IV. Out to Sea and Back Again
XIV. Marine Facilities and the Fleet
“The long arm of the oceanographer is his ships and his groping fingers, the cable. Without ships to test and to explore, the hypotheses and laboratory discoveries of the marine researcher become dry and insubstantial and the researcher blind and isolated.”[1]
Since 1937 Scripps Institution has had a long arm, and since 1948 it has maintained the largest oceanographic fleet of any research institution.
The first ship of that fleet was the graceful schooner E. W. Scripps, given to the institution by Robert P. Scripps in 1937. Then came the hardworking tug Horizon in 1948, the first of many former military ships. From 1949 through 1968 she made 267 scientific cruises, spent 4,207 days at sea, and logged 610,522 miles.
From 1948 “new ships were regularly added from Navy or other surplus sources, up to the Alexander Agassiz in 1961 and the tug Oconostota in 1962. Soon after that Scripps began acquiring ships that were specifically designed for oceanographic research: the Ellen B. Scripps, modified from offshore oil-supply boats; the Alpha Helix, a floating laboratory; and two of the ships designed by the Navy as
The service to operate the fleet, Marine Facilities (Mar-Fac), came into being in 1948. Finn Outler was then technical superintendent for the Marine Physical Laboratory, and among other duties was responsible for the conversion of the PCE(R)-855 and PCE(R)-857 into research vessels for the Navy Electronics Laboratory. When the onset of the Marine Life Research program enabled Scripps to acquire three ships, all of which required conversion for research use, Outler was asked to take charge. He found himself yearning for the help of a certain fellow submariner acquaintance from prewar Navy days before each had been separately assigned to China patrol. Quite by accident he came across that man's name in the San Diego telephone book: James L. Faughn, who, Outler found, was then out of the Navy and attending law school in San Diego. The persuasion of Outler and of just-departing Director Sverdrup brought Faughn to Scripps on a long useful career: as ship's captain and superintendent, technical administrator, coordinator for Naga Expedition, supervisor of the construction of the Alpha Helix, and staff officer.
As technical superintendent in engineering at Marine Facilities, Faughn took charge of finding available Navy ships for the Marine Life Research program in 1948 and of directing their conversion to research. On his recommendation the Horizon and the Crest were acquired, as well as the fishing boat Paolina-T. At the same time, yachtsman Clemens W. Stose, who had been the prewar captain of the E. W. Scripps, continued at Scripps after the war. In 1950, when it appeared that Stose might be retiring, Acting Director and shipmate Roger Revelle commented:
Launching of the Melville, sideways, at Defoe Shipbuilding Company, Bay City, Michigan, on 10 July 1968. Photo by James Pollock.
Since 1937, when he supervised the transformation of the E. W. SCRIPPS from a movie star's yacht into a sturdy research vessel and became her first skipper under the University flag, Clem has retired several times to my knowledge. … I well remember, in his first days at Scripps, Clem occasionally wondered aloud what those scientists were up to, and whether it was necessary to mar a beautiful vessel with all that queer gear. But he never complained and always did his best to make sure that the maximum possible amount of scientific work at sea was done. During the years he has become accustomed to the peculiar behavior of oceanographers and now he almost acts like one himself.[2]
Instead of retiring then, Stose continued at Scripps as marine superintendent (hull) until 1953.
Clifford W. Colbeth was hired in 1951 as a ship's officer to replace Gus Brandel, who was also at times skipper of the E. W. Scripps. Colbeth was advanced to ship captain the following year, and in February 1954 he became marine superintendent. When Peter G. Trapani replaced him as marine superintendent in July 1956, Colbeth returned to serving as ship captain until 1958.
Trapani's familiarity with the sea was a long one: he enlisted in the Navy at the age of seventeen in 1926 as an apprentice seaman, rose through the ranks in the electrician series, was commissioned an ensign in wartime 1942, and advanced to commander before his retirement in the spring of 1956. In July of that year he became marine superintendent at Scripps and continued to direct the expanding Marine Facilities until his retirement in 1972. Peter S. Branson, who had retired as captain in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1968 after a number of years of service afloat and ashore, took charge of Marine Facilities at that time.
