of science; slippery fishes, scalding
coffee, sharp-edged buckets, lofty sea walls —
all have been met, and fought, and conquered.
In recognition of these activities, so far beyond
the call of duty, it is hereby ordained that[volunteer]
is a Life Member of the
Society for the Investigation of Non-Gastronomical
Characteristics of the Gruniondand is hereinafter privileged to spawn on the beach at high tide.
Walker's study very precisely established the spawning pattern of the grunion.
One of Boyd Walker's students from UCLA was Richard H. Rosenblatt, who joined the Scripps staff in 1958, and simultaneously, as mentioned, became curator of the growing fish collection. Rosenblatt's own studies have been directed to the taxonomy and distribution of a great variety of marine fishes, especially of the eastern Pacific, from near-shore to midwater and deep ocean areas. He has been a leader or participant in a number of expeditions, including the attempt on Antipode Expedition in 1971 to photograph and capture a live coelacanth near the Comoro Islands. Although the trip did not attain that goal, it did add a number of significant specimens of other fishes to the collection. In 1975 Scripps alumnus John E. McCosker acquired in the
Robert L. Wisner, who began work at Scripps in 1947 for Francis P. Shepard, soon returned to his earlier interest — fishes — as the Marine Life Research program grew. He turned to the large unstudied collection of the usually mesopelagic lanternfishes (family Myctophidae) gathered at Scripps chiefly with the Isaacs-Kidd midwater trawl. Among fishes, these twinkling, small creatures — one-half inch up to twelve inches long — are exceeded in numbers in the oceans probably only by the cyclothones, and their taxonomy is complex.
In 1973 Walter F. Heiligenberg, who received his Ph.D at the University of Munich, joined the Scripps staff, and he has been pursuing studies on electrolocation in fishes, with emphasis on problems of signal detection and information processing in the nervous system.
Others who conducted studies on marine vertebrates at Scripps for shorter periods of time were Theodore J. Walker, who in the 1960s made observations on gray whales in the breeding lagoons and along the migration route, and earlier investigated the role of the lateral line of fishes; and Grace L. Orton, a specialist in amphibian larvae, who in the 1950s and early 1960s studied the eggs and early stages of various marine fishes. Also, Adriano A. Buzzati-Traverso, a population geneticist who was at Scripps from 1953 to 1962, set out to establish a field of marine genetics through the use of the brine shrimp Tigriopus. In a project for the Marine Life Research program, he also adopted the technique of paper partition chromatography in an effort to distinguish individual populations of sardines. Samples from various specimens of the same species, he found, in collaboration with Andreas B. Rechnitzer, were “remarkably constant, irrespective of the size or age of the fish.”
The researchers on fishes and fisheries at Scripps have for many years maintained a close working relationship with their colleagues in the National Marine Fisheries Service, a rapport that was nurtured by the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation (see chapter 3). Several of the senior researchers of the federal laboratory have served as lecturers and adjunct professors at Scripps. The fisheries laboratory maintains an extensive collection of eggs and larval fishes, to which Scripps has often contributed specimens. Researchers from each organization have often participated in the other's expeditions.
MARINE INVERTEBRATES
For some years, the one who devoted the greatest time at Scripps to studies on invertebrates was Wesley R. Coe. New Englander Coe had been a faculty member in biology at Yale University for 42 years before his retirement in 1938, when he became a visiting professor at Scripps. His field of research was the growth and reproduction of various marine invertebrates, especially the nemerteans and various species of mollusks.
As a visitor at Scripps during the academic year of 1926-27, Coe began a study of the attachment and growth of organisms on surfaces introduced into the ocean. “During the first year the program as outlined met with many vicissitudes,” noted Coe, “owing mainly to the writer's inexperience with the powerful force of the breaking surf on an exposed sea-shore.”[6] All the introduced blocks were carried away by storm waves except those set in deep water at the end of the pier. Replacements were installed, and Winfred E. Allen continued the observations after Coe's return to Yale; the two researchers published on the long project together. “During the nine years from October, 1926, to
For a study of Mytilus, the California mussel, Coe and his younger colleague Denis L. Fox gathered more than a thousand mussels of various sizes, placed them in screened boxes, and suspended them below the water surface at the end of the pier. The length of each mussel was measured every month until waves from a late December storm snapped the supporting boom and ended that project in its twelfth month. A second group of mussels was gathered to start again, and from the two years of data the rate of growth of mussels of various ages was meticulously tabulated.
That younger colleague, Denis L. Fox, by 1975 had gained the distinction of having been the longest-term living staff member at Scripps Institution. His career at the laboratory by the sea began in 1931, when as “a sharp young graduate from Berkeley and Stanford with fresh experience in industry and degrees in Biology and Chemistry, [he] was buttonholed by T. Wayland Vaughan.”[8] Fox was born near Rye, England, in 1901 and in 1905 moved to the United States with his parents, to a farm near Napa, California. After earning his B.A. in chemistry at Berkeley, he worked in chemical research for Standard Oil Company for four years before entering Stanford for a Ph.D. in
[*] This book includes events through the end of December 1976, at which time the Marine Biology Building was not completed.
Fox later said: “The colleague who had the greatest influence upon my professional growth at Scripps was Francis B. Sumner. … It was he who introduced me to the whole general subject of animal pigments, and with whom I conducted joint researches on the subject for the first several years.”[9] These studies were particularly on the carotenoid pigments of fishes, and the research led Fox into further work on other animal pigments, to the extent that an admiring colleague could say: “Armed with new methods and uncanny ingenuity he wrenched the colorful secrets from anemones and ascidians, from gorgonians and garibaldis, from Metridium and medusae.”[10]
All these and others too, for Fox's studies have been principally aimed at unraveling the metabolic fractionation of pigment molecules. His subjects have also included the orange-bodied California mussel, nudibranchs, barnacles, octopi, squid, primitive plants, and a number of fishes — and “the largest brilliantly coloured birds of the New World,” the flamingos. In a Gorgonian coral and in two hydrocorals, Fox and his colleagues in 1970 described the first known examples of chemical binding of brightly colored carotenoid acids in calcareous skeletons.
For Fox's long study of flamingos he worked closely with the San Diego Zoo. Flamingos, as zookeepers had long known, tend to lose their bright coloring in captivity. When Fox began his study in 1954, the flock of flamingos at the
In 1953, Fox published the first edition of his summary treatise, Animal Biochromes and Structural Colours,[12] written, according to one reviewer, “with a zest that betrays his own delight in his subject.” A revised second edition of the text by Fox was published by the University of California Press in 1976.
The most intensive ecological study of nearshore creatures at Scripps was carried out by Edward W. (“Bill”) Fager. He had received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Yale in 1942, had participated in the wartime Manhattan Project, and had received a Ph.D. in zoology at Oxford before joining the Scripps staff in 1956 to pursue ecological studies. A longterm project of his was analyzing the community structure of a shallow-water area off the Scripps beach, often called “Fager's Half-acre.” The area selected was the sand plain between the two heads of the La Jolla submarine canyon, and the study method was direct observation by Scuba diving. The water depth of five to ten fathoms was “chosen because it allowed 50-60 min working time underwater per dive and avoided the complications of surf in shallower water and the problems of decompression introduced by prolonged work at greater depths.”[13] Fager, with Arthur O. Flechsig as his most frequent partner, dived repeatedly in the area over a three-year period (and less often for another three years), to monitor the most common
Fager and Flechsig next set out four artificial “rocks” — one-meter cubes of asbestos board on iron frames — on the underwater sandy area, to determine the development of a community in a new environment. These were monitored, “weather permitting,” every two to three weeks for several years. As encrusting invertebrates and algae became established on the new homesites, fishes, starfishes, crabs, lobsters, and octopi moved in for food and shelter. The new communities had both similarities and differences, which led Fager to conclude that “chance plays a much larger role in the establishment and maintenance of communities than had been thought.”[15]
The ecological studies by Fager and his diving assistants and colleagues were combined with computer simulation studies to try to understand the dynamics of simple communities and to predict the effects of various types of perturbation on them. Fager concluded in 1971: “All of the studies on the computer that have been even moderately successful in modeling the observed events have had a prominent random component in them.”[16]
These studies were in progress when Fager was incapacitated by pneumococcal meningitis early in 1973 (which led to his death in 1976). Paul K. Dayton began supervising some of the projects under way. He had joined the Scripps staff in 1970, and among other studies turned to an ecological survey of kelp communities that had been started off Del Mar by Westinghouse Corporation in 1967. This project by Dayton's group “involves studies of the individual growth rates, recruitment, and mortality patterns of several kelp species, the foraging patterns and effect of their herbivores, and the community implications of several carnivores.”[17] Dayton has also been directing a study of Antarctic sea-floor invertebrates.
E. W. Fager maneuvering a bongo net on Piquero Expedition, 1969. Photo by Elizabeth Venrick.
One of the many students of Fager's was James T. Enright, who, after receiving his Ph.D., was at the Max-Planck Institute in Germany from 1961 to 1963, then at UCLA until 1966, when he became a staff member at Scripps. He began his researches on circadian rhythms, using first a beach-dwelling amphipod (Synchelidium), which customarily migrates up and down the beach with the tide. Enright found that under laboratory conditions the tidal rhythm of the amphipod persisted for several days. He also determined that Synchelidium can perceive pressure changes of less than 0.01 atmosphere, that another amphipod, Orchestoidea corniculata, orients itself to moonlight, and he has continued with researches on the parameters that establish rhythmicity in various animals, including the house finch. Enright's titles are often eye-catchers: i.e, “The Internal Clock of Drunken Isopods,” and “When the Beachhopper Looks at the Moon: The Moon-Compass Hypothesis.”
Elizabeth Kampa moved to Scripps Institution at the same time as Carl L. Hubbs in 1944, having been his assistant at the University of Michigan after receiving her B.A. there. She earned her Ph.D. with work done at Scripps in 1950, simultaneously with fellow-student Brian P. Boden; they had been married the previous year. Brian Boden had begun his researches on diatoms, but soon both Bodens were investigating the ups and downs of the deep scattering layer. They determined that an important component in the migrating layers was the abundant group of shrimplike crustaceans known as euphausiids. Brian Boden, with Martin W. Johnson and Edward Brinton, prepared a taxonomic study of the Euphausiacea, and he measured the bioluminescence within the deep scattering layer. Elizabeth Kampa
Joel W. Hedgpeth was at Scripps from 1950 to 1957, during which time he compiled and edited the Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology, a classic work in the subject, published by the Geological Society of America in 1957. Besides his broad interests in ecology and in the history of marine biology, his outrage at the distribution of debris by humans across the landscape and seascape, and his fondness for Puckish humor and the Celtic language, Hedgpeth is an expert on pycnogonids — marine spiderlike arthropods that typically have four pairs of legs. He doesn't always take them seriously, however. After identifying the one pycnogonid gathered in a dredge haul on Transpac Expedition in 1953, he could not resist comparison, in a brief classic paper, with the 1948 Swedish Deep Sea Expedition: one pycnogonid in three dredge hauls on the Scripps trip and one pycnogonid in nine dredge hauls on the Swedish trip. “The only justifiable conclusion,” said Hedgpeth, “and one that cannot offend any national
William A. Newman's researches on invertebrates are both biological and geological, in the classical tradition of Charles Darwin and former Scripps director T. Wayland Vaughan — among the few who have combined studies of living and fossil organisms. Newman joined the Scripps staff in 1962 for a year, spent two years at Harvard, and returned to Scripps in 1965. He has served since then as curator of the Scripps collection of benthic invertebrates. Newman's research has been especially on the taxonomy, distribution, and evolution of barnacles throughout the world from tropic isles to the Antarctic. The distribution of these shallow-water creatures has been of interest to geologists concerned with the fluctuations in sea level and with the sinking of guyots. Newman has also dated the levels of terracing of coral formations to determine former stillstands of sea level on various islands and shores.
On Styx Expedition in 1968, Newman, along with Richard H. Rosenblatt and Edwin C. Allison (then a San Diego State University geology professor), discovered another seamount in the Mid-Pacific Mountains west of Hawaii. This proved to be a drowned atoll which had been at the surface in Cretaceous time. In honor of the originator of the accepted explanation of atoll subsidence, the Styx researchers named the feature Darwin Seamount.
Andrew A. Benson joined the Scripps staff in 1962, from UCLA. He turned to studies of the waxes and fats stored by marine animals, especially in the copepods, “small marine crustaceans that are enormously abundant; indeed, in most oceanic areas they are the largest single component of the zooplankton.”[19] Copepods are also a major link in the food chain from phytoplankton to the higher animals,
Other work on invertebrates begun at Scripps in recent years has been that of Robert R. Hessler, who joined the staff in 1969 from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where his studies demonstrating the great diversity in the supposedly sparse deep-ocean fauna had attracted attention. Hessler, with colleagues, has been making an intensive survey of the benthic community under the center of the North Pacific gyre. From South-Tow Expedition in 1972 he acquired what he considered to be “one of the most complete samplings of deep-sea bottom communities in a single ocean location.”
Also, Lanna Cheng (Mrs. Ralph A.) Lewin has since 1970 been gathering specimens of the only truly marine insect, the several species of the fragile sea-skater of the genus Halobates, for studies of their distribution and behavior.
A great deal of work on invertebrates — i. e., plankton organisms — has been done by the Marine Life Research program and is cited in chapter 3.
Some of the marine invertebrates have been studied at Scripps by researchers who call themselves geologists and who are especially concerned with the dating of sediments by means of fossil organisms. The researches by Milton N. Bramlette on nannoplankton, by Fred B Phleger and colleagues on foraminifera, and by William R. Riedel on radiolarians are cited in chapter 12. Another researcher who devoted considerable time to invertebrates while at Scripps was Robert H. Parker, a biologist by background, who did extensive studies of the taxonomy and ecology of macro-invertebrates in the sediments of the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California under API Project 51 (see chapter 12).
MARINE MICROBIOLOGY
Claude E. ZoBell was at Scripps as an assistant professor of marine microbiology in 1936, having joined the institution's staff in 1932. Born in Utah in 1904, he was raised in the upper Snake River Valley in Idaho; he received his B. S. and M. S. in bacteriology at Utah State University in Logan, and his Ph. D. at Berkeley. Most of his doctoral work was done at the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research in San Francisco, and ZoBell had a six-month appointment there before transferring to Scripps. For a number of years he served as an advisor on sanitation and public health matters at Scripps, along with his other duties.
The subject that ZoBell began at Scripps was large. As he pointed out in 1959: “Bacteria, yeasts, fungi, microflagellates, blue-green algae, and allied microbes are widely distributed in the sea. … Besides being concerned with the deep sea and open ocean, [the marine microbiologist] must also be cognisant of conditions of microbial life in the littoral zone, estuaries, inflowing rivers, and related lakes. Thus the domain of the marine microbiologist encompasses more than two-thirds of the earth's surface and 99 per cent of the hydrosphere.”[21]
Claude E. ZoBell attaching messenger to wire above a J-Z sampler, in the 1940s.
In the mid-1930s ZoBell determined that various organic compounds are adsorbed on solid surfaces submerged in the ocean in greater concentration than in the surrounding water. This encourages the attachment and growth of bacteria and other microbes. ZoBell defined the sequence of events in the fouling of submerged surfaces, and during World War II he participated in studies of the fouling problem for the U.S. Bureau of Ships.
In 1942, ZoBell became a participant, with Denis Fox and Roger Revelle, in the first American Petroleum Institute grant to Scripps, for fundamental research on the occurrence and recovery of petroleum. ZoBell's researches were aimed at determining the microbial modification of marine sediments, in part using the mud cores taken from the floor of the Gulf of California in 1939 and 1940 (see chapter 2). The petroleum institute was soon fascinated by ZoBell's discovery that some of the bacteria in those cores proved capable of freeing oil from sediments. The minute bacterium with the ambitious name of Desulphovibrio halohydrocarbonoclasticus, ZoBell found, caused oil to separate from sediments in several ways, and he also found that bacteria can free oil from tar sands and oil shales. Tests were carried out in Pennsylvania on the possibility of inoculating old oil fields with bacteria to release unrecovered oil. In 1947 ZoBell received a patent on the oil-releasing process, which he promptly assigned to API for free use to the public. The process was not used extensively in the United States, but was used for a slight increase in oil production in old wells in several European countries.
For various studies on the oil-forming process, the API grant was continued until 1952. ZoBell determined that bacteria tend to make organic matter more petroleum-like by removing oxygen, nitrogen, and certain other elements,
ZoBell and his colleagues have also researched the manner in which oil on the sea surface is degraded by bacteria. Free oxygen proved to be the most important condition affecting the oxidation of oil. Temperature is also important, through its effects on the mixture of oil with water and the reproduction rate and metabolism of bacteria. Cold-acclimated Arctic bacteria were found capable of oxidizing oil at temperatures slightly below 0°C. In the breakdown of oil, ZoBell found that several species of bacteria acting together degrade petroleum more rapidly than does a single species.
ZoBell has also investigated the microorganisms of the surface and of the middle depths of the ocean. For the latter he devised the J-Z sampler (designed by ZoBell, constructed by buildings and grounds foreman Carl Johnson), a sealed sterilized bottle that is designed to draw in a water sample when lowered to the desired depth and triggered when the attached glass tube is broken by a messenger traveling down the wire. The samplers can be attached at intervals along the wire to collect at a number of depths on the same lowering. ZoBell has found that bacteria are abundant in the uppermost layers of the ocean where plankton are found, less common in mid-depths, and very abundant at the interface of the ocean water and the sediments of the ocean floor, where detritus accumulates.
On the Galathea, during the Danish Deep-Sea Round-the-World Expedition in 1951, ZoBell acquired microorganisms from the almost-greatest depths of the ocean and “brought 'em back alive.” Hakon Mielche, who was also on the expedition, recalled the moment on 15 July of awaiting the return of the sampler from the floor of the
[*] ZoBell's student, Richard Y. Morita, on Midpac Expedition in 1950 had retrieved bacteria from the sea floor at 2,700 meters. See chapter 15.
:We had worked intensely and had not slept for 24 hours. We looked unshaven and red-eyed. The coffee-pot was perking incessantly in the [galley]. The whole ship was in a fever of excitement. Instruments had never been sent down to such great depths. Most scientists the world over claimed that organic life could not exist in the ice-cold, totally dark depths of the sea under a pressure of 1,000 atmospheres.
… The one-meter-long metal [corer] appeared above the water and was hauled aboard. We had barely time to take pictures and film of it, before ZoBell had a hold of it and disappeared down below to his little, private laboratory embracing the [encased core of mud] as if it were pure gold. In spite of the fact it only contained mud. But the mud was applied to glass [slides] for the microscope and then the rest was quickly divided and deposited in fifty [piston-stoppered vials], which immediately were put under pressure of 1,000 atmospheres and cooled to … 2 degrees Celsius, which temperature the thermometer had shown was found at the bottom of the ocean. There was organic life in the mud. Long chains of bacteria, creatures on the border of the animal- and plant-world — but living creatures.[22]
After the expedition, from time to time the vials, containing either the original mud samples or nutrient medium inoculated with such mud, were examined for evidence of living microorganisms. On a visit to ZoBell's laboratory at Scripps 15 years after the trench haul, Mielche found that
By 1967 ZoBell had “explored” — with corers on various expeditions — ten trenches deeper than 7,000 meters, and had found several different varieties of living bacteria in them. Over a number of years he has investigated the effects of pressure on deep-sea organisms and the rates of growth of microorganisms at various hydrostatic pressures. He and his colleagues have found that some microorganisms from surface-pressure environments survive deep-sea pressures at deep-sea temperatures, although existing under such conditions only in a dormant state. This has led to comparisons with deep-sea organisms, which are active at high pressures and low temperatures.
MARINE PLANTS
Plants of the ocean have been scrutinized by several Scrippsians. Some of the early studies on the biggest ocean plant — the giant kelp, Macrocystis pyrifera — have been described in chapter 6. Much smaller, but much more significant in both volume and in the food chain of the ocean, are the phytoplankton, of which the major representatives are the diatoms — microscopic algae with cell walls fortified by silica; and the dinoflagellates — plantlike protozoans with two flagellae for locomotion. In 1936, the chief researcher on these at Scripps was Winfred E. Allen, who had first spent a summer at the institution in 1917 and continued as a full-time staff member from 1919 until his retirement in 1946 (he died the following year). His special interest was in diatoms and their distribution. Allen designed a closing bottle for subsurface sampling in 1925, and he set up standard collecting methods that involved filtering or settling of the contents of water samples. He also
While making his collections over many years, Allen also logged his observations from the pier: of schools of mackerel and of the first hammerhead shark reported in the area; of myriads of sea birds — “about 500 pelicans (part count, part estimate)” one early morning, and “several hundred or even thousands of white bellied shearwaters” fishing north of the pier; of sea lions in groups of ten to twenty; of siphonophores; of red tide; and of double rainbows, and even one meteor.
In his analysis of twenty years of plankton observations, Allen found such abrupt variations in numbers of individual organisms at each station that he was led to the “unavoidable conclusion” that “attempts to coordinate and correlate chemical and physical data with records of changes in activity or productivity of diatoms are likely to be grossly misleading if based on observations made at intervals longer than one day.”[23] In fact, he noted: “To those who may have thought of conditions in the ocean as being so nearly uniform that the routine of life must be rather monotonous, it may seem somewhat shocking to know that our records show no two years alike in the twenty, no two months alike, and no two weeks alike.”[24]
In addition to the daily collections, Allen also gathered and received material from short cruises of the Scripps, from longer cruises of the E.W. Scripps for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries from 1938 to 1941, from the expeditions in 1939 and 1940 to the Gulf of California, from collections by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Alaskan waters, from collections by the U.S. Navy from California to Australia, and from collections by G. Allan Hancock and by Templeton Crocker. He published on the relationships of abundance of phytoplankton to the hydrographic conditions of the areas covered. The problem was big, as he observed: “I think that enough may have been said to indicate that no matter how busy we have been and how many problems we have attacked with variable success, there is still plenty to do.”[25]
Half a century later, James T. Enright turned back to the data that Allen had accumulated during his two years of twice-daily sampling, which Enright called “one of the most extensive phytoplankton sampling and identification programs ever undertaken by a single investigator at a single location.”[26] Allen had found “that the estimates of abundance of diatoms for the evening samples tended, in general, to be lower than those for the preceding or following mornings,” and he suggested that the diatoms increased through reproductive activity at night. After computer analysis of Allen's material, Enright concluded that the data could be best explained by an increase through reproductive activity at night and extensive grazing by zooplankton in daytime.
Marston C. Sargent began studies on marine algae at Scripps in 1937, after receiving his Ph.D. at Caltech and serving there as a staff member for three years. His researches were on the photosynthesis and growth of kelp and other seaweeds and on organic productivity in the ocean. On Operation Crossroads in 1946, with Thomas S. Austin, he made the first measurements of organic production on a coral reef. From 1951 to 1955 Sargent was head of training at the Navy Electronics Laboratory, after which he became oceanographer for the Office of Naval Research; in that post he was responsible for relations with all west-coast oceanographic organizations that had contracts with ONR, and he was conveniently located at Scripps. When Sargent retired from ONR in 1970, he became coordinator for the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation (see chapter 3) until his second retirement in 1974.
Winfred E. Allen, with his plankton collector, on the end of Scripps pier, about 1926.
Another Scripps researcher on minute marine plants has been Francis T. Haxo, who received his B.A. from the University of North Dakota and his Ph.D. at Stanford in 1947. He was an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University before joining the Scripps staff in 1952. In 1963 he advanced to professor. Haxo's studies have specialized in photosynthesis and the pigments of algae and dinoflagellates. For example, on Billabong Expedition to the barrier reef of Australia in 1966, Haxo and colleagues determined from studies of living giant clams that the brown-colored dinoflagellates inside the clam's mantle tissue produce more than enough oxygen and glycerol for their own needs and so provide some to their host. On the Bering Sea Expedition by the Alpha Helix in 1968, Haxo measured the photosynthesis and respiration of Arctic cold-adapted seaweeds.
From 1947 to 1961 at Scripps, Beatrice Sweeney also conducted studies on phytoplankton, especially the culture and characteristics of dinoflagellates. She continued, among other projects, the observations begun by W. E. Allen on red tides — “when the sea turns the color of tomato soup” — from vast numbers of organisms, often dinoflagellates, containing orange or red pigments. She discovered and characterized the natural diurnal rhythms in the bioluminescence of Gonyaulax polyedra, a subject that has been pursued by a number of investigators ever since.
Ralph A. Lewin's studies have been chiefly with various species of algae, especially on their biochemistry and their sensitivity to pollutants. Lewin was born in London and earned his B.A. and M.S. at Cambridge University, which also awarded him a D.Sc. in 1972. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 1950 and joined the Scripps staff in 1960 from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Over several years Lewin and his coworkers analyzed the flexibacteria — brightly colored gliding microbes, some of which grow on organic matter, some of which are parasitic and others predatory. Lewin's group developed techniques for isolating and culturing flexibacteria from coastal waters, hot springs, and other habitats, which made it possible, with computer analysis, to classify six genera and 27 species of this difficult group. Lewin also isolated diatoms from brackish, marine, and highly saline waters, and has determined their tolerance to these varying salinities.
This enthusiastic man began the Sumnernoon film-or-slide programs that during the 1970s became a popular presentation each week — in Sumner Auditorium — during the academic year. Lewin has for some years also been a keen advocate of the international language, Esperanto.
OTHER BIOLOGICAL STUDIES
Various workers at Scripps have used marine organisms as study subjects in cell physiology, embryology, and development — traditional fields for marine biological laboratories.
Benjamin E. Volcani, for example, has pursued studies on the biochemistry of diatoms. Born in Ben-Shemen, which is now in Israel, Volcani received in 1941 the first Ph.D. in microbiology awarded by Hebrew University. He joined the Scripps staff in 1959. Volcani and his colleagues
In the late 1960s David Jensen carried out researches on the rudimentary heart of the hagfish and on cardiac control in various animals. Theodore Enns since the mid-1960s has carried out studies on the formation of urea in the horn shark and on the transport of water, gases, electrolytes, and other substances in various marine organisms. Nicholas D. Holland, since 1966 at Scripps, has studied, with the aid of electron microscopy, the mucous secretion in sea urchins and the detailed anatomical structure and spermatogenesis in sea lilies (crinoids). David Epel, on the Scripps staff since 1970, has pursued studies of fertilization and the early stages of development in the eggs of sea urchins and starfishes. George N. Somero, who also joined the staff in 1970, has been investigating the biochemical changes involved in adaptation to different temperatures in fishes.
In 1967 the Neurobiology Unit was formed, under the leadership of Theodore H. Bullock, to recognize the substantial group of neurophysiologists at the institution. These include some from the Marine Neurobiology Facility located in the Physiological Research Laboratory building and various other administrative units, with overlap to the UCSD Medical School.
ECOLOGICAL RESERVES
Scripps Institution biologists established the first two reserves belonging to the university, now incorporated into a statewide system called the University of California Land and Water Reserve System. The various parcels of land throughout the state — 22 of them in 1975 — have been set aside both for study purposes and to preserve natural habitats. Included are desert dunes, coastal marshes, mountain meadows, islands, chaparral, mountain and coastal streams — representing many of the remarkably diverse habitats of the large state.
Long before that system was established in 1965, the first reserve had been set aside: the shoreline and coastal area in front of Scripps Institution, now called the Scripps Shoreline-Underwater Reserve.
Percy S. Barnhart, the longtime curator of the Aquarium-Museum, started the shoreline preservation early in 1926, because he was concerned about the “constantly increasing number” of people “coming to our local rocky beach for the purpose of obtaining lobsters, abalones, and other animals of the shore for food purposes.”[27]
Director Vaughan seconded Barnhart's memorandum and on 7 January 1926 forwarded it to University President W. W. Campbell. Other biological stations, especially Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, had encountered similar depredations, and had tried as early as 1919, but unsuccessfully, to have legislative action taken to protect the area in front of the several marine stations, for study purposes of the researchers. Vaughan pursued the matter in 1926, and he enlisted the aid of the California Fish and Game Commission, the San Diego Natural History Museum, and members of the state legislature. A bill was presented to the California legislature early in 1927, specifically to set aside as a biological preserve the thousand feet of shoreline and portion
The waters adjacent to Scripps came under protection in 1948, under the enforcing jurisdiction of the Commandant of the Eleventh Naval District. The regulations prohibit vessels, other than federal or Scripps ships, from anchoring in front of the institution, or from dredging, dragging, seining, or otherwise fishing within the area. This provided protection for the various pieces of equipment installed by Scripps researchers along the pier and from the beach outward. In 1972 an underwater reserve was established by the city of San Diego and the state of California from La Jolla Cove up the coast for almost six miles to the northern limits of Torrey Pines State Reserve. Within the park is an ecological reserve, from which no marine life may be removed. At the dedication of the park, a plaque was unveiled in memory of Scripps diver Conrad Limbaugh (see chapter 6) and Harold Riley, one-time president of the San Diego Council of Diving Clubs and advocate of the underwater park, who drowned off Torrey Pines in 1970.
Scripps supervised another piece of land of ecological distinction for some years before it too was placed in the university reserve system. This was a parcel in an area that Ritter long before had advocated preserving: Mission Bay. After his directorship had ended, Ritter summarized to the chairman of the State Park Commission his views:
… For years [False Bay or Mission Bay] has been one of the richest sources of certain kinds of marine
― 237 ―life for research and study at the Scripps Institution. … During the years of my directorship of that institution we often considered the possibility of preserving at least some portion of that area as a permanent source of such forms of life. Unless measures are taken soon the whole area will be diverted to uses such that it will become almost useless in this way.[28]
Director Vaughan in 1928 tried to enlist the aid of the Fellows of the San Diego Society of Natural History in setting aside part of Mission Bay for scientific purposes.
The actual establishment of a Mission Bay marsh reserve came about through negotiations by Carl L. Hubbs with two owners of marsh property: Mrs. Oscar J. Kendall and the San Diego Beach Company, founded by A. H. Frost. These owners donated 20 acres of prime marshland on Mission Bay to the University of California in 1952,[*]
[*] Shortly after the city had threatened to condemn it to preempt as park land.
Mrs. Kendall as a memorial to her husband and son, and the corporation as a memorial to its founder. The Kendall-Frost Reserve is one of the few remaining saltwater marsh areas in southern California and supports a large population of resident and migratory birds.Hubbs was chairman of the UCSD unit of the University of California Land and Water Reserve System for a number of years, and was a major participant in the arrangements for the system to acquire two other parcels in the San Diego area: Dawson Los Monos Canyon Reserve, near Vista, and Elliott Chaparral Reserve, near Miramar Naval Air Station. Since 1973 Paul K. Dayton has been chairman of the UCSD reserve committee.
NOTES
1. In Brian Boden, “Bioluminescence in Sonic-Scattering Layers,” Proceedings of International Symposium on Biological Sound Scattering in the Ocean, 1971, 65.
2. Memorandum to Roger Revelle, 21 July 1953.
3. Theodore Bullock, “Marine Biology,” Science, Vol. 124, No. 3215 (10 August 1956), 281.
4. Mimeographed summary.
5. University Clip Sheet, 7 September 1944.
6. “Season of Attachment and Rate of Growth of Sedentary Marine Organisms at the Pier of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California,” Bulletin of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Technical Series, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1932), 39.
7. W. R. Coe and W. E. Allen, “Growth of Sedentary Marine Organisms on Experimental Blocks and Plates for Nine Successive Years at the Pier of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography,” Bulletin of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Technical Series, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1937), 101.
8. Tribute to Fox at SIO Staff Council meeting, 22 May 1969.
9. “Again the Scene,” Manuscript in SIO Archives, 1975, 124.
10. Tribute to Fox at SIO Staff Council meeting, 22 May 1969.
11. D. L. Fox, “Metabolic Fractionation, Storage and Display of Carotenoid Pigments by Flamingoes,” Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Vol. 6 (1962), 6.
12. London: Cambridge University Press.
13. Edward W. Fager, “A Sand-bottom Epifaunal Community of Invertebrates in Shallow Water,” Limnology and Oceanography, Vol. 13, No. 3 (July 1968), 448.
14. Ibid.
15. SIO Annual Report, 1970, 26.
16. SIO Annual Report, 1971, 26.
17. SIO Annual Report, 1974, 38.
18. “Reports on the Dredging Results of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Trans-Pacific Expedition, July-December 1953,” Systematic Zoology, Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1954), 147.
19. Andrew A. Benson and Richard F. Lee, “The Role of Wax in Oceanic Food Chains,” Scientific American, Vol. 232, No. 3 (March 1975), 77.
20. Ibid., 86.
21. “Introduction to Marine Microbiology,” Contributions to Marine Microbiology, New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Information Series, 22 (1959), 761.
22. “Meeting Microbes from the Deepest Sea,” translated by Greta Ashdown from Aalborg Stiftende, 29 January 1967.
23. “Summary of Results of Twenty Years of Researches on Marine Phytoplankton,” Proceedings of Sixth Pacific Science Congress, Vol. 3 (1941), 581.
24. Ibid., 580.
25. Ibid., 583.
26. “Zooplankton Grazing Rates Estimated Under Field Conditions,” Ecology, Vol. 50, No. 6 (Autumn 1969), 1070.
27. Memorandum to Director Vaughan, undated.
28. Letter of 29 March 1928.
The Scripps pier, from which various oceanic measurements have been recorded for almost three-quarters of a century.
XI. The Ocean in Motion:
Studies in Physical Oceanography
“The particular satisfaction in having a physical laboratory operating in conjunction with the biological work lies in the fact that whenever a special biological question comes along requiring information from the physical side, the physicist can be appealed to then and there.”[1] So said Director William E. Ritter in 1908 in reference to Scripps Institution's first physical oceanographer, George F. McEwen, a graduate student in physics from Stanford. McEwen was often appealed to, for his association with Scripps continued until after his retirement in 1952; he had first worked at the institution during the summers until he finished the requirements for his Ph. D. from Stanford in 1911, then spent one year as instructor in mathematics at the University of Illinois, after which he joined the Scripps staff.
In the course of his long career, according to his colleagues, McEwen:
applied both statistical and physical methods in studies of the variation in temperature and other properties, and sought relations between ocean changes and
― 242 ―weather and climate. These investigations stimulated him to make an early (1919) estimate of turbulent eddy transfer in the ocean surface layer and later (1938) to introduce an energy equation for computing values of evaporation over the eastern Pacific.In 1946 several colleagues were involved in diffusion studies in Bikini Lagoon and at their request McEwen developed models of turbulent diffusion from radioactive source areas. The success with these applications led him to devise a model to explain the decay of the large horizontal eddies observed off the coast of Southern California. The paper on these results was published in 1948 as his contribution to the Sverdrup Anniversary Volume.[2]
McEwen installed a tide gauge on the Scripps pier as soon as that structure was completed in 1915, and shortly afterward he installed a complete weather station there also. For a number of years he prepared long-range forecasts of Pacific coast seasonal air temperatures and precipitation, based on correlation with ocean temperatures. These were provided to farm advisers, chambers of commerce, and many businesses, until the project was discontinued during World War II. McEwen also participated in studies by visiting Polish climatologist Wladyslaw Gorczynski in 1939, on a comparison of southern California climates with those of similar sunny regions in Europe and Africa — a project that “involved a large amount of compilation and computing and the preparation of many charts.”[3]
Scripps had taken on another laborious task in 1935: supervising the compiling of oceanographic data gathered by “all ships in the Pacific” from 1904 through 1934. The project was under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration, and was located in three rooms in the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium building. As Sverdrup described it:
After data are transferred from the coding sheets to punched cards, the cards are sent to the Washington Office [of the Navy Hydrographic Office] for mechanical tabulation. In accordance with arrangements made with the United States Hydrographic Office, the final coding sheets of data thus compiled are filed at the Scripps Institution for use in various studies of ocean-surface conditions, in particular for investigating variations in the Japan Current.[4]
When the project was ended in 1939, some 60,000 coding sheets from data in the Pacific Ocean were on file at the institution.
The advent of Harald U. Sverdrup to the institution in 1936 led to a considerable increase in physical — or dynamic — oceanography, Sverdrup's own specialty. In his first year he installed at the end of the pier “an electrically operated device for recording the highly localized [current] movements.”[5] During World War II, he taught classes for military officers and participated in compiling current charts for life rafts and in the research by Walter H. Munk on forecasting sea and swell for amphibious landings (see chapter 2). In his years at Scripps, Sverdrup's publications covered practically all aspects of his field: upwelling and water masses, evaporation from the ocean, currents and circulation, geostrophic flow, lateral mixing, and oceanic turbulence. His interest influenced many studies and drew many students into physical oceanography at the institution. Prewar student Walter H. Munk returned to Scripps after the war to continue his studies, which became both dynamical and geophysical (see chapter 7).