In its early years the fleet had no home. The E. W. Scripps, for example, was berthed at the yacht harbor in San Diego Bay before World War II. After the war, Scripps ships tied up at the Navy Electronics Laboratory dock at Point Loma, by courtesy of the Navy. When space was not available there, one or more of the ships, when in home port, had to be berthed at San Diego city docks or at National Steel and Shipbuilding Company.
A permanent home was finally acquired in 1965, when six acres of land were leased from the Navy (which gave the land to Scripps in 1975) alongside the Navy Electronics Laboratory on Point Loma. Jeffery D. Frautschy was a major participant in the design of the utilitarian buildings, jointly called the Chester W. Nimitz Marine Facilities, which were dedicated in March 1966. The Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation provided the funds for the million-dollar facility, which includes an administration building, an electronics shop, a general carpenter, welding, and machine shop, a warehouse and stores building, a storage yard, and — at first — a floating pier made of two large barges acquired through state surplus in 1962. After completion, it was just barely possible to tie up, at the pier and marginal wharf, almost all the ten vessels that Scripps then owned, the sole exception being Flip. In 1974, through funds provided by the National Science Foundation, the floating-barge pier was replaced by a larger concrete pier and extension of the marginal wharf; the new pier has sewer and bilge-water connections for the ships, and connections for telephones, compressed air, and fresh water. Flip, which had been berthed at the B Street Pier at the Embarcadero on San Diego Bay for many years, was finally able to join the rest of the fleet, as was ORB, the ocean research buoy of the Marine Physical Laboratory. The National Marine Fisheries Service ship David Starr Jordan regularly berths at the MarFac pier, and
The Scripps ship facility was named for Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, retired commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, just a month after his death. In addition to his many years of distinguished service in the United States Navy, Nimitz had served as a university regent from 1948 to 1956 and long before then had organized NROTC on the Berkeley campus, where he had served as professor of naval science and tactics from 1926 to 1929.
To provide for the needs of Scripps research at sea, on expeditions long and short, the number of people at Marine Facilities over the years has fluctuated between 100 and 200, operating six to ten vessels. The group includes the ship captains, other ships' officers, crew members, and a shore-support staff.
Providing ship services to scientists is not an easy role for a sailor. Only under research circumstances is a ship not under the sole command of the ship's captain, for, in service to science, the captain shares with the chief scientist the decisions as to when and where the ship will sail. All responsibility for the safety to the ship lies with the captain, who occasionally has to remind scientists of that point. Scripps ships have run aground (one captain did seem to have a predilection for that), but not often. James L. Faughn, captain on Midpac Expedition and on many later ones, and Noel Ferris — whose skill in ship maneuvering drew awed admiration among crew, scientists, and jaded dock-workers — stand out as ship captains who have worked especially well with the scientific party.
In the years just after World War II, many of the Scripps scientists and technicians had served in the Navy and were already familiar with ships and the language of them. Not so many of today's oceanographers have that background, which sometimes leads to a breakdown in communication.
The ship's cook has problems too when trying to serve science and scientists. “I remember our frustrated cook's exasperation [on Midpac Expedition, wrote Edward S. Barr] while he stood in the galley doorway with a full meal served in the empty messhall, while all the scientists were aft on the stern examining an unscheduled newly-caught sea creature!”[4] That was but the first of many chow-time interruptions.
When the E. W. Scripps made her first long research expedition to the Gulf of California in 1939, oceanography was an all-male profession. (Women graduate students at the institution then were in biology and were expected to stay ashore.) When Mrs. Roger Revelle and Mrs. Francis P. Shepard met the E. W. Scripps in Guaymas in 1940, they were forbidden by the captain to set foot aboard ship. The philosophy lingered, although after World War II women were sometimes tolerated on one-day trips. In 1949 Revelle expressed the philosophy of the era:
… Obviously, certain inconveniences arise when women passengers are aboard for overnight trips on a small vessel. These are usually greatly exaggerated however.