The establishment of an extensive program in physical oceanography — and its usefulness to the Navy — attracted a number of early postwar graduate students to Scripps. In 1939, Scripps had 8 registered students; in 1947 there were
Among the early returning students in physical oceanography was Robert S. Arthur, who had been assigned to duty at Scripps by the Navy in 1944. After receiving his Ph. D. in 1950 he continued at the institution, becoming professor in 1963. Arthur's early studies were on the refraction and diffraction of waves, and his later work has focused on currents and upwelling. For example, he devised an improved method of predicting mean monthly anomalies of sea-surface temperatures; he has studied oscillations in sea temperature at the Scripps and Oceanside piers; he has researched the dynamics of rip currents; and he has investigated methods for calculating currents at the equator and for determining upwelling velocities along coasts. Arthur has long carried a heavy teaching program at the institution, and has always devoted a great deal of time to students.
BATHYTHERMOGRAPHS
In 1938 the bathythermograph (BT) came into use; this ingenious device for determining temperature below the
The first BT slides handled by Scripps were a few sent to the institution by Woods Hole in late 1940; Eugene LaFond made prints of these — the first time this had been done — and returned them. During World War II LaFond was in charge of the BT center at the University of California Division of War Research and carried out the analysis of the slides on the Scripps campus. LaFond's group compiled sonar charts of the BT data for the Pacific and Indian oceans for use by Navy ships. After the war Scripps was designated the repository for the BT soundings in the Pacific Ocean that had been taken by Navy and Coast Guard ships — some 100,000 of them, accumulated especially for studies of underwater sound. When LaFond transferred to Navy Electronics Laboratory in 1947, graduate student Dale Leipper was put in charge of the group of Scripps technicians who converted the BT readings into depths, and he
In the latter 1940s Margaret Robinson entered the scene, first as a draftsman in the BT section. She soon enrolled as a graduate student — in spite of Director Sverdrup, who told her that “women will never be accepted as oceanographers.”[7] Mrs. Robinson received her M.S. in 1951, and in 1957 became supervisor of the Bathythermograph Temperature Data Analysis Section, a post that she filled until her retirement in 1974. With “energy, ingenuity and perseverance,” Margaret Robinson and her assistants (all women) processed vast amounts of ocean temperature data, from BTs and from shore stations.
The early slides processed by the BT group were gathered laboriously. On Midpac Expedition in 1950, for example, according to watchstander Edward S. Barr:
The BT winch … was used every hour. … [It] was operated from the side of the ship. One would lower the recording device — looking like a rocket — over the side, and let it drop, free wheeling, to a predetermined depth. Then the brake would be applied, stopping its descent. Winching power was then applied to reel the device back to the surface and aboard. … In any kind of rough weather, this BT position was frequently subject to waves making a clean sweep of the deck. In spite of breaking waves over the side, the operator had to hold his station, because the equipment was already over the side. One couldn't run for shelter as the brake and hoisting power were combined in a single hand lever. To let go of this lever would cause all the wire on the winch to unwind, sending the recording device and all its cable to the ocean bottom forever. It was not at all uncommon, from the protective position of the laboratory door, to look back and
― 247 ―see your watchmate at the BT winch completely disappear from sight as a wave would come crashing over the side. … We also took turns taking BT readings. It wasn't fair for only one person to get wet consistently.[8]
Crashing waves were not the only problem. As B. King Couper and Eugene C. LaFond noted of the wartime technique: “Probably the greatest hazard was a swinging BT after it left the water. A familiar saying was: ‘sight, surface, oh that son of a gun,’ or words to that effect, as the instrument swung in circles around the boom.”[9] James M. Snodgrass noted that “Oftentimes, in somewhat heavy — and not so heavy — weather, [the BT] behaves as a tethered lethal missile. The bathythermograph cable with bathythermograph attached has occasionally been wrapped around the ship's funnel.”[10]
Snodgrass, in fact, found himself “appalled at the primitive nature of the BT lowerings”; a physics graduate of Oberlin College, he had served at the University of California Division of War Research during World War II, and after two years in industry, he returned to Scripps at the invitation of Roger Revelle in the fall of 1948. He participated in the development of several of the new oceanographic tools of the early 1950s. By 1958 he was in frequent correspondence with B. King Couper of the Navy Bureau of Ships over the possibility of developing an easier method of taking BTs, specifically an expendable bathythermograph. Snodgrass's idea was to use a wire-connected device, instead of an acoustic signal. As he described it to Couper:
Briefly, the unit would break down in two components, as follows: the ship to surface unit, and surface to expendable unit. I have in mind a package which could be jettisoned, either by the “Armstrong” method, or some simple mechanical device, which would at all times be connected to the surface vessel. The wire would be payed out from the surface ship and not from the surface float unit. The surface float would require a minimum of flotation and a small, very simple sea anchor. From this simple platform the expendable BT unit would sink as outlined for the acoustic unit. However, it would unwind as it goes a very fine thread of probably neutrally buoyant conductor terminating at the float unit, thence connected to the wire leading to the ship.[11]
Louis Garrison taking a mechanical bathythermograph recording on Midpac Expedition, 1950.
A number of companies were entering the growing field of ocean industry, and Snodgrass urged them toward developing an expendable bathythermograph (quickly called an XBT), which was much desired by the Navy. He discussed with engineers from various companies his ideas on a feasible approach. In the early 1960s the Navy called for bids on an XBT, and three companies, including Sippican Corporation of Marion, Massachusetts, received contracts to provide a small number of units. Within a short period of time, Sippican became the sole supplier of XBTs.
Their unit, based on Snodgrass's original idea, consists of: a probe that falls freely at 20 feet per second in the ocean; a wire link; and a shipboard canister that remains in the launcher until the measurement is made. The wire link, which is wound on a spool in the probe and a second spool in the canister, is unreeled from both spools as the probe sinks and the ship moves away, so that the wire remains stationary. A thermistor temperature sensor in the probe is connected electrically to a chart recorder through the three-conductor fine wire and a cable from the launcher to the recorder. The sinking rate of the probe determines its depth and so yields a temperature-depth trace on the recorder.
Over the years the quality of XBTs has been improved well beyond the accuracy of the laborious mechanical BTs, and at a cost per unit measurement that is considerably less. Also, the depth to which XBTs can be used is much greater.
In 1967, Jeffery D. Frautschy, Marston C. Sargent, and Phillip R. Mack, supervisor of the staff shop, designed and built the BT digitizer, a machine to digitize analog BT traces automatically. Computer programs were developed to speed up the data reduction and to conform to the National Oceanographic Data Center system. The programs could also be used to derive annual temperature distribution from 125 meters to the ocean bottom and to determine annual salinity distribution from surface to bottom.
The processing group handled BT data from many other institutions in several countries, as well as Scripps and Navy BTs. From the mass of material Margaret Robinson prepared “carefully compiled atlases of the temperature distribution of the oceans and seas of the world.” The first one, on the North Pacific Ocean, was prepared in 1971 for the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office; it provided monthly temperature distribution at the surface and at levels of 100, 200, 300, and 400 feet. Atlases for the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea followed; these brought the comment to Mrs. Robinson, upon her retirement, from Chief of Naval Research Rear Admiral M. D. Van Orden that her compilations had “formed the basis for the Fleet's oceanographic forecasting capability, the source material for many scientific evaluations of the physical ocean, especially the North Pacific, and provided the framework for many oceanographic expeditions.” By that time Margaret Robinson — and “her girls” — had processed 477, 483 bathythermograph slides.
Couper and LaFond noted:
Although the accuracy of [BT] data is not always as good as desired, they have proven extremely useful to both the Navy and others in understanding water structures and the physical, chemical and biological processes which occur in the upper layers of the sea. For instance, the correlation between time-lapse photographs of moving slicks and BT layer-depth information established the relationship of surface slicks to internal waves. Even in meteorology, heat transfer can be more accurately established with BT data.[12]
CURRENTS
At about the time that Sverdrup arrived at Scripps in 1936, McEwen wrote: “It is especially desirable to undertake a systematic investigation of the cold California Current, since virtually nothing is known as to the amount of water carried by this current or its seasonal variations or its changes from year to year.”[13] Sverdrup agreed with this point, and encouraged a program of repeated cruises with the institution's new vessel, the E. W. Scripps, to study the oceanic region from San Diego to San Francisco out to several hundred miles (see chapter 2). In addition, Richard H. Fleming rode the Fish and Game Commission ship Bluefin twice and Erik Moberg rode it once in 1936, for various studies including the release of 6,000 drift bottles to try to trace currents. Within a few years the California Current and its fluctuations had been outlined.
The early exploratory expeditions by Scripps made current measurements well beyond the California Current. On Midpac Expedition, researchers using a borrowed geomagnetic electrokinetograph (GEK) found unexpected surface eddies near the equator. On Northern Holiday
Warren S. Wooster turned his expertise on the currents of the deep ocean toward international solutions to sticky problems, especially in fisheries and cooperative researches. During Navy service in World War II he determined to study the oceans, received his M.S. at Caltech, and then entered Scripps for his Ph. D. As a student he participated in CalCOFI cruises throughout the California Current, and he was chief scientist on parts of Northern Holiday and Shellback expeditions. Armed with his just-received Ph. D., he led Transpac Expedition to Japan in 1953. During 1957 and 1958, Wooster was introduced to international oceanography as director of investigations for the Council of Hydro-biological Investigations in Lima, Peru. There he became interested in the unusual El Niño current that intermittently destroys Peru's fishery and guano industries.
On his return to Scripps he was soon organizing another current-chasing expedition, Step-1, which in 1960 sailed to South America in cooperation with the Inter-American
On various other expeditions over the years Wooster pursued studies of ocean currents and of regions of coastal upwelling — for example, along the coast of Africa, a study that was based on measurements of temperature, wind, and ship drift collected by merchant vessels during the past century.
From 1961 to 1963, Wooster was the first Director of the Office of Oceanography of UNESCO, and secretary of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, located in Paris, and there he “quickly experienced the harsh realities of international science. The incessant demands of bureaucracy, the incessant digestion and production of paper and then the incessant and interminable meetings where participants behave less than scientific have all left him unperturbed while he has proposed some action which would be accepted by both the governmental and the scientific communities, and which would break down another barrier interfering with the progress of marine science.”[16]
Wooster served as secretary to and, from 1968 to 1971, president of SCOR (Scientific Committee on Oceanic
John A. Knauss began studies of currents as a Scripps graduate student, on Shellback Expedition in 1952. He became especially interested in the Cromwell Current, first observed by researchers who were longline-fishing for tuna at the equator on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ship, Hugh M. Smith, in 1951. The longline gear drifted to the east while the surface drift of the ship was to the west. In 1952 Townsend Cromwell, then with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Hawaii (later at Scripps), with R. B. Montgomery and E. D. Stroup, made direct current measurements of the newly found current — the first large permanent subsurface current to be identified. They proposed the name Pacific Equatorial Undercurrent for it. Knauss and Cromwell traced it with free-floating parachute drogues on Eastropic Expedition in 1955, and Knauss continued the study on Dolphin Expedition of the International Geophysical Year in 1958. On 3 June, three days after the Dolphin measurements were completed, Townsend Cromwell was killed in a plane crash in Mexico en route to the Spencer F. Baird for tuna studies. Knauss proposed that the major subsurface flow be named the Cromwell Current. (Both names are presently used.)
The current was found to be a thin, swift flow of water moving eastward beneath the equator at speeds up to three knots. For several years the whereabouts of the current east of the Galápagos Islands was unknown. Knauss tried to trace it in that area on Swan Song Expedition of 1961 — his
Joseph L. Reid, Jr., entered physical oceanography by way of expeditions into the California Current, and went on to studies of other surface currents, to the circulation of intermediate-depth waters, and to the movement of bottom currents. Texas-born Reid received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Texas in 1942 and entered the Navy. After World War II he enrolled at Scripps and received his M.S. in 1950, and he continued at the institution in the Marine Life Research program, of which he became director in 1974. In 1955 he coordinated the extensive synoptic survey called Norpac (see chapter 3).
To determine what happens in the North Pacific in the winter, Reid set up Zetes Expedition in 1966 and was chief scientist on the second leg, from Kodiak to Hakodate in midwinter; that leg was named Boreas for the god of the North Wind. The Scripps ship Argo endured wind gusts up to 70 knots, plunged into waves up to forty feet high, and at times her decks were covered with ice. In the Sea of Okhotsk near the coast of the Soviet Union, Argo acquired a watchdog: a Soviet Navy ship that hovered nearby and watched every move of the American researchers. The Russians would not communicate (except for a few waves) and their ship pulled away when Argo put over a small boat in the hope of trading ice cream for vodka. From data
Ready for warmer weather, Reid led two legs of Styx Expedition to Samoa in 1968. The aim was to determine the flow of the circulation of the bottom waters. The deep, dark river surrounding Hades for which the expedition was named proved to be — as expected — a submarine current that transported cold Antarctic bottom water through a gap 80 to 100 miles wide into the Pacific Ocean at a velocity of six inches per second, “by far the highest on record for an ocean bottom current,” according to Reid.
From his analyses of the circulation of the bottom waters, Reid has concluded:
From the Norwegian-Greenland Sea the cold and saline water is traced southward through the Denmark Strait, where vertical mixing raises both temperature and salinity to their maximum values in the central North Atlantic. From there the temperature and salinity decrease monotonically southward toward the Weddell Sea, partly by lateral mixing with the cold, low-salinity waters on this stratum where it lies near the sea surface in the Weddell Sea, and partly by vertical mixing with the underlying Antarctic bottom water. From the southern South Atlantic the high values of temperature and salinity (the stratum now lies close to a vertical maximum in salinity) extend eastward with the Antarctic Circumpolar Current into the Indian and Pacific oceans, with monotonically decreasing temperature and salinity as further vertical mixing erodes the maximum in salinity, until the salinity maximum is found at the bottom in the North Pacific Ocean.[18]
“Oceanography is fun.” The North Pacific leg of Zetes Expedition, 1966.
AIR-SEA INTERACTION
The many studies at Scripps that have begun with the ocean and turned toward the weather are an example of the institution's diversity and complexity. They also show that the organization of Scripps shifts as readily as do the sand grains in a rip current.
In 1967, for example, Director Nierenberg observed that “an inventory at the Institution shows that no less than eight groups are working on aspects of [air-sea interaction].”[19] Administratively, these groups were scattered among the Applied Oceanography Group, the divisions of earth sciences, of marine biology, and oceanic research, the Marine Life Research group, the Visibility Laboratory, and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. Since then, the division names have been changed, AOG has expired, some of the people have turned to other studies, and others have changed administrative units. But the weather continues much the same — and continues to be studied.
The earliest attempt of Scripps to observe the area where the sea meets the sky was ill-fated. It began in August 1931 with an offer by Lt. Harold L. Kirby that he would gather oceanographic and meteorological data for the institution from a seaplane. Lt. Kirby's background and experience were impressive: U.S. Naval Air Force, public-spirited civic movements; research in meteorology and in flying; pilot for Pacific Marine Airways from Los Angeles to Catalina Island; U.S. Army Corps Reserve.
His request was for official support from the institution — and a month's salary — in order to arrange, through
Several Scripps staff members were quickly persuaded of the value of gathering data from both sea and air by this means. They envisioned the airplane as capable of “carrying the gear necessary for all of our work at sea except the especially heavy equipment used in deep sea dredging”[21] — at no cost to the institution. The Naval Air Station at North Island offered to provide Douglass seaplanes to Kirby for a short series of flights that would take aerial measurements up to 1,000 feet and sea measurements down to 50 meters. After those flights Kirby hoped to design a seaplane especially for marine observations.
He was given an appointment as Associate in Meteorology for one month, and the enthusiasm for the project continued. But at the end of the month his report was not finished, and so the appointment was extended another month. By that time the special meteorological fund had been sadly depleted, and doubts were creeping in as to the possibility of the outside sources of funds. In addition, Vaughan noted that “Lieutenant Kirby's conduct around the Institution has been such that he has offended a number of people. Apparently he thinks that he may order certain people connected with the Institution in a way in which not even I myself would think of doing.”[22] The appointment was not continued.
The next Scripps group to use an airplane for ocean research was more experienced: the Applied Oceanography Group (AOG), which was established in 1961 to study certain problems of particular interest to the Navy. Its area of study was especially the top few millimeters of the ocean surface. The laboratory was directed by Edward D. McAlister
During World War II McAlister had pioneered in the development of proximity fuse for antiaircraft guns. He joined the Scripps staff in 1961 from the Naval Ordnance Division of Eastman Kodak and turned to studies of the mechanism of heat transfer in the topmost layer of the ocean. He designed an infrared radiometer, “a very ingenious gadget … which looks at the water through two different windows — one at around 2.5 microns and the other at around 3 microns.” McAlister found that “the difference in absorption of water in these two bands is very great and, therefore, gives him simultaneous measurements of the radiant heat flux from two different depths right near the surface and, therefore, a very delicate measure of the thermal gradient due to evaporative cooling.”[23]
In 1962 AOG leased a DC-3 airplane, later given to them, on which they mounted the infrared radiometer to measure heat flow from the ocean. With the airplane it was possible to survey 10,000 square miles of sea surface in 24 hours. The top 30 meters of the world's oceans store 1021 calories or 1015 kilowatt hours of solar energy in an average day. The release of this heat depends upon wind speed, cloud cover, air temperature, and other factors. Through various measurements, McAlister and colleagues concluded that different mechanisms of heat transfer to the surface dominate within different depth regions.
In other studies of the topmost layer of the ocean, AOG researchers measured the vertical motion in the water by means of Rhodamine-B dye tracer plus fluorometer, an extremely sensitive method aimed at determining the convective activities of the ocean above the thermocline, and
Gifford C. Ewing, already a staff member at Scripps, was one of the organizers of AOG, and he continued with that group until 1964, when he left for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He had participated in Operation Crossroads in 1946 (see chapter 15), and then entered Scripps for graduate work. For his Ph.D. dissertation he set out to determine what causes band slicks — “calm streaks on a rippled sea.” He photographed them, he measured temperatures in and alongside them, he watched the behavior of bits of paper dropped near them. Slicks, he concluded, “are formed by the ripple-damping action of a surface film of organic matter which occurs naturally on biologically productive waters.” The compaction of the surface film can be caused in several ways; one of them, “typical of summer conditions on the California Coast, is a train of long internal waves in a shallow thermocline.”[24]
Ewing was a proficient airplane pilot and, in his own airplane, he occasionally transported other Scripps researchers to remote areas of Baja California for special studies, such as coastal lagoon work by Fred B Phleger and gray whale censuses by Carl L. and Laura C. Hubbs. Ewing knew, he was sure, every possible landing strip for an airplane throughout the sparsely populated and isolated peninsula.
The DC-3 airplane originally acquired by AOG was used for occasional studies by other Scripps staff members until it was sold in 1974.
The amount and time of release of solar energy from the ocean and its transport to other parts of the globe are factors that determine climate and weather. Besides AOG, other groups at Scripps were looking into that transfer of energy.
Several of them participated in the Barbados Oceanographic and Meteorological Experiment (BOMEX) in 1969, along with researchers from a number of other institutions. “Probably the most extensive air-sea investigations ever made of a large-scale ocean area,” said one of the participants, BOMEX was set up to document the meteorological situation in a five-hundred-mile square in the Atlantic Ocean. The AOG researchers participated, using the DC-3, and “were rewarded by the making of some scientific history — the first airborne measurements of the total heat flow from the sea surface” — which was acknowledged by the Environmental Science Services Administration with a plaque of appreciation. Flip was also a participant in BOMEX, in the craft's first venture into Atlantic waters. Scientists from a number of institutions used the quiet platform, which was outfitted with special booms, for observations and measurements just above the surface of the sea. Among these researchers were Carl H. Gibson, Russ E. Davis, and Charles Van Atta, all of Scripps, who carried out measurements of air turbulence, temperature fluctuations, and wave parameters.
In the Pacific Ocean a major investigation of the causes of weather began in the 1960s, as an extension of the Marine Life Research program, under the guidance of John D. Isaacs. In the hope of determining the causes of fluctuations in fish populations in the California Current region, the MLR program expanded its scope to investigate large-scale air-sea interaction in the entire North Pacific Ocean.
The key to understanding local variations is recording weather parameters over a large area by continuous observation — a method that is tedious at best and expensive in ships and people. Isaacs's proposed plan — the North Pacific Buoy program — was to use unmanned, fixed instrument packages with continuous recorders, moored in deep water far from the coast. Isaacs and Willard Bascom had developed
In the 1960s MLR engineers George Schick and Meredith Sessions pursued the design problems of moored buoys for instrument stations — not only the instrumental problems, but such puzzles as how to discourage inquisitive fishermen from disassembling buoys, sea lions from hauling out on them, and sharks from biting the lines. The result — twelve feet long, twin-hulled, oval in shape, and striped in bright orange and black — was called the bumblebee buoy. The first two units were moored in 1968, north of Hawaii, in water 12,000 and 18,000 feet deep; they held instruments for continuous recording of wind speed and direction, water temperature down to 1,500 feet, barometric pressure, and solar radiation. Along with the Scripps units were installed “monster buoys,” 40 feet in diameter, which had been developed by the Convair Division of General Dynamics. These giants telemetered information on weather phenomena and wave heights back to a receiving station (a converted bus) at Scripps for computer analysis. In 1972 two buoys were installed within the California Current, and current meters were placed on the sea floor adjacent to them.
Jerome Namias, formerly head of the Extended Forecast Division of the U.S. Weather Bureau, joined the Scripps staff on a part-time basis in 1968, to pursue means of deriving long-range weather forecasts by use of long-term interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean. Using historical files of records from merchant ships as well as buoy-gathered data, he has found correlations of ocean-surface temperature patterns with temperature fluctuations across the continent. He determined “that a major change in winter wind, weather and ocean surface temperature patterns took place between the roughly decadal periods
Joseph C. K. Huang developed a numerical dynamic model to simulate the North Pacific Ocean, based on the hydrodynamic equations for fluid in a basin and incorporating the configuration and bottom topography of the region. “This model was developed for the study of air-sea interacting mechanisms in order to understand the physical nature of large-scale normal characteristics and anomalous changes in the North Pacific Ocean in response to the various seasonal meteorological conditions.”[26]
From the broad base of the North Pacific Buoy program an even vaster project has emerged: NORPAX, the North Pacific Experiment, designed to study the interaction between the upper waters of the North Pacific and the overlying atmosphere. This multi-institution project, organized in 1972 and headquartered at Scripps, has drawn in researchers from several units at the institution.
An active participant in NORPAX is Charles S. Cox, who has been on the Scripps staff since he received his Ph.D. at the institution in 1954. His researches have been aimed at measuring microstructures — fine-scale fluctuations in temperature, salinity, and magnetism — within the ocean waters to determine the processes of mixing. Cox developed free-fall instruments that have been used on a number of expeditions. With such an instrument temperatures are recorded continuously as a tube sinks slowly through the water; it returns to the surface after completing the measurements and dropping its ballast. Such measurements provide a fine-scale picture of temperature variations
OTHER PROJECTS IN PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY
Other studies of motion in the ocean and the impact of the ocean on the land have been carried out throughout the years at Scripps.
Dale Leipper, for example, in 1947 and 1948 conducted a long study for the Navy of the formation of fog in San Diego. He also analyzed the long record of surface temperatures accumulated by the institution, especially by George F. McEwen, to determine the water temperature fluctuations along the southern California coast.
William G. Van Dorn began in mechanical engineering before earning his Ph.D. at Scripps in 1953 and continuing on the staff. In 1948 he devised a magnesium-rod release timer for a deep-current meter on a project for the Office of Naval Research. During the International Geophysical Year, Van Dorn directed the Scripps program of wave recording in the island observatory project. He devised a long-period wave recorder for tsunami prediction, and he studied the pattern of the destructive tsunami at Hilo, Hawaii, caused by the earthquake of 23 May 1960 near Chile, and the tsunami caused by the earthquake of 28 March 1964, off Alaska. In the mid-1960s Van Dorn undertook a study of the circulation of water around various Pacific islands, and he has also made observations and
Two Scripps researchers, Walter H. Munk and Myrl C. Hendershott, advised the city fathers of Venice, Italy, in 1971 and 1972, on the periodic flooding of that city. Venice is built on mud flats, slowly sinking because of industrial removal of ground water; also, sea level is gradually rising throughout the world. Flooding at Venice occurs during storms with strong winds from the south. Hendershott, with an Italian scientist, developed a mathematical model of the circulation of the Adriatic Sea to predict circulation patterns and dispersion of pollution. Munk has proposed that Venice use caissons to close the three openings into Venice lagoon during storms.
Hendershott joined the Scripps staff in 1965, after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard, on studies of internal waves carried out partly at Scripps. He worked out solutions to Laplace's tidal equations by using the method of finite differences. Satisfactory models derived for the global tides had to include the actual bottom relief and the deformation of the solid earth from the weight of the oceanic tidal column.
NOTES
1. W. E. Ritter, “The Scientific Work of the San Diego Marine Biological Station During the Year 1908,” Science, Vol. 28, No. 715 (11 September 1908), 332.
2. Robert S. Arthur, Denis L. Fox, Carl L. Hubbs, and Russell W. Raitt, In Memoriam, University of California (July 1975), 92.
3. H. U. Sverdrup, “Research Within Physical Oceanography and Submarine Geology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography During April 1939 to April 1940,” Transactions of the American Geophysical Union for 1940, 344.
4. Sverdrup, “Research Within Physical Oceanography and Submarine Geology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography During April 1938 to April 1939,” Transactions of the American Geophysical Union for 1939, 423.
5. W. E. Allen, “The Growth of a Marine Observatory,” Internationale Revue der gesamten Hydrobiologie und Hydrographie, Vol. 39 (1939), 467.
6. Letter from Allyn Vine to Richard H. Fleming, 20 August 1941.
7. Los Angeles Times, 8 February 1973.
8. “MIDPAC — The First Big Step,” manuscript, 17 August 1975.
9. “The Mechanical Bathythermograph: An Historical Review,” paper presented at Silver Jubilee of the Instrument Society of America, 26–29 October 1970, Philadelphia.
10. “New Techniques in Undersea Technology,” IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, Vol. AES-2, No. 6 (November 1966), 626.
11. Letter of 29 December 1958.
12. “The Mechanical Bathythermograph,” paper, 26–29 October 1970.
13. “The University and the Pacific,” California Monthly (March 1937).
14. “Preliminary Report, Shellback Expedition,” SIO Reference 52–47, 9.
15. “SHELLBACK Expedition,” Naval Research Reviews, Vol. 6 (May 1953), 4.
16. “Warren S. Wooster,” American Oceanography (August 1968), 3.
17. Joseph L. Reid, Jr., “Zetes Expedition,” Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, Vol. 47, No. 4 (December 1966), 558.
18. California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations Reports, Vol. 17 (October 1974), 14.
19. SIO Annual Report, 1967, 5.
20. Letter from T. Wayland Vaughan to J. C. Harper, 6 August 1931.
21. Letter from George F. McEwen to T. Wayland Vaughan, 3 August 1931.
22. Letter to University President R. G. Sproul, 3 November 1931.
23. Letter from Gifford C. Ewing, 30 November 1961.
24. G. C. Ewing, “Slicks, Surface Films and Internal Waves,” Journal of Marine Research, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1950), 161.
25. California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations Reports, Vol. 17 (October 1974), 12.
26. Ibid.
XII. Sand, Silt, and Sea-floor Spreading:
Studies in Marine Geology
“In 1940,” wrote H. William Menard in 1969, “it appeared that the sea floor was a relatively quiet place with minimal relief and that all mountain building and other important geological processes occurred on continents or at their margins.”[1] At that time the known relief of the Pacific basin was a few deep trenches and bits of the mid-ocean ridge system, discovered on the few prewar explorations and cable surveys.
Then geologists began going to sea, many of them because the Navy asked them to go. They went with enthusiasm and great expectations, carrying an encyclopedic knowledge of the native customs on each tropic isle. In general, those at Scripps subscribed to Menard's theme: “There is no virtue in going to an unpleasant atoll if a beautiful one has the same geology.”[2]
During the 1950s, “shattered beliefs soon became a commonplace as it developed that almost everything supposed about ocean basins was wrong.”[3] That “relatively quiet place” was found to be gashed by trenches, humped with undersea volcanoes and flat-topped guyots, and arched by rises and ridges. To marine geologists the
By the 1960s it had become apparent that in the ocean basins are found the most active areas of the earth's crust. Now it is believed that new crustal material slowly rises from the mantle at oceanic ridges and spreads to the sides, leaving its record in the reversals of magnetization of the rocks. The surface of the earth is divided into about ten major rigid plates which are moved in respect to one another by deep, as-yet-unknown forces. The land areas are carried by these motions toward or away from each other. Where two plates meet, one is thrust beneath the edge of the other, usually in a deep oceanic trench.
To reach these conclusions, geologists have joined forces with geophysicists. Together they have devised a remarkable roster of hardware, much of it developed or put to ship-board use quite recently, and some of it apparently susceptible to mal de mer. A geologically oriented expedition setting out now carries echosounders, heat-flow probes, gravity meters, corers, magnetometers, deep-sea cameras, grab samplers, dredges, and assorted seismic equipment. Huge winches and towering A-frames manipulate the gear, along with straining muscles.
Scripps Institution has been, of course, only one of many research centers that have contributed to the discoveries in geology (some of which are also covered in this book in chapter 4). Equipment and theories have been invented all over the world, and borrowed freely. Scripps scientists have ridden ships of other institutions and have reciprocated with their own ships. Scientists have moved from one institution to another, also, bearing their favorite ideas. Scripps has contributed the results from a great many expeditions throughout the Pacific Ocean, some in the Indian Ocean, and a few in other seas. The institution has also contributed to the floor of the ocean a great many
Marine geology on the west coast began with Francis P. Shepard at Scripps Institution and almost simultaneously on the east coast with Henry Stetson at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Shepard entered the geology profession in the 1920s only to be “assured time and again that the major problems of geology had been solved”[4] — but he didn't believe it. A summer of sea-floor sampling from his father's yacht off New England quickly showed him that offshore sediments were not evenly distributed outward from coarse to fine as the textbooks had said. In 1933 he spent part of a sabbatical from the University of Illinois in La Jolla; he was then identified in the local paper as “one of the most energetic students in the U.S. … of marine bottom deposits and the configuration of the sea bottom.”[5] Four years later he moved to Scripps as a visiting investigator to find out about sediments, incidentally bringing with him the largest grant ever awarded up to that time by the Geological Society of America: $10,000.
Francis P. Shepard beaming as he enters the Diving Saucer for a look at his submarine canyon. Photo by Ron Church.
Simply by wading and rowing out from shore, Shepard became a marine geologist. Essentially his approach has been to extend land geology onto the sea floor, and he has continued to work chiefly on nearshore phenomena. In those primordial days of marine geology, Sverdrup looked at it differently: “The work of Shepard is not oceanographic,” he noted in 1937. “We shall continue work in sedimentation which is a problem in oceanography, but to us details of the submarine topography are of small interest and the geological character of the rocks forming the bottom is insignificant.”[6] Shepard continued his work at Scripps under the Geological Society grant, alternating between the seashore laboratory and the University of Illinois. In 1942 he joined the University of California
On his arrival at Scripps in 1937, Shepard quickly had his eye and sextant on, his rowboat over, and his sounding line in Scripps submarine canyon, while awaiting the conversion of the E. W. Scripps into a research ship. With sounding line, with the help of a helmeted diver, and later of Scuba divers, with echosounder, with marker buoys, with underwater camera, and from diving saucers, he has mapped and pored over “his” canyon for almost forty years, until it has become certainly the best known in the world. (Shepard's long-used shore points for map coordinates for the Scripps canyon have baffled more recent students, who can scarcely be expected to know that “NFG” is the north front gable of the house in which Robert Dietz lived long ago, or that the “monstrosity” is the Moorish-castle-style house on Torrey Pines Road.)
The helmet-and-airhose diver who explored the submarine canyon at first hand in 1947 for Shepard was Frank Haymaker, a zoology major from UCLA who learned geology in a novel way. As Shepard said: “Diving into a narrow submarine canyon which has vertical and even overhanging walls is a hazardous undertaking.”[7] Haymaker on the sea floor communicated with Shepard and the surface boat by two-way telephones. When Haymaker found interesting rocks, “a skiff was rowed over to the diver and a sledge hammer and a chisel lowered so that he could break off the rocks and send them up in a bag. … Haymaker obtained samples of the fill on the canyon floor by driving in pipes. The personnel at the surface would pull out the pipe, and
During the early 1950s, Scuba divers replaced the helmeted diver and continued the firsthand observations of Shepard's canyon.
A debate over the formation of submarine canyons raged for decades. For quite some time, Shepard and others advocated that such canyons had been cut by rivers and insisted that sea level had to have been sufficiently lower to allow for aerial erosion. But Shepard became persuaded that the depths were too great, and he now believes that the deep gashes in the continental slope were shaped by a combination of moderate lowering of sea level, turbidity currents, and other currents and mass movements. He bowed gracefully to the accumulating evidence and modified his opinion with the comment that “it is monotonous trying to support the same old ideas.”[9]
Shepard's interest in nearshore features has not kept him close to home; indeed, it has turned him into a world traveler, almost always to a delightful isle or shore with sun-drenched beaches. He selected the north side of Oahu, Hawaii, as a comfortable place to write Submarine Geology in 1946, and so on 1 April of that year he became an expert on tsunamis, earthquake-generated sea waves. He brought to the attention of the world that the first wave is not necessarily the highest — a point emphasized by his having lost his book manuscript and notes to the ninth giant wave. Himself he saved by scrambling up an ironwood tree and hanging on for dear life.[*]
[*] Mrs. (Elizabeth) Shepard had stayed on the high ground to which they fled after the first wave wakened them, while he returned to their house to salvage what he could.
Thereupon, he set out to measureWhile touring coastal regions over the years, Shepard gathered samples for dating sea-level fluctuations throughout the world. By means of radiocarbon dating, done chiefly by Hans Suess's laboratory (see chapter 13), he established that for the last 17,000 years the sea level has risen an average of 25 feet every thousand years, but more slowly toward the present. In recent years he has installed series of current meters to record the movement of material down — and up — a number of submarine canyons along the Pacific coast. While the net movement is downward, considerable back-and-forth motion of the sediments has also been recorded.
In 1966, the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists established the Francis P. Shepard Award for Excellence in Marine Geology; they defined Shepard's areas of prominence as the distribution and characteristics of sediments, marine geomorphology, and the structure of the continental margins. Shepard, said science writer Bryant Evans, “gives you the impression of being engaged in a delightful hobby.”[10] His walk is ever jaunty, his tone is always enthusiastic, and his only variation from an ever-present smile is a beaming smile. Emeritus since 1966, he continues to pursue his hobby — very professionally — on beaches from Moorea in the Society Islands to La Paz, Baja California.
From 1951 to 1957 Shepard directed API Project 51, sponsored at Scripps by the American Petroleum Institute. This was a geologic study of the coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico for the purpose of remedying “the admitted ignorance of geologists about the conditions of deposition of sedimentary formations similar to those in which oil is found.”[11] From 1954 API Project 51 was administered through the Institute of Marine Resources (see chapter 6).
The first area selected for detailed studies by API Project 51 was the northwest Gulf of Mexico, which has had rapid, large-scale deposition of sediments for a long time and is slowly subsiding. The project was “a joint effort by sedimentationists, biologists (including students of macroorganisms, foraminifera, ostracods, microfossils, and bacteria), clay mineralogists, chemists, and — to a limited extent — petrographers and physical oceanographers.”[12] The field workers maneuvered in small vessels, a marsh buggy, and an air boat along the Gulf coast and Mississippi delta to gather cores, mud, sand, and rock samples. These were analyzed in field and laboratory, in the hand and under the microscope, with mass spectrometer and X-ray diffraction, for microfossils and macrofossils, for organic content and remanent magnetism, for grain size and roundness, for areal extent and local variation.
Said Shepard: “Perhaps more than anything else the project has shown how important it is to use a multiple approach in diagnosing environment characteristics.”[13]
Fred B Phleger, who had been instrumental in bringing API Project 51 to the campus, called it “a liberal education in sedimentology for all of the numerous participants,”[14] and he summarized the accomplishments as: providing a detailed description of the sedimentary patterns of the Gulf coast region, analyzing the distribution of the organisms within them, summarizing the history of the Holocene rise of sea level on the continental shelf, and defining further problems in sedimentology.
As might be expected, the project continued. Tjeerd H. (“Jerry”) van Andel became project director in 1957, as API 51 was turning to studies in the Gulf of California, the site of Scripps Institution's first venture into geologic oceanography in 1939. Other geologists and geophysicists at Scripps were also interested in the great trough that splits Baja California from the mainland, so the Marine Physical
[*] The word is correctly spelled with either one “1” or two, and the participants in the expedition did not strive for unanimity on this point in their reports.