… On the other hand, our ships are not yachts; they are essentially fishing vessels. Hence the men aboard are liable to be dirty, smelly, profane and possibly even offensive to any women who think Queen Victoria's Albert was the ideal husband. In attempting
― 352 ―to be clean, odorless, refined and inoffensive, our crew members, marine technicians, and scientists might possibly lose efficiency and the scientific work might suffer. Thus it is necessary to consider each situation on its merits and to think up reasons whenever possible to discourage women from participating in the work at sea.I am against the establishment of any formal policy with respect to women visitors. You know how perverse women are; if we made a policy prohibiting them from going out on the ships, we would find two or three in the chain locker every time we cleared the whistling buoy. An unwritten policy which does not prohibit but subtly discourages their presence will best achieve our rather dubious ends.[5]
Revelle did consider each situation on its merits. In 1952 he invited Rachel Carson, whose book The Sea Around Us had come out the previous year, to join Capricorn Expedition. She accepted and later regretfully declined. During Capricorn Expedition Revelle invited Helen Raitt to return home aboard the Spencer F. Baird when she met the ship in Tonga. By then, other women had spent shorter periods of time aboard Scripps ships. Although there have been complications at times, women are very regularly members of scientific parties aboard ship now, and in 1973 the first of several women crew members was hired (none of whom, however, stayed very long).
A jack-of-all-trades who performed heroic service for the Scripps fleet for many years, in an advisory capacity, was Maxwell Silverman. He once called himself “a seagoing pipefitter,” but he was really an oceanographic engineer, before the term was invented. Silverman began at Scripps in 1951 for a year, then worked at Navy Electronics Laboratory for three years, and returned to Scripps as an assistant
Silverman became more and more involved with the design of oceanographic ships, beginning with the conversion of the Argo in 1959. He also became concerned with the regulations imposed on those ships by the U.S. Coast Guard, and he helped from a workable set of regulations for this unusual — and rather contrary — category of ships. When the Navy began constructing research ships for the oceanographic institutions, Silverman became adviser, critic, and watchdog. His approach, said one observer, combined “courage and courtesy.” While the first ships of the Navy's AGOR series were being designed, Silverman once carried to Washington a list of 104 items that he considered deficient in design, location, or utility. Backed by other Scripps officials, he persuaded the Navy to change more than 90 of those items. Silverman, on loan from Scripps, supervised the construction of the Atlantis II for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and then supervised the Thomas Washington for his own institution. He participated in the design of the Melville and her sister ship, the Knorr, of Woods Hole. Over the years he spent a great deal of time in Washington as liaison officer on ship design, and he finally left Scripps in 1973 to work for the oceanographer of the Navy, until his death by heart attack four months later. Said Jeffery Frautschy: “Clearly, modern oceanographic ships are memorials to Max's dedication, competence, and effectiveness.”
THE FLEET
The following alphabetical list includes all ships that are owned or have been owned or operated by Scripps Institution since its beginning (but not rented or borrowed vessels). The list includes a number of Navy-owned vessels, as the Navy has provided research ships to the institution often since 1948, because of its keen interest in oceanographic studies. The Glomar Challenger is owned and operated by Global Marine, Inc., under contract to Scripps (chapter 12).
L is length, B is beam, D is draft, CS is cruising speed, R is cruising range in nautical miles, E is endurance (days at sea without resupplying).
Alexander Agassiz (the first) (1907-1917)
L 85 feet; B 26 feet; D 6.3 feet. Crew 5; scientists 4. MBA-owned.
This ketch or yawl was built by San Diego boat builder Lawrence Jensen for research work[*]
[*] This ship is perhaps the first one designed and built specifically for ocean research by an American nongovernmental institution.
for the Marine Biological Association, which founded Scripps Institution. The association acquired the ship on 21 August 1907, with funds provided by Ellen B. Scripps. From five names suggested by Scripps staff members, the donor chose to honor the Harvard geologist-oceanographer who had visited the young institution in 1905.
Nimitz Marine Facilities (buildings in right foreground) and the fleet. The Point