Sea Expedition in the spring of 1959, using the Spencer F. Baird and the Horizon; the participants took many soundings, collected core and dredge samples, gathered biological specimens, recorded gravity measurements, shot seismic-reflection profiles and refraction lines, and with Scuba gear and echosounder explored the submarine canyons off Cabo San Lucas.Visiting Danish biologist Henning Lemche was especially pleased with the capture of live Neopilina, a problematical mollusk-like creature that had been thought long extinct until a few live ones were trawled from a depth of 3,570 meters well off Costa Rica by scientists on the Galathea in 1952 and described by Lemche in 1957. He had visions of dredging other archaic forms alive from the depths of the Gulf of California with the aid of the newly developed Isaacs-Kidd deep-diving dredge that slid on underwater slopes as if on skis. Asides were made by some about the trilobite-canning expedition, but no other kinds of living fossils were hauled from the deep.
The seismologists were surprised to find that the crustal layer at the northern end of the gulf seemed to be continental while that at the southern end appeared to be oceanic. Might it be that the Baja California peninsula was being split away from the mainland by sea-floor motion?
While Vermilion Sea Expedition researchers explored the ocean depths, an overland trip along the marshy coastal plains of the eastern side of the Gulf of California was led by Joseph R. Curray, another of the early participants in API 51, one whom Shepard called a “remarkably good field
API Project 51 ended in 1962, at the choice of Scripps geologists, who turned elsewhere for the funding that was becoming too much for industry. The American Petroleum Institute had contributed more than one million dollars to the eleven-year study.
Curray has continued his interest in coastal sediments and the geology of the sea's margins. Often in collaboration with David G. Moore (long with the Navy Electronics Laboratory and its successor, the Naval Undersea Center), he has described coastal profiles and the evolution of continental margins. Curray and colleagues have graduated from dugout canoes to the largest Scripps vessels, from which they employ seismic techniques to determine the thickness and nature of sediments of the continental shelves and slopes. Using seismic profilers in 1966, Curray surveyed the continental shelf and slope along eastern North and South America, and concluded that continental slopes are chiefly depositional features.
In 1967 Curray and Shepard coordinated Carmarsel Expedition to resolve questions on sea-level fluctuations. As Curray commented just before the trip: “In most areas, we cannot determine whether the land has been going down or the sea has been going up.” The chosen area was the Caroline Islands and the Marshall Islands in the southwest Pacific, where uniformly submerged terraces had been reported. Geologists from Cornell University, the American Museum of Natural History, the U.S. Geological Survey, and Yale University participated, along with those from Scripps, including biologist William A. Newman. On Carmarsel, the group surveyed the topography of the islands, sampled marine terraces, collected shells for dating, and drilled the coral islands. The results were not simple; the group
Douglas L. Inman, a physics major at San Diego State University, after World War II became a student of Shepard's and joined the Scripps staff upon completing his Ph.D. in 1953. Combining physics and fluid mechanics with geology, he has concerned himself with the processes in the wave zone, where man comes into conflict with the ocean. Where the sea meets the land, storm waves may undermine foundations, rip currents may drag swimmers seaward, favorite beaches gradually disappear, and harbors slowly fill with silt. These problems have become Inman's problems. He and his co-workers constitute the Shore Processes Study Group, which uses both instruments and Scuba gear to study the mechanics of the beaches. This program at Scripps is almost unique among oceanographic laboratories, and has become of increasing interest as man encroaches upon the sea.
Rip currents have been a subject of concern, and curiosity, to Scripps scientists for many years. Shepard, K. O. Emery, and Eugene LaFond measured and pondered them during the 1930s, and Inman and colleagues have continued studies in more recent years, finally to conclude that rip currents are caused by the interaction of incident surface waves with longshore edge waves. Following the suggestion by Inman that edge waves might have an important influence on nearshore circulation, Anthony J. Bowen presented his evidence for the formation of rip currents in 1967 at the only defense-of-doctorate ever held in the Hydraulics Laboratory, where he produced rip currents in the wave basin as part of his presentation. Edge-wave interaction has been found by Inman's group to form nearshore circulation cells and various common beach features such as beach cusps and crescentic offshore bars.
The transport of sand by waves was an early study of Inman's. He and Edward D. Goldberg devised a method of
The Shore Processes Study Group is continuing to determine what happens in the churning wave zone.
Not many years ago [wrote Birchard M. Brush and Inman], it was a logistic triumph for an oceanographer to dip one instrument in the ocean in order to acquire a pitifully limited amount of information on one or two parameters of the many he wished to know.
The present program embraces the continuous and simultaneous acquisition of current velocity in two orthogonal directions, wind speed and direction, a directional array of accurate pressure sensors for determining wave directional spectra, a modern digital wave staff to measure surface displacement, and thermistor arrays for measurement of the thermocline.[15]
Anthony J. Bowen demonstrating the formation of rip currents in the wave tank of the Hydraulics Laboratory in 1967, for his doctoral committee and audience.
Through these simultaneous measurements, the Shore Processes Study Group has concluded that “the important processes that operate in the nearshore waters of oceans, bays, and lakes are similar. … Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that processes in nearshore waters are driven by basic, interrelated forces that are systematic and essentially regular in form. These systematic driving forces lead in turn to the development of coherent processes such as the nearshore circulation cells and the longshore transport of sand that are basically similar the world over.”[16]
The concept of uniformity of the coastal processes, which vary only in relative magnitude from place to place, has made it possible to predict the impact of a particular change — such as a structure — on a particular beach area.
The sediments of the deep sea have drawn the attention of a number of Scripps geologists through the years. These thick layers are derived from several sources and are rearranged by deep currents, by turbidity currents, and by burrowing creatures. Sand, mud, and rocks wash into the sea from rivers (and fall from melting icebergs); undersea volcanoes spew material into the ocean and above-sea volcanoes pour lava and fine ash into it; the winds carry minute dust particles far from land; and always a constant rain of dead organisms drifts downward to the sea floor. Tiny plants and animals of the surface waters occur in such vast numbers in some areas that their hard shells through the millenia pile up into a thick slurry of soft ooze. There are radiolarians, diatoms, and silicoflagellates — with shells of silica — and there are foraminifera, coccolithophores, and pteropods — with shells of calcite. Sponges dwelling on the sea floor at all depths leave siliceous spicules when they die, and from the fishes are left scales and teeth and bits of bone. The sediments in shallow water are rich in calcium carbonate, but many of the calcite shells are dissolved before
One of the first puzzles about the deep-sea sediments was why they formed such a thin layer. In 1946 the Dutch geologist Ph. H. Kuenen estimated that the average thickness of ocean sediment should be three kilometers, if the earth were, as then estimated, two billion years old. On Midpac and Capricorn expeditions seismologist Russell W. Raitt found the sediment column only about 300 meters thick (east-coast seismologists at about that time found the sediments in the Atlantic about 450 meters thick). Cores of older sediments from the sea floor were rarely older than Upper Cretaceous; none were apparently older than Lower Cretaceous (135 million years before present). Where was the rest of the geologic column that should, in the undisturbed floor of the ocean, leave a record to the beginning of time?
It took many years of work by geologists and geophysicists to resolve the puzzle. They concluded that the floor of the ocean was certainly disturbed. The older sediments are now thought to have been systematically destroyed as new crustal material has been forced upward and outward along the sea floor.
The sedimentologists have had plenty of material to work with, however. The early cores, only five meters long, could represent many years of geologic time, and longer cores were soon available.
One of the earliest Scripps workers in this field was Milton N. (“Bram”) Bramlette, who transferred to Scripps from UCLA in 1951. He continued to demonstrate “his ability to throw light upon very large problems by his study of very small objects, the remains of microscopic and sub-microscopic life of ancient seas”[17] — which led to his receiving an LL.D. from the University of California in 1965, the first awarded in ceremonies at UCSD.
Texas-born Bramlette had spent eighteen years with the U.S. Geological Survey before he joined the staff of UCLA in 1940. The Department of the Interior acknowledged his studies with the Distinguished Service Medal in 1963, when they cited “his study of the origin of the siliceous rocks of the Monterey formation, which won for him international recognition; his study of trans-Atlantic deep-sea cores, which resulted in the first trans-oceanic correlation of glacial deposits; and his understanding of the origin of the Arkansas bauxite deposits, which permitted effective exploration that led to the discovery of major sources of aluminum ore.” By then, Bramlette was identifying coccolithophores, discoasters, and calcareous nannoplankton in Pacific cores also, from Capricorn Expedition, in which he had participated, and from later Scripps expeditions.
Fred B Phleger also joined Scripps in 1951, when he made permanent what had been a visiting position while he was on the staff of Amherst College and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Phleger set up and headed the Marine Foraminiferal Laboratory, which has integrated geology and biology in its analysis of fossil foraminiferal shells in marine sediments and in the taxonomy, distribution, and ecology of living foraminifera that eventually add to those sediments. Phleger and Frances L. Parker, when they first arrived at Scripps, began studies of the successions of foraminiferal assemblages in cores from the North Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, taken on the Swedish Deep-Sea Expedition in 1947 and 1948. Scripps expeditions were soon providing cores from throughout the Pacific Ocean. Frances L. Parker enlarged the studies of foraminifera to analyze the factors that influenced the assemblages on the sea floor and in the geologic record. She also worked on shallow-water foraminifera, stressing the ecological aspects of their distribution. A great deal of taxonomic revision was required in this complex group of simple animals.
In more recent years Wolfgang Berger has undertaken studies on the solution of foraminifera shells and coccoliths in sea water, and the distribution of carbonate in the deep ocean. He determined that most of the dissolution takes place on the sea floor, not during settling through the water. Berger and colleagues have mapped the distribution of the present-day calcite-compensation depth for comparisons with other periods.
William R. Riedel began at Scripps by joining Northern Holiday Expedition in 1951 and becoming a staff member in 1956. His specialty has been the intricately shelled radiolarians, a complex group of organisms that he has found defies easy classification. They can, however, be used as indicators of geologic age, and by the mid-1960s Riedel was detailing the movement of fossil radiolarians away from the East Pacific Rise, a movement that became one more verification of sea-floor spreading. He has analyzed radiolarians from all the oceans and from marine sediments on land, and has, for example, been able to establish a radiolarian zonation that divides the Cretaceous period into seven parts. Since the mid-1950s Riedel also has been curator of the Scripps collection of sea-floor cores and dredged rocks.
Gustaf O. S. Arrhenius began his studies at Scripps on deep-sea cores and has gone into several other fields as well: chemistry, physics, and space science in particular. Born in Stockholm, Arrhenius was a staff geologist on the Swedish Deep-Sea Expedition of 1947 and 1948, and shortly after receiving his Sc.D. from the University of Stockholm in 1952, he accompanied Capricorn Expedition as a visitor. He joined the Scripps staff the following year.
Arrhenius has delved into theories on the origin of life from organic material that existed before the formation of the earth; on the nature of comets; on asteroids; and on the earth's moon and its composition. In 1966 he helped to establish the Institute for the Study of Matter, and in 1970
Edward L. (“Jerry”) Winterer transferred to Scripps from UCLA in 1962 and has also delved into the ages of sediments. “The ocean basins have a lucid but very short geologic memory — about 200 million years,” Winterer once said, and he has gone also to continental rocks — which he once called “dusty and badly kept archives” — to help extend the geologic record. Winterer and Riedel in 1969 announced the recovery near New Guinea of an unusually complete core by the Deep Sea Drilling Program's Glomar Challenger, a core that contains “an almost complete record” of radiolaria, foraminifera, and nannofossils through 30 million years.
The structure and the topography of the Pacific basin have interested Scripps geologists since 1950, when Midpac Expedition set out. H. W. Menard was then in the Sea-Floor Studies group at Navy Electronics Laboratory, a co-sponsor of the expedition. That group — Robert S. Dietz, Edwin L. Hamilton, Edwin C. Buffington, Robert F. Dill,
In 1955 Menard was appointed to the Institute of Marine Resources at Scripps (see chapter 6). His early interest had been in turbidites, coarse sediments presumably transported from their land source by turbidity currents. He developed a reputation for being able to read echograms faster than anyone else and, in fact, he looked at more of them than anyone else. He soon was describing the topography of the sea floor and the origin of its features — from ripple marks and fan deposits to fracture zones, the Mendocino Escarpment, the East Pacific Rise, and, later, the geometry of tectonic plates.
In 1957, through IMR, Menard set up a bathymetric survey of the northeastern Pacific Ocean, to which the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries also contributed. Their interest was in aiding tuna fishermen, who had long known that tuna, and other fish, congregate near seamounts and submarine banks. Fishermen who came across such a feature usually kept the location secret and returned to it repeatedly. BCF persuaded the fishermen to yield their secrets, for the advantage of all. Gerald V. Howard, then director of the Biological Laboratory of BCF, noted in 1960 that the accidental discovery of Shimada Bank,[*]
[*] Named for Bell Shimada of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, who was killed in a plane crash in Mexico en route to join the Spencer F. Baird in June 1958. Also killed were Townsend Cromwell of Scripps and three women family members of ship's personnel.
off the west coast of Mexico, led to large catches of yellowfin tuna; this set in motion the cooperative project of analyzing and plotting the large amount of sounding data gathered in the previous decade by Scripps vessels and by those of BCF,The project enlarged, so that by 1961 an equal-area bathymetric chart of the Pacific basin and a physiographic diagram of the northeastern Pacific Ocean had been completed. By the mid-1960s Stuart M. Smith had devised a computer program to handle the formidable task of coordinating the routine ship records of bathymetry, magnetics, and seismic data. These are indexed, correlated with navigation records, and filed in digital form on magnetic tape or on charts of the Pacific Ocean. Under the direction of Thomas E. Chase from 1970 to 1976, the Geological Data Center provides its data and charts to anyone interested — and fills many such requests from fishermen, oceanographers, oil companies, and Sunday sailors. “Eventually,” the compilers say, “all oceans are to be mapped in a painstaking and patient accumulation of bits and pieces of data gathered by the world's oceanographic community.”[18]
As a separate mapping project, Jacqueline Mammerickx (Winterer) has been compiling bathymetric charts of the South Pacific, on which she has identified three fracture zones and a series of magnetic anomalies in that area.
One of the chief problems in compiling a map of the ocean floor is simply knowing where the ship was that recorded the depths. Echosounders may provide precise depths to the sea floor, but a surface reference point is needed. Star and sun sights can be marred for days by overcast, and currents skew the dead reckoning figures calculated from course and speed. On Scripps expeditions, the “discussions” have often been quite sharp between scientists and officers on the bridge as to where the ship has been for a number of hours. “Part of the problem for many years,” said one expedition leader, “was ever getting a captain to admit that any of his sights were less than perfect.” On one
Two-ship operations enlarge the scope of the discussions. Menard gave an example of an attempt by Argo and Horizon in 1967 to find each other 22 hours after they had separated:
Waving to each other we parted [at 0800 hours] and since each could clearly see the other, we absentmindedly assumed that we were at the same point. … I think it a rude awakening to climb out of bed at 0600 hours, pour down half a cup of aging coffee, walk to the bridge to find that the dead-reckoning position is in doubt by ten miles, walk to the laboratory and learn that the depth is almost a mile shallower than expected, and radio Horizon to learn that according to their dead reckoning the ships should be almost side by side. Near us they were not. … I radioed Horizon to ask where it had been when we were last side by side. (Navigators get nervous if you ask them where they thought they had been.) A long pause followed. … The radioed position showed that, as we waved at each other, the navigators on the two ships had differed by about twenty miles in their opinions of our position. … The ships reversed course and somewhere in the mist and rain squall that frustrated our Radar, we hoped that we were headed toward each other for a rendezvous.[19]
Over the years, the development of Loran helped, in those areas within the network, but the greatest improvement has come through satellite navigation, which was released by the Navy for use by civilian ships in 1967. Even this has its limitations, and the sextant is not yet obsolete, nor yet absolute.
Among the sea-floor oddities that attracted the attention of the roving geologists were the manganese nodules, soft rocks that look much like potatoes blackened in a campfire. Menard, under IMR auspices, in the mid-1950s began a survey of the abundance and distribution of manganese nodules throughout the Pacific, using dredges, corers, and deep-sea cameras. Chemical analyses by Edward D. Goldberg and Gustaf O. S. Arrhenius indicated significant amounts of manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, and copper in the nodules. Goldberg analyzed by the ionium-thorium method the unusually large nodule that had been uniquely acquired on Northern Holiday Expedition (see chapter 15) in 1951; he found that its rate of growth was somewhat less than 0.01 mm per thousand years — “probably one of the slowest reactions occurring in nature in which a measure of the rate of the reaction can be ascertained.”[20] Southeast of Tahiti on Downwind Expedition in 1957, Menard found nodules in sufficient quantity to represent a potentially minable resource, and he compiled photographs from Scripps and Soviet expeditions of the International Geophysical Year to determine the regions of greatest concentrations of these odd rocks. From sea-floor photographs Menard and Shipek in 1958 estimated that twenty to fifty percent of the deep-sea floor in the southwestern Pacific is covered with nodules. John L. Mero joined IMR (on the Berkeley campus) for several years to carry out feasibility studies and soon concluded that mining the nodules for valuable minor minerals was economically sound. He then went off to set up a company to try sea-floor mining.
Exploration of the deep trenches of the Pacific by Scripps began on Capricorn Expedition in 1952, when geologists on the Horizon surveyed the “challenging oceanic complex” known as the Tonga Trench for nearly a thousand miles, with “all of the best instruments and scientific ideas
For several years the declared deepest spot on earth was shifted among four trenches, depending upon which one was last visited by a research ship: the Kurile Trench, northeast of Japan; the Mindanao Trench, off the Philippines; the Tonga Trench, east of the Tonga Islands; and the Mariana Trench, southeast of Guam. Fisher finally resolved the question, from echo-sounding records that he took with precise sounders over the Tonga, Mindanao, and Mariana trenches and from soundings by Soviet oceanographers over the Kurile Trench. Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench won the contest, with a record depth of 35,810 ± 30 feet; Tonga was second, with a maximum depth of 35,435 ± 6 feet, and Mindanao (or Philippine) third, at 32,910 ± 20 feet.[*]
[*] Cook Deep in the Mindanao Trench briefly held the deepest record, which was cited in some authoritative articles, but a few months after the record depth was announced the echo sounder was found by the Royal Navy Commander of the surveying ship to have been “producing” soundings about one-sixth deeper than it should have.
So the Mariana Trench was selected for the world's deepest dive, by the U.S. Navy-owned submersible Trieste in 1960, when Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh reached the bottom of the sea.Fisher has returned often to the areas of the deepest trenches and to not-quite-so-deep ones as well, such as the Middle America Trench and the Peru-Chile Trench. He probably holds the record for time at sea among Scripps senior scientists. With the advent of the International Indian Ocean Expedition, he turned his attention to the Indian
After many days at sea, any piece of land looks attractive, and the stunning islands of the Pacific look like paradise indeed. Scripps geologists have never had to struggle for an excuse to get ashore: on Hawaii, to visit Kilauea volcano; on Consag Rock in the upper Gulf of California, because it was rumored to be granitic (it isn't; the light color proved to be guano); on Bayonnaise Rocks, because a submarine eruption had occurred there a year before; on Easter Island, to see the giant carvings; on St. Paul in the southern Indian Ocean, to see the penguins; on the Galápagos, to pay homage to Darwin's isles; on Rapa; on Pitcairn; and more. Capricorn Expedition in 1952 led geologists to Ocean Island, an uplifted atoll with deposits of phosphate:
We were somewhat interested in dating the uplift and inquired about possible fossils [wrote Fisher to Shepard]. The result was most gratifying. While we sat in the shade sipping Melbourne Bitter Ale the inhabitants brought us beautifully preserved fossil echinoids and clams they had been using for doorstops and paperweights.[23]
The explorers paused too at Rotuma Island, in the hope of determining on which side of the andesite line[*]
[*] For some years the basic rocks of the Pacific Ocean basin and the acidic rocks of its continental borders were considered separated by the andesite (from Andes) line. Detailed geologic studies over the years have made this simple demarkation less significant.
the islandA native named George, who had been to school in Suva, knew where there were some outcrops and led us off through some of the lushest jungle I ever saw [wrote Stewart to Shepard]. Cocoanut palms and banana palms, banyan, breadfruit, papaya, and mangoes grew in profusion, frangipanis and hibiscus were the only flowers I could recognise, big land crabs sidled into their holes in the trail as we passed and then came back out to peer after us, birds called. … George led us perhaps a mile back in the jungle where we happily thumped away at the volcanic rocks, much to the amusement of George and the brood of urchins that tagged along after us. …[24]
From such brief island stops, tons of rock have been transported back to home port for analyses (and rock gardens).
Indeed, when Albert E. J. Engel moved from Caltech to Scripps in 1958 he observed that the institution collections of island rocks were enormous but that samples from the floor of the ocean were skimpy. He doubted that island rocks were typical of the Pacific basin, and he set out to gather quantities of sea-floor rocks to test his guess. His wife, Celeste, of the U.S. Geological Survey, carried out the analyses of these samples with him. “To our surprise, and delight,” said Engel, “when we dredged in the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Indian oceans, we found the rocks extraordinarily unique, kindred to achondritic meteorites, and unlike all previous conceptions of basaltic and other mafic rocks of the volcanic edifices built upon the ocean floor. This was, perhaps the most exciting petrological find of its time.”[25] Engel has been particularly interested in the history of the earth's crust. His quest has sent him far afield
Hauling rock samples from the floor of the ocean, which Scripps has been doing for a quarter of a century, is not easy. Such rocks from the walls of trenches or from the slopes of seamounts where they are not covered by sediments can provide clues to the geologic history of the ocean basins and to the reflecting layers that are recorded by seismologists elsewhere beneath the sediments. The collecting method is by dredge, but, as Menard said:
The whole idea of dredging is preposterous. We stop a ship over a spot where we have every expectation that the bottom is irregular solid rock; we then lower a dredge on a steel cable a fraction of an inch thick and a mile or so long and attempt to break the rock without breaking the cable.[26]
Indeed, sometimes all goes awry, as on an early attempt at dredging on Capricorn Expedition:
One incident nearly broke our spirits [wrote Fisher to Shepard]. Running eastward up from a depth of 4800 fathoms, we came upon a seamount 100--120 miles east of Vava'u [Tonga Islands], which reached to within 225 fathoms of the surface. We attempted to dredge. The 1/2-inch line is old and snapped near the bail when the dynamometer hardly registered a serious stress, though it was obvious we were somewhat hung up. Slightly daunted, we assembled and wove up the remaining dredge, put it over, and, after it was on bottom 15 minutes, lost it in the same manner. Considering the experienced personnel — Menard,
― 295 ―[Robert F.] Dill, [Harris B.] Stewart, and Fisher — we prefer to think the fates were against us.[27]
Such near-spirit-breaking is not entirely a thing of the past. On the second leg of Eurydice Expedition in 1974, a dredge was left in the Canton Trough south of the Line Islands, and 8,000 meters of wire followed it to the floor of the trough when the cable snapped. Graduate student Bruce Rosendahl, otherwise always cheerful, didn't smile again until the next day, when another dredging attempt was successful. On the third leg of Eurydice, another scientific party “left one dredge and 367 m of wire on flanks of Combe Bank.”[28]
Nevertheless, Scripps geologists have persisted in collecting, principally by dredging, the hard rock samples that provide “ground truth” for the sea-floor spreading hypotheses about the movements or collisions of crustal plates and the composition of the lower crust. Collections of abyssal rocks available for study at Scripps Institution now are second to none. Fisher in particular has become adept at retrieving well-located and fresh specimens of ultramafic and mafic igneous rocks from the deepest walls of the major trenches of the western Pacific. His work in collaboration with Celeste G. Engel has confirmed not only the chemical and petrographic uniformity of the low-alkali basalts characteristic of the shallow layers of the oceanic crust, but also has established the extraordinary range of igneous rocks that, perhaps as sills or crudely stratiform bodies, comprise the deeper layers of the oceanic crust and possibly upper mantle: lherzolites and other peridotites, gabbros of several varieties, anorthosites and titanium-rich gabbros similar to those that have been found on the moon, and even plutonic rocks rich in silica previously thought to be characteristic of continental areas.
George Hohnhaus (left) and Edward L. Winterer showing off a particularly successful dredge haul in the southern California borderland, in 1964.
The recent trend in marine geological studies is interpreting the history of specific regions. The ships crisscross anomalous areas, bearing questions and drawing out answers.
Menard, for example, planned Nova Expedition in 1967 “to try to determine the development and geologic history of the peculiar Melanesian region in the southwestern Pacific where the sea floor seems to be part continent and part ocean basin.”[29] He summarized the cruise's wonders and woes in Anatomy of an Expedition. Thanks to Harmon Craig, when he was scientific leader on the Argo, that trip put Dixon Seamount and Hohnhaus Seamount on the map, in honor of two Scrippsians who made many an expedition's accomplishments possible. George W. Hohnhaus, sometimes called Big George, because he is, began working for Scripps in 1953, and proved well-nigh indispensable at handling shipboard oceanic equipment. He has spliced wire, rigged equipment, and hoisted more load than one person should. A former underwater demolition expert, he has served as explosives shooter aboard ship, and he was a qualified scientific Scuba diver. Fred S. Dixon, who began at Scripps in 1955, also proved adept at rigging equipment, ingenious at developing and building shipboard gear, and useful as a general expediter. He wrote many sections of the Marine Technician's Handbook, a manual continuously updated by Scripps personnel for shipboard work. Dixon is not quite as big as Hohnhaus, but he was “given” the larger seamount, which was found and surveyed by researchers on the Argo while Dixon was aboard. The two peaks are about halfway between Midway Island and the Fiji Islands. Dixon Seamount measures 38 miles across the tip and is 13,100 feet high; Hohnhaus Seamount is about 32 miles across and 12,400 feet high. The two honorees will never get more than a glimpse by photograph, if that, of their mountains, because the tops are almost a mile beneath the surface. The crew members and scientists then on Nova
The vast Indian Ocean was a new area to peruse and describe after the first Scripps trip there in 1960 (see chapter 15). Robert L. Fisher, who coordinated and led several trips across that ocean, outlined the bathymetry. The Mid-Indian Ocean Ridge, “part of a world-girdling system of earthquake-prone submarine mountain chains where new crust is being created and emplaced as volcanic rock,” was surveyed on Lusiad Expedition (1962--63), Dodo Expedition (1964), Circe Expedition (1968), and again on Antipode Expedition (1971).
Joseph R. Curray and David G. Moore on the latter two expeditions explored one of the world's great natural dumps: The Bengal Deep-Sea Fan in the Bay of Bengal. This pile of sea-floor sediments has been poured into the ocean from the great Himalayan Mountains by way of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers. By surveying and through seismic reflection and refraction profiling carried out by Russell W. Raitt, the fan was found to be 3,226 kilometers long, 1,613 kilometers wide, and 16,460 meters thick at the landward end. Turbidity currents have left meandering and braided channels, rimmed with natural levees, much like river-delta features on land.
In the latter 1960s the trend in geology turned to sea-floor spreading, and fairly quickly every Scripps expedition was bringing in evidence. Menard presaged the turn in a letter to Director Nierenberg on 12 November 1966:
I just returned from a remarkable meeting in New York and I cannot let a month pass before I return from the South Pacific without letting you know my views on the consequences for Scripps. Sea floor creation and spreading centered on the mid-ocean ridge
― 299 ―and rise system is now demonstrated although the mechanism is still in doubt. This means that the history of the ocean basins is capable of being unraveled through mapping and sampling of magnetic anomalies and the rocks of the second crustal layer.…It is my impression that marine geology and geology as a whole are at a turning point comparable to physics when radioactivity was discovered. It will be a very exciting time for participants but a sad time for onlookers. …
The participants — a number of geologists and geophysicists at various institutions, sparked by a dynamic group at Cambridge University in England — were putting together the details of the theory of plate tectonics. In 1967 Dan McKenzie, then at Scripps Institution, devised the idea of using rigid-body rotations to describe plate motions, and with Robert L. Parker, then newly arrived at Scripps, he published a significant paper on tectonics on a sphere.
Graduate student Tanya Atwater was drawn into the theorizing at that time. She later wrote:
Sea floor spreading was a wonderful concept because it could explain so much of what we knew, but plate tectonics really set us free and flying.
…From the moment the plate concept was introduced, the geometry of the San Andreas system was an obviously interesting example. The night Dan McKenzie and Bob Parker told me the idea, a bunch of us were drinking beer at Little Bavaria [in Del Mar]. Dan sketched it on a napkin. “Aha!” said I, “but what about the Mendocino trend?” “Easy!” and he showed me three plates. As simple as that! The simplicity and power of the geometry of those three plates captured my mind that night and has never let go since.
― 300 ―…The best part of the plate business is that it has made us all start communicating. People who squeeze rocks and people who identify deep ocean nannofossils and people who map faults in Montana suddenly all care about each other's work. …[30]
Scripps geological expeditions contributed to the developing theories. Graduate student Dan Karig said that data gathered on Circe Expedition in 1968 indicated that arcs of the western Pacific had migrated away from Asia. Also from Circe Expedition John G. Sclater theorized that Ninetyeast Ridge in the Indian Ocean may have formed as a result of the breakup of the single continent Gondwanaland some 30 to 70 million years ago. Robert L. Fisher and Celeste G. Engel dredged very fresh basaltic rocks from the Mid-Indian Ocean Ridge on Circe Expedition and suggested that these indicated an active spreading center. Graduate student Tanya Atwater on Piquero Expedition in 1969, after surveying back and forth across the Peru-Chile Trench, concluded that the trench represented a collision between two crustal plates. Edward L. Winterer on Seven-Tow Expedition in 1970 determined by magnetic surveys that a long chain of seamounts between Samoa and Honolulu had been transported by crustal shifting as much as 1,500 miles. From that same expedition Sclater and James W. Hawkins determined that the Tonga Islands had been moved eastward from the Fiji and Lau islands. Hawkins returned to the area on Antipode Expedition in 1971 to investigate the spreading apart of the sea floor in the Lau island arc. And so the search continues. …
THE MOHOLE
A project that involved a number of geologists and geophysicists was dramatically announced at the First
Some say that the Mohole idea began in Walter Munk's patio at a champagne breakfast. Well, almost.
According to Willard Bascom, it began in a meeting of the Earth Sciences review panel of the National Science Foundation in March 1957. Somewhat discouraged by the lack of scientific breakthrough in the proposals under review, the committee adjourned. But committee members Walter Munk from Scripps and Harry Hess from Princeton asked themselves, “How could the earth sciences take a great stride forward?” Munk suggested that they should consider what project, regardless of cost, would do the most to open up new avenues of thought and research. He thought that the taking of a sample of the earth's mantle would be most significant.
“…The scope could not then be imagined but obviously such a project would be a heroic undertaking costing a large sum of money and requiring new techniques and monumental equipment. Their own grand ideas, so far from realization, made them a little self-conscious. Hess suggested that it be referred to the American Miscellaneous Society for action.”[31]
That sometimes-maligned and oft-misunderstood society was christened by Gordon Lill and Carl Alexis of the Geophysics branch of the Office of Naval Research in the summer of 1952 over a pile of proposals to that office that could be categorized no more closely than one at a time, i.e., they were all miscellaneous. Bascom described the society:
Any scientist who has business with ONR's Geophysics Branch is likely to claim membership in the American Miscellaneous Society since there are no official membership rolls. In fact, there are no bylaws, officers, publications or formal meetings. Nor are there any dues, for funds are a source of controversy. The membership is largely composed of university professors or scientific researchers but the rumor that only persons can be admitted whose research proposals to ONR have been turned down because they are too far-fetched is completely false — it is merely a coincidence.[32]
Such whimsy and the society's general antics have brought the comment that it is “a mildly loony, invisible college of otherwise mature academicians … exceedingly democratic, but harmlessly anarchic.”[33] Among the rare activities of the group is the occasional awarding of its albatross to deserving oceanographers. The bird is a mounted adult specimen, “a bit scruffy about the tail feathers.” The recipient is obliged to transport home the bulky award, give it house room until the next presentation, and deliver it to the succeeding honoree at a meeting chosen usually for its great distance. Scripps recipients of this acknowledged but awkward honor have been John Knauss, Walter Munk, Victor Vacquier, Roger Revelle, and Sir Edward Bullard.
AMSOC, as the abbreviation goes, met informally for breakfast — with white but not sparkling wine — at Munk's home in La Jolla in April 1957. Among other subjects, the group discussed drilling a hole to the Mohoroviˇić discontinuity, i.e., to the earth's mantle.[*]
[*] The boundary was named for Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohoroviˇić, who discovered it from earthquake records in 1909.
According to“The project sounded so simple and logical at a breakfast meeting on a sunny patio. The members lazily looked down a desert canyon at the sparkling Pacific below and felt pleased with the morning's work. … That afternoon a delegation called on Roger Revelle to inform him about the grand new idea that had blossomed on his campus.”[35]
Later that month William Rubey of the U.S. Geological Survey, Maurice Ewing, director of Lamont Geological Observatory, and Arthur E. Maxwell, chief of oceanography for the Office of Naval Research, were added to the committee.
“It was decided to ask the National Science Foundation for funds to make a feasibility study [continued Bascom]. With genteel horror that august organization declined, politely suggesting that such a distinguished group of scientists might be able to attach themselves to a more reliable group than the American Miscellaneous Society.”
AMSOC applied to the National Academy of Sciences for sponsorship and became a committee of the Academy and National Research Council. The American Geophysical Union voted their support of the drilling idea, and finally the National Science Foundation granted $15,000 to begin a feasibility study of drilling to the Mohoroviˇić discontinuity.
Willard Bascom, “an inventive, restless, cocky oceanographer and mining engineer with long experience and
The drilling ship CUSS I (named for the members of Global Marine Exploration Company that owned it: Continental, Union, Shell, and Superior oil companies) was selected for the test and was modified for one and one-half million dollars to drill in deep water. CUSS I, according to novelist John Steinbeck, had “the sleek race lines of an outhouse standing on a garbage scow.”[38] It, too, worked.
The first hole was drilled 25 miles off La Jolla, in March 1961, and it broke records: the 3,111 feet of water over which the ship floated was ten times greater than water depths previously attempted. Five holes were drilled in two days of testing, the deepest to 1,035 feet in sediments of the San Diego Trough. Then the clumsy rig was towed slowly and laboriously by a tug to a site 40 miles off Guadalupe Island, Baja California, Mexico. The Guadalupe site had been selected on the advice of Russell W. Raitt and George G. Shor, Jr., as an interesting spot geologically in an accessible range for CUSS I (which was based in Los Angeles) but well off shipping lanes. It was hoped that the drilling could reach the “second layer,” a hard reflecting horizon presumed to be volcanic.
At the Guadalupe site, Scripps ships Horizon and Spencer F. Baird stood by to serve as handmaidens on the radar and sonar buoys, and Orca served as a shuttle for a succession of distinguished visitors. Revelle was there, and Walter Munk, Gordon Lill, Sir Edward Bullard, Life photographer Fritz Goro, and John Steinbeck, who wanted to be there because of “some small experience in matters of the sea.”[39] The nervous man in charge of the scientific program was William R. Riedel.
In waves up to 14 feet high and wind gusts up to 20 knots, CUSS I held its position while scientists held their breath. The water depth was 11,672 feet. It took half a day for the drill pipe to reach the floor of the ocean before it could even begin drilling. Excitement went up as the drill bit went down 600 feet into the sediments, to the approximate depth of the “second layer.” Steinbeck felt “a joy like a bright light at having been there to see” and recorded the day in a “casual log”:
Easter Sunday, April 2 [1961] — Delight on the CUSS. We brought up a great core of basalt, stark blue and very hard with extrusions of crystals exuding in lines — beautiful under a magnifying glass. The scientists are guarding this core like tigers. Everyone wants a fragment as a memento. We have broken drilling records every day but now we have broken through to the second layer which no one has ever seen before. We figure this core cost about $5,000 a pound. I asked for a piece and got a scowling refusal and so I stole a small piece. And then that damned chief scientist gave me a piece secretly. Made me feel terrible. I had to sneak in and replace the piece I had stolen.[40]
President John F. Kennedy, in a telegram to the National Academy of Sciences, called the experimental drilling “a
The feasibility of drilling in very deep water and the practicality of dynamic positioning had been successfully demonstrated. CUSS I was returned to Global Marine, and the Mohole project turned to phase two. While that fiasco dragged on, Riedel and dozens of other scientists from several institutions pored over the invaluable cores from the Guadalupe site, a historic first.
As Science commentator Daniel S. Greenberg said: “Clearly, the engineering problems of Mohole were formidable, but they were beginning to pale alongside the organizational and political problems” — which he recounted in a series of articles in January 1964. Briefly: the National Academy of Sciences stepped out of the picture, Willard Bascom went off to other ventures, and the National Science Foundation struggled to find its own role in Mohole. Congressmen questioned the politics behind the choice of Brown & Root as the contractor to carry out the drilling, and before long they even more seriously questioned the spiraling cost estimates for a drilling barge as tall as a thirty-story building. Differences of opinion swirled among geologists as to whether the project should drill one single spectacular hole to the Mohoroviˇić discontinuity with an obviously expensive drilling vessel, or whether it should first drill a number of shallower holes in a variety of interesting places with a not-quite-so-expensive intermediate vessel.
Hollis Hedberg of Princeton, then chairman of AMSOC, spoke effectively for the latter program:
I might say that a major reason for the recommendation of the intermediate vessel has been to save the taxpayer's money while at the same time guaranteeing him a goodly return for a relatively modest
― 307 ―expenditure. Ocean-drilling exploration is inevitably going to be a long-continuing operation for many years into the future. It should be planned carefully with a modest, orderly, and progressive approach to the more difficult aspects, and it should go no faster nor at any greater rate of spending than experience and achievements justify. There is no need for a wastefully expensive crash program when at least equally valuable results can be attained sooner by a more systematic procedure involving relatively modest annual expenditures which need go on no longer than results justify.[41]
While arguments continued and plans were being formulated for a giant drilling vessel, geophysicists pondered a reasonable location for drilling to the mantle. Among the members of the National Academy's site-selection committee were Raitt and Shor at Scripps; the others were J. Brackett Hersey of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, John Nafe of Lamont Geological Observatory, and chairman Harry Hess of Princeton. The criteria for choosing a site, said Shor in 1962, were: “The weather must not be too bad, the site must be near an active port. Deep-water currents must not be strong. In addition, we need to find areas where the discontinuity is shallow and the seismic velocities beneath it suggest average conditions.”[42] High temperatures in the ocean floor at the location would also be undesirable.
East-coast scientists explored several promising areas in the Atlantic and, in the spring of 1962, the Mohole project funded Hilo Expedition by Scripps geophysicists to survey possible locations between California and Hawaii. The group completed 33 seismic stations and heat probes in 29 days, at the end of which exercise they reported themselves “all well but tired.” From that expedition, the most favorable
In a flurry of political infighting and concern over costs in 1966, Congress decided that the Mohole project should not be continued. Its cost to that point was estimated at 20 million dollars. Some of that was salvaged in scientific accomplishment and engineering design; some of it was not. Mohole became no-hole.
Greenberg's epitaph called Mohole “the albatross of the scientific community”[43] — and AMSOC two years later varied its custom of honoring oceanographers with its albatross by bestowing the bird on a former member of the Atomic Energy Commission for his “study of the oceans and other liquids after 5 p.m.” Harmlessly anarchic.
DEEP SEA DRILLING PROJECT
The philosophy of the intermediate-drilling program espoused by Hollis Hedberg was picked up by others, even while the Mohole project was still very much in the running. Geologists interested in ocean sediments began advocating a drilling program that would provide a number of samples of the sedimentary column from a variety of different sites, in order to trace the history of the ocean basins and at last to determine why the ocean sediments were so much thinner than predicted.
The success of CUSS I made such a program appear feasible. However, it “would still be too complex and costly for one individual or even one institution to initiate and
Early in 1962, after a proposal of Cesare Emiliani, from the Institute of Marine Sciences, University of Miami, to charter a drilling vessel for work in the Caribbean and western Atlantic, a committee (LOCO) [Long Core] was formed consisting of two scientists each from Miami, Lamont Geological Observatory of Columbia University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California, and Princeton University. The LOCO committee, realizing that a formal organization was needed, considered a nonprofit corporation of individuals or institutions, but failed to agree on its charter. Later that year, Maurice Ewing of Lamont, J. B. Hersey of Woods Hole, and R. R. Revelle of Scripps formed such a corporation (CORE), which, in February 1962, submitted a proposal to carry out a drilling program as visualized in the intermediate phase of Project Mohole. This proposal was not endorsed by LOCO and was not funded, and both groups faded away.
…Finally, in the first half of 1964, scientists from Miami, Lamont, Woods Hole, and Scripps decided to attempt once more to form an organization to initiate and carry out large drilling projects in the ocean. In May of that year, the directors of these four institutions signed a formal agreement called JOIDES (Joint Oceanographic Institutions Deep Earth Sampling) to cooperate in deep-sea drilling. It was the intent that JOIDES should prepare and propose drilling programs based on the ideas of broad segments of the oceanographic community.[45]
Soon after that, Revelle left Scripps to become director of the Center of Population Studies at Harvard; in December 1964 he pointed out that Fred N. Spiess — as the director of Scripps — should become the representative of JOIDES in his place. “As you can imagine, I take this action with great regret,” Revelle wrote to the other members of the committee, “because dealing with the deep sea floor is something I have dreamed about ever since I was a graduate student at Scripps.”[46] When William A. Nierenberg became director in 1965, he also became the Scripps member of the JOIDES executive committee.
A planning committee, consisting of one representative from each of the JOIDES institutions,[*]
[*] Charles Drake from Lamont, J. Brackett Hersey from Woods Hole, Fritz Koczy from Miami, and George G. Shor, Jr., from Scripps (Shor was replaced in May by William R. Riedel and Tjeerd H. van Andel).
during the first half of 1965 “carried out exhaustive consultations with marine scientists within and outside the four institutions.” They concluded that “the most rapid, significant, and generally valuable advances in our understanding of the history of the oceans can be made by examining the sedimentary column, and to a lesser degree the shallow basement, of truly oceanic areas.”[47] Tjeerd H. van Andel and William R. Riedel prepared a draft of a proposal to the National Science Foundation for a three-year program: “drilling of sediments and shallow basement rocks in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and adjacent seas.”The first drilling under JOIDES auspices was on the Blake Plateau off southeastern United States from the ship Caldrill. This project, under the direction of Lamont Geological Observatory, during April and May of 1965 drilled six holes in shallow-water areas and whetted the appetites of sedimentologists.
During mid-1965, with the active participation of Nierenberg in his new post as director, the original
In 1966 Scripps Institution was designated the operating institution for the Deep Sea Drilling Project. William W. Rand was appointed project manager; he was succeeded by Kenneth E. Brunot as acting manager in October 1967, then as manager from April 1968 to the end of 1970. The scientific advisers at first were van Andel and Riedel; in December 1967 Melvin N. A. Peterson was appointed chief scientist until 1971, when he became co-principal investigator, and N. Terence Edgar became chief scientist until 1975, succeeded by David G. Moore in 1976. To house the big project, the Deep Sea Drilling building was built in 1970, on the Scripps campus slightly up the hill and across La Jolla Shores Drive from the main center.
In January 1967, Scripps signed a contract with the National Science Foundation to manage a drilling program in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for at least eighteen months, to begin in mid-1968. A subcontract was let to Global Marine Exploration Company to provide and to operate a drilling ship to be built for the new program. On 23 March 1968, at Levingston Shipbuilding Company in Orange, Texas, “with a bottle of seawater mixed from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and symbolic of the far-flung operations scheduled for the scientific program,”[48] Mrs. William A. (Edith) Nierenberg christened the ship Glomar Challenger, a name proposed by van Andel.
The big vessel, which has been in continuous use since 1968, is 400 feet long, and is dominated by a drilling derrick 142 feet high amidships. M. N. A. Peterson and A. J. Field said that the ship “is a low profile hull, quite heavy for its size and designed for maximum mass radius of gyration
As soon as the Glomar Challenger was launched, outfitted, and accepted, she went to work, under the direction of Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel of Lamont — and struck oil. At least it was determined that the Sigsbee Knolls in the Gulf of Mexico are salt domes like those that sometimes contain oil, and traces of oil were identified before the hole was closed.
The Glomar Challenger of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, drilling at night.
The early work of the Glomar Challenger was chiefly in the Atlantic Ocean, but in 1969 the ship moved into the Pacific. Scripps expeditions had helped pave the way there, by making detailed surveys of a number of the sites selected for drilling. Scan Expedition in 1969 sailed counter-clockwise around the Pacific, pausing at 33 locations for reflection profiling, magnetometer readings, piston-core samples, heat-flow measurements, and sea-floor photographs. These helped establish the precise location for each
The vessel has gone on around the world and throughout the “seven seas” from the Arctic to the Antarctic and the tropics between. Each leg of its journeys is almost two months long, followed by a short stop in port, allowing a complete crew changeover. A high point in the drilling operation was reached on 25 December 1970, when a wornout drill bit was replaced and re-entered in the same drill hole. This capability has made it possible to drill through the hard chert layers, which seem to be found so commonly throughout the world's oceans.
Preliminary analyses of the cores taken by Glomar Challenger are done aboard ship. “The first analysis is by paleontologists, who determine geologic age. Technicians X-ray cores, determine water content, and measure radio-activity. Then they study a core's composition, grain-size and general mineralogy. Cores are documented photographically, because some properties change in storage. Then the cores are carefully packaged and placed in cold storage.”[50]
Preliminary reports on the cores are published soon after the completion of each leg of the cruise. A year after each leg, the samples become available to qualified researchers for further study. Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory is the repository for cores from the Atlantic Ocean, the Antarctic area, and the Mediterranean; and Scripps Institution is the repository for cores from the Pacific and Indian oceans, under the curatorship of William R. Riedel. The quantities of cores required building an addition for core storage beside the Deep Sea Drilling building in 1974.
The original drilling contract for 18 months was extended by 30 months, and again by 36 months. Leg 44, “the culmination of over seven successful years of geological exploration,” ended on 30 September 1975, and completed the
The fourth phase of the project commenced on 30 November 1975, as the International Phase of Ocean Drilling (IPOD), the purpose of which is to drill holes deep into the rocks beneath the sea-floor sediments in an attempt to determine their composition, structure, and geologic history, as well as to continue coring in the sediments. International it is, for through the years the member institutions of JOIDES have grown to include: the Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe, Federal Republic of Germany; the Centre National Pour L'Exploitation des Oceans (CNEXO) of France; the Department of Oceanography, University of Washington; Hawaii Institute of Geophysics of the University of Hawaii; the USSR Academy of Sciences; the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University; the National Environmental Research Council (NERC) of the United Kingdom; the Ocean Research Institute of the University of Tokyo; Oregon State University; the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science of the University of Miami, Florida; Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California at San Diego; Texas A & M University; the University of Rhode Island; and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
To begin the new phase, during 1976 Glomar Challenger traveled more than 20,000 nautical miles, and 44 holes were drilled into the sea floor, to recover more than 1,000 cores. At a site west of Portugal a record penetration of 1,740 meters into the sea floor was attained.
In its eight years of effort, the Deep Sea Drilling Project has retrieved 145,728 feet of sediment (to May 1976). Those columns of sand, silt, volcanic ash, and debris, accumulated from 398 sites in the world's oceans, have “unequivocally established the geological youthfulness of [the oceanic] crust in comparison to most continental rocks and
NOTES
1. Anatomy of an Expedition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 48. Used with permission of McGraw-Hill Book Co.
2. Ibid., 4.
3. Ibid., 48.
4. Reply to award of Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London, Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, No. 1634 (3 October 1966), 140.
5. Scripps Institution Notes, September 1933.
6. Private notes, 15--22 October 1937; SIO Archives.
7. “Terrestrial Topography of Submarine Canyons Revealed by Diving,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, Vol. 60 (October 1949), 1599.
8. Ibid.
9. Reply to award of Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London, loc. cit., 139.
10. San Diego Union, 23 April 1966.
11. F. P. Shepard, The Earth Beneath the Sea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 210.
12. F. P. Shepard, “Stratigraphic Research That May Pay Off,” Oil and Gas Journal (21 February 1955), 159.
13. In: Francis P. Shepard, Fred B Phleger, and Tjeerd H. van Andel, editors, Recent Sediments, Northwest Gulf of Mexico (Tulsa, Oklahoma: American Association of Petroleum Geologists, 1960), 3.
14. In: Ibid., 365.
15. “Coastal Processes and Long Range Planning,” 8th Annual Conference of Marine Technology Society, Preprints, 1972, 217.
16. Douglas L. Inman and Birchard M. Brush, “The Coastal Challenge,” Science, Vol. 181 (6 July 1973), 21. Copyright 1973 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
17. Citation for LL.D. at UCSD, 1965.
18. IMR Annual Report, 1972.
19. Anatomy of an Expedition, 221--22.
20. E. D. Goldberg, “Chemistry in the Oceans,” Oceanography, Washington, D.C., American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1961, 591.
21. Radio message, 1 January 1953.
22. Radio message, 6 January 1953.
23. Letter of 11 December 1952.
24. Letter of 11 December 1952.
25. Letter to the author, 27 November 1974.
26. Anatomy of an Expedition, 170.
27. Letter of 10 January 1953.
28. Radio message, 18 November 1974.
29. Anatomy of an Expedition, 4--5.
30. In Allan Cox, compiler, Plate Tectonics and Geomagnetic Reversals (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1973), 410 and 535--36.
31. Willard Bascom, Hole in the Bottom of the Sea (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1961), 47--48. Copyright $ 1961 by Willard Bascom. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
32. Ibid., 30.
33. R. G., “Do Oceanographers Have More Fun?” Science, Vol. 181, No. 4103 (7 September 1973), 926.
34. Willard Bascom, Hole in the Bottom of the Sea (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1961), 48.
35. Ibid., 49.
36. D. S. Greenberg, “Mohole: The Project That Went Awry,” Science, Vol. 143, No. 3602 (10 January 1964), 116.
37. Ibid., 118.
38. “High Drama of Bold Thrust Through Ocean Floor,” Life, Vol. 50, No. 15 (14 April 1961), 111. Copyright $ 1961 by John Steinbeck. Originally appeared in Life Magazine. By permission of McIntosh and Otis, Inc.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 122.
41. Letter in Science, Vol. 143, No. 3612 (20 March 1964), 1275. Copyright 1964 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
42. News release, 7 March 1962.
43. “Mohole: Aground on Capitol Hill,” Science, Vol. 153, No. 3739 (26 August 1966), 963.
44. “Deep-Sea Drilling for Scientific Purposes: A Decade of Dreams,” Science, Vol. 160, No. 3835 (28 June 1968), 1420. Copyright 1968 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
45. Ibid.
46. Letter of 14 December 1964.
47. Draft of proposal to National Science Foundation, 23 June 1965.
48. SIO Annual Report, 1968, 17.
49. “Deep Sea Drilling with D/V Glomar Challenger,” MS of talk for Challenger Expedition Centenary, 13 September 1972, 4.
50. Ibid., 10.
51. “Deep Sea Drilling: Research Lags Exploration,” Science, Vol. 181, No. 4098 (3 August 1973), 428. Copyright 1973 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
XIII. Within the Waters and Muds:
Studies in Marine Chemistry
“One of the most striking observations of marine biology is the fact that some parts of the ocean are very fertile while other parts are quite barren. There must be chemical factors which determine fertility, and an explanation of this was perhaps the first serious question which oceanographers asked the chemist. In the year 1930 there were probably no more than a dozen professional chemists in the world who were actively interested in the ocean, and practically every one of them was trying to answer this question.”[1]
Erik G. Moberg taking a water sample from a Nansen bottle, aboard the Scripps, probably in the 1930s.
One of those in 1930 was Erik G. Moberg at Scripps Institution, a chemist whom Director Vaughan described as “careful, thorough, and reliable,” and whom he credited with having placed Scripps among the leaders in research on the chemistry of sea water. Swedish-born Moberg had emigrated to the United States in his teens, and had received his B.A. at the University of North Dakota and his Ph.D. from the University of California, for work carried out mostly at Scripps, before joining the staff of the institution in 1925.
Scripps had no chemical laboratory at that time, and Moberg “with his own hands” proceeded to build one. By
By the late 1930s, when John Lyman was Moberg's graduate student, the chemistry department at Scripps had what Lyman called “a lot of service functions. We did Kjeldahls for Roger Revelle, maintained and calibrated the reversing thermometers, and ran all the chlorinities. At sea, we did phosphates and oxygens. Moberg knew all this forwards and backwards. … ” Through bitter experience, Moberg “learned that the only way to bring back good salinity samples is to put them into citrate of magnesia bottles. … After he severed his connection with SIO there
Moberg spent considerable time at sea on various research ships of other laboratories, as well as on the boat Scripps, of which he was essentially in charge. He also was extensively involved in the conversion of the E. W. Scripps into a research vessel, and he then used it for collections at a regularly scheduled series of stations out to the offshore islands. Moberg left Scripps in 1945.
In 1946 Norris W. Rakestraw was invited to Scripps from Brown University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to plan a research program in chemistry. Already noted as one of the nation's leading chemistry educators, Rakestraw continued his expertise at Scripps, where for some years he was dean of students, and in 1960 he became the first dean of the graduate division of UCSD. He also ably edited the Journal of Chemical Education for fifteen years. Rakestraw became professor emeritus in 1965.
During the decade following Rakestraw's arrival at Scripps, marine chemistry at the institution expanded greatly and turned to highly sophisticated techniques. In 1949 Edward D. Goldberg joined the staff, followed by George Bien, who began with API Project 51 (see chapter 12) in 1951, and by Theodore R. Folsom in 1952. In the mid-1950s Roger Revelle was envisioning an expanded university in the San Diego area, and — before that concept had been fully approved by university officials — he invited Hans E. Suess from the U.S. Geological Survey, Harmon Craig from the University of Chicago, and physicist Walter M. Elsasser from the University of Utah[*]
[*] Elsasser transferred to Princeton in 1962.
to become the first appointments of the new campus. Craig has continuedThe work of these scientists has gone well beyond “service functions.” As Goldberg said in 1960: “The paths of marine chemistry have also been fashioned by the advances of chemistry itself. … Whereas in the nineteenth century but twenty elements in sea water had been adequately assayed, today a knowledge of the concentration of fifty or sixty has been established and attention is now centering upon the distribution of isotopes of the elements.” [4] Analyses of sea water have led marine chemists into studies of man's abuse of the sea as the world's largest waste basket. Dating by means of isotopes has drawn them into determining the ages of sediments, the reactions where sea water meets mud or shell, and the ages and distribution of water masses. They have worked with biologists, geologists, and physical oceanographers in solving the complexities of the sea, the air, and the land.
Edward D. Goldberg, for example, who joined the Scripps staff just after receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1949, began his researches along with Scripps geologists on the composition of manganese nodules and on sedimentation in the ocean. In the mid-1950s he used ionium-thorium ratios to date cores from various expeditions in the Pacific. Goldberg and colleagues found that radioactivity did not decrease steadily with depth, but increased in the lower layers. Barium was found in some Pacific sediments in greater concentration than in igneous rocks or in land sediments, and could be correlated with areas where biological activity was highest, so that concentration by siliceous organisms such as diatoms and radiolarians seemed the most likely explanation. In 1959, with
With graduate student Robert W. Rex, Goldberg analyzed quartz grains in ocean sediments, and they concluded that Darwin's suggestion that wind-borne dust furnished material for extensive ocean sediments was correct. They found that more than half the deep-sea deposits in the North Pacific are derived from wind transport from arid areas of Europe and Asia.
The wind was carrying other forms of dust, also, found Goldberg: talc, for example, which was surprisingly widespread in air samples even over remote parts of the ocean. The source proved to be land-sprayed insecticides, in which talc was the carrier. High concentrations of insecticides had already been found in tunas and in penguins and shearwaters far from sources of pesticides.
Such studies of widespread man-introduced material in isolated as well as populated regions led Goldberg on to studies of pollution, studies into which he was drawn by Roger Revelle's concern over man's alteration of the marine environment. “Man,” said Goldberg in 1968, “has become a geological agent, competing with natural processes, in the alteration of seawater composition. … Excess carbon dioxide from the burning of such fossil fuels as oil, coal and gas, synthetic detergents from municipal discharges, pesticides, lead, radioactivity from the detonation of fission and fusion devices are found in measurable quantities in the oceans.”[5] Mercury, he also pointed out, was introduced into the ocean at a greater annual rate by man's activities than by natural transfer. From samples taken from the Greenland ice sheet, Goldberg, Koide, and Herbert V. Weiss
In 1970 Goldberg and William A. Newman hosted a two-day symposium in La Jolla on “Man's Chemical Invasion of the Ocean: An Inquiry,” which was attended by more than five hundred persons. Goldberg also has called for extensive monitoring of pollutants, and in 1973 helped to establish jointly with Soviet scientists an environmental monitoring network for measuring the effects of pollution on marine organisms. Along other lines, Goldberg took an early interest in the establishment of UCSD and served as the first provost of Revelle College from February 1965 to July 1966, at which time he returned to his chemical researches at Scripps.
GEOSECS engineers at console controlling computerized underwater telemetry systems aboard the Melville, 1972. Left to right; Arnold Mantyla, Arnold Bainbridge (at console), Jack Spiegelberg (in background), Rick Ackermann, and Bob Fong.
As nuclear-bomb testing began in the early 1950s, various people, including Roger Revelle, became concerned over the effects of the introduction of radioactivity into the ocean. Theodore R. Folsom was drawn into these studies. A native San Diegan, he earned his B.S. and M.S. at Caltech in physics and in 1952 received his Ph.D. at Scripps, when he also joined the institution's staff; he retired in 1975. John Isaacs recalled one of Folsom's contributions to Project Wigwam in 1955:
On the first and only deep underwater nuclear explosion, much of the upwelled radioactivity was distributed in extremely thin, submerged laminae; the first observation of such layering, I believe. We were frustrated — for while we could detect the radioactivity with the lowered probe, we could not obtain a sample of the radioactive water because the sampler was a meter above the detector and it was impossible to sample these layers from a rolling ship. Overnight and single-handedly, Ted took over the ship's shop and
― 329 ―created a self-contained sampler, with its own internal logic that could snap a sample of a layer the instant it encountered one. It was only then that we were able to obtain direct evidence and samples of these astonishingly thin layers.[6]
By means of a closed sampling system, free of contamination, Folsom was able to sample deep-water layers and so determine that the radiocarbon ages were dependable and that fission products were confined to the upper layers of the ocean, not penetrating into deep water as rapidly as had been supposed.
During 1960, said Folsom, “we rushed about collecting specimens suitable for establishing the radioactive background in the sea during the weapons moratorium. We believed this to be a unique opportunity; perhaps the last time the fallout input would be simple to study.” [7] In 1961 nuclear testing resumed and “this pleasant period ended” with the advent of “specimens noticeably contaminated with nuclides characteristic of young fallout.” Traces of the 1961 and 1962 nuclear explosions were followed for several years through sea-water sampling in their slow movement around the North Pacific.
In a study for the city of Los Angeles, for its Hyperion sewage treatment plant, Folsom, with G. K. J. Mohanrao of Caltech, in the late 1950s set up a monitoring system by means of several isotopes, with special attention to the long-lived cesium-137. They were able to correlate variations in the cesium in the sewage treatment system with nuclear weapon testing.
To determine the effect of discharging radiocesium into the ocean by way of sewage, Folsom set out to establish the normal level of this isotope in the Pacific. This required developing a technique that readily distinguished cesium from other alkali metals. Sea-water samples from the Scripps
Folsom and his co-workers expanded the Hyperion project into a comparison of radioactivity in sewage at twelve cities, including Los Angeles, which led into defining the problems inherent in monitoring sewage plants. They also undertook a study of the effects of discharge of radioactivity on marine organisms living near the Hyperion outfall and a comparison with similar organisms elsewhere along the Pacific coast. The study quickly showed considerable variation of radioactive isotopes among organisms within small areas. Albacore tuna, for instance, concentrated cesium in their tissues to more than a hundred times the level of their surroundings. Marine fishes, in fact, were found to concentrate much higher levels of natural radioactivity than any terrestrial animals.
Folsom's group established a reference of the concentration of several metallic radionuclides in various organisms along the coast and throughout the Pacific Ocean in order to be able to monitor changes over the years. They also analyzed the quantities of several other metallic trace elements in the tissues of fish and found the radioactive concentrations high for some years after their introduction into ocean waters.
In the mid-1950s some geochemists were looking into another aspect of man's impact on the environment: what
Estimates by the United Nations indicate that within the next 50 years we will have produced 1,700 billion tons of new carbon dioxide from combustion of industrial fuel. This astronomical sum is 70 per cent of the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere. In this way we are returning to the air and the sea the carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years. From the standpoint of meteorologists and oceanographers, we are carrying out a tremendous geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past or be repeated in the future. If all this carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere it will certainly affect the climate of the earth and this may be a very large effect.[8]
Revelle and Hans E. Suess, Harmon Craig, and James R. Arnold[*]
[*] Who in 1958 became a staff member of what was to become UCSD.
and Ernest C. Anderson, from their background work in several laboratories, in 1957 published their independently derived figures on the rate of transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the oceans: a residence time of approximately ten years for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere before it is dissolved in the oceans.Revelle called the study of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and ocean one of the major Scripps projects for the International Geophysical Year of 1957--58, and announced the establishment of a radiocarbon laboratory at Scripps for processing samples of sea water for radiocarbon and tritium. Radiocarbon analysis had a twofold interest: determining isotope exchange and transfer of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and the ocean, and using radiocarbon to trace the movement of deep ocean water and the mixing of water masses.
On the expeditions of the IGY, Norris Rakestraw and George Bien set up the shipboard sampling program, in which they collected surface and deep-water samples from 40° south latitude to 15° north latitude in the Pacific Ocean. The samplers, devised by the Scripps Special Developments Shop, were stainless steel barrels of approximately fifty-gallon capacity, with spring-loaded doors that could be tripped by a messenger traveling down the wire. Various models were tested — and some were left on the floor of the ocean. On the expeditions, once the water samples arrived on board, Rakestraw or Bien settled down to long continuous hours of shipboard analysis. (“They were real heroes,” said Harmon Craig, who was aware of his colleagues' shipboard hours because he was putting in similar hours of time on gas analysis!) “Radiocarbon measurements [of the IGY samples, said Bien, Rakestraw, and Suess] have shown for the first time that it is possible to determine true age differences of water masses by the determination of radiocarbon in the dissolved bicarbonate.”[9]
From the IGY expeditions and from later expeditions, which sampled both the Pacific and the Indian oceans, Bien, Rakestraw, and Suess concluded:
In the Pacific Ocean the 14C [carbon-14] content decreases constantly from south to north well into the
― 333 ―northern hemisphere; thereafter the gradient seems to flatten out. This is consistent with [John A.] Knauss' circulation pattern. … Extensive mixing probably also takes place.In the Indian Ocean, the situation is approximately similar but not so clear. 14C decreases from south to north, though not so regularly. … As in the Pacific Ocean, the results here are consistent with the assumption of slowly rising deep water in the northern parts of the ocean.[10]
From continued radiocarbon investigations in surface sea water, Bien determined that latitudinal variations in surface-water concentrations are due both to the location of atmospheric nuclear tests and to ocean mixing processes. The tests have been conducted primarily in the northern hemisphere, where maximum radiocarbon concentrations are also found.
Revelle also enticed Charles D. Keeling to Scripps in 1956 to pursue the study of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and ocean, and Keeling has continued analyzing and monitoring carbon dioxide very precisely. He determined that the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was only about one-half the amount that would occur if all man-caused carbon dioxide stayed in the atmosphere. Much of the remainder, he has concluded, is absorbed by the surface waters of the oceans. To monitor carbon dioxide levels, Keeling and his colleagues in the early 1960s established three isolated recording stations: in Alaska, at the South Pole, and atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii. In 1969, Arnold E. Bainbridge developed a more sensitive analyzer for continuous measurement of carbon dioxide, which was installed at Mauna Loa to replace the equipment there. In cooperation with New Zealand scientists, Keeling established several
Small variations in ocean conditions, such as slight changes in temperature or in barometric pressure, can affect the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by sea water. Keeling and his colleagues have been correlating such variations with changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In 1968 Keeling prepared a chart of the distribution of the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in surface waters for the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, based on two years of continuous measurements from Scripps expeditions. He found pronounced belts of high pressure near the equator in the Pacific and Atlantic, but not (at least for the summer measurements) in the Indian Ocean. Through very precise data from expeditions and several island stations, Keeling and colleagues have been able to find seasonal and short-term periodicities in the distribution of carbon dioxide. These have been correlated with the Southern Oscillation, a cyclical fluctuation in zonal wind circulation.
The radiocarbon laboratory that was announced by Revelle before the IGY was the laboratory of Hans E. Suess, who had established a similar laboratory for the U.S. Geological Survey earlier for determining ages of geological and archaeological events. Suess's major improvement on the technique of radiocarbon dating — which was based on the discovery in 1947 of the isotope carbon-14 in nature by Willard F. Libby — was the use of acetylene as the counting gas. That, combined with meticulous laboratory procedures, enabled him to reduce the experimental error of samples dated to less than one percent.
The La Jolla Radiocarbon Laboratory, as the new facility
Suess's first interest had been in the dating of glacial advances in the United States, work that he has called “exceedingly enjoyable” and “most rewarding.” Early measurements on logs buried by advancing ice sheets showed the last glaciation on the American continent to have been only 19,000 years ago, much more recent than had previously been estimated by geologists. Suess went on to compare recent radiocarbon dates with tree-ring-dated wood in order to determine the variations in atmospheric carbon-14 throughout the past 9,000 years. His determination that the radiocarbon had been decreasing since about the turn of the century, because of the burning of fossil fuels, has been termed the “Suess effect.”
For other researchers, at Scripps and elsewhere, the Radiocarbon Laboratory for some years handled samples to provide dates on prehistoric man, on fluctuations in sea level, the time of formation of lagoon sediments, and of deep-sea oozes and muds. Charcoal, shell material, coral, foraminifera — even green-blue mud and llama dung — were submitted to the laboratory for dating events of significance to biologists and geologists.
Some funds for the Radiocarbon Laboratory were provided by the university's statewide Water Resources Center, established in 1957, for studies on isotopic variations in natural waters, carried out by Harmon Craig, and for studies of climatic cycles in California, carried out by Suess and Carl L. Hubbs. Samples dated under the latter project provided dates of southern California aboriginal populations as far back as 7,000 years, and gave a first certain date (14,500
After the establishment of UCSD and its medical school, the researchers at Scripps who were studying minute traces of natural radioactivities found the background level rising, from increased use of radioactive materials in various research projects. Folsom and Suess began seeking a “non-radioactive retreat,” and, when the bunkers on Mt. Soledad that had served as an Army intelligence and radar station during World War II became available, Folsom especially urged that the almost-underground, isolated buildings be acquired. The property was awarded to UCSD in 1965 from the assets of the Templeton Foundation. Folsom moved his laboratory into the bunkers after they were renovated, and Suess's Radiocarbon Laboratory moved into an adjacent, separately built structure later.
Also drawn to La Jolla by Revelle in 1955 was Harmon Craig, who had received his Ph.D. in geology-geochemistry at the University of Chicago, where he had been in charge of the mass-spectrometer studies under Harold C. Urey for analyses of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen isotopes.[*]
[*] Urey was attracted to the new campus in 1958, as a professor at large, through conversation with Craig.
At Scripps, Craig's laboratory eventually grew to contain five mass spectrometers: Samson, Delilah (of course), Micah, Gad, and an unchristened portable unit. For several years in the latter 1950s one of Craig's projects was measuring the variations in the concentrations of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in natural waters.Isotopes in ocean waters turned up some surprises: an unexpectedly high proportion of the helium-3 isotope, for instance, which Craig found on Nova Expedition in 1967. He concluded that this isotope was derived from within the mantle and was presumably leaking into sea water from the seafloor-spreading centers.
In the 1970s Craig has been developing a means of using concentrations of radon and helium as earthquake precursors. He and his colleagues have set up a monitoring network in thermal springs and wells along four major faults in southernmost California.
In a land-based project in 1972, Craig, assisted by his wife Valerie, developed a mass-spectrometer technique for identifying specific quarries of Greek marble through the proportions of carbon-13 to carbon-12 and oxygen-18 to oxygen-16, which is enabling archaeologists to identify the source of individual marble statues. The husband-and-wife team made detailed collections in the four major quarrying areas used by the Greeks from the archaic period to Roman times. Marbles from each quarry could be distinguished by isotope analysis.
Craig and his colleagues — Yu-chia Chung, Ray F. Weiss, and Manuel Fiadeiro — have also been measuring the radium distributions in the world oceans, studying the mixing processes in the bottom waters, and determining the distributions of dissolved argon, nitrogen, and total carbon dioxide in sea water.
Some of these studies have been within the Geochemical Ocean Sections Study (Geosecs) program. “Geosecs began,” wrote Craig, “with the recognition by Henry Stommel [of MIT] that the full potential of geochemical tracers for the study of deep-ocean circulation could only be realized by a maximum collaborative effort in which simultaneous studies of as many significant properties as possible could be made over a large section of the oceans.”[11]
For Geosecs, Fred Dixon helped design a new balanced conducting wire for deep STD (salinity, temperature, depth) measurements, and Craig's group and Dixon built a new hydrographic winch and several items for carrying out shipboard chemical measurements. Thus equipped, Craig and shipmates on Antipode Expedition in 1971 gathered closely spaced hydrographic casts and made detailed geochemical studies. These resulted in the discovery of a major density discontinuity — which they named the benthic front — in the South Pacific Ocean, beginning east of New Zealand and sloping downward to the north and east, a discontinuity that separates deep water from bottom water.
The first major Geosecs expedition was in 1972--73 in the Atlantic Ocean on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution ship, the Knorr, and included various Scripps chemists and physical oceanographers. The Pacific's turn for study came in 1973--74, with a 35,000-mile expedition on the Melville from the Bering Sea to the Antarctic — “one of the most technologically advanced oceanographic expeditions ever carried out,” according to participant Weiss.
Also participating in Geosecs projects has been Devendra Lal, whose varied studies have dovetailed with the work of
With Craig and others, Lal has participated in analyses of the composition and radioactivity of particulate matter in the oceans. He devised a sampling device that uses cotton filters and pressure-activated switches to turn on the filtration at specific depths. On Geosecs expeditions the device has filtered 5,000 to 15,000 liters of sea water at depths from 50 to 2,000 meters in the South Pacific.
For some years chemists at various universities had been carrying out studies on lead and its isotopes. In 1960, one of these chemists came to Scripps from Caltech, Tsaihwa J. (“Jimmie”) Chow. Born in Shanghai, he had received his B. S. from National Chiao-tung University and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. His early studies were on elements in sea water and the composition of marine sediments and of meteorites. Among those elements, Chow found lead occurring in greater quantity than expected. He analyzed samples from polar snowfields and later, with Goldberg, from layered sediments cored in several offshore basins, and so derived a history of the increasing accumulation of lead with industrialization. Chow perfected methods for distinguishing various sources of lead from their isotopic composition. In 1970 he announced that leaded gasoline
In the latter 1960s new additions to the chemistry staff at Scripps included Joris M. Gieskes, D. John Faulkner, and Jeffrey L. Bada. Netherlands-born Gieskes came to Scripps in 1967 and turned to studies of the chemistry in interstitial waters of marine sediments and of the activity coefficients of mixed electrolytes. Faulkner, who started at Scripps in 1968, set up a program to isolate and identify previously unknown chemicals from marine sources, especially for useful pharmaceuticals. The researches by Faulkner and his associates have resulted in the identification of antibiotics in sponges, the first known instance of antibiotic activity in a tunicate, a complex mixture of toxins in starfishes, and the storage of toxic chemicals by the sea hare from its algal diet. Faulkner's group has also experimented with insect growth regulators on barnacles, one of which (ZR-512) caused young barnacles to metamorphose into adults before they attached to a surface, thus causing their death by starvation. Bada, a San Diego native and UCSD graduate who joined the Scripps staff in 1969, had devised a new method of dating sediments and fossil bone by means of the racemization reaction of amino acids. He has been using this technique for dating calcareous sediments from
NOTES
1. Norris W. Rakestraw, “The Chemist in Oceanography,” ICSU Review, Vol. 3, No. 4 (October 1961), 166.
2. Letter to University President Robert G. Sproul, 16 January 1934.
3. Letter to E. N. Shor, 21 December 1975.
4. “Chemists and the Oceans,” Chymia, Vol. 6 (1960), 162.
5. “New Chemistries in the Ocean,” manuscript for talk.
6. Talk at Staff Council meeting, 13 May 1975.
7. Memorandum to Joseph Hutchinson, 25 October 1961.
8. Testimony to House of Representatives Appropriations Committee considering appropriations for the International Geophysical Year, 1956.
9. “Radiocarbon Dating of Deep Water of the Pacific and Indian Oceans,” Radioactive Dating, International Atomic Energy Agency, 1963, 159.
10. “Radiocarbon in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and Its Relation to Deep Water Movements,” Limnology and Oceanography, Vol. 10, Supplement (November 1965), R29-R30.
11. “The Geosecs Program: 1970--71,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Vol. 16 (1972), 47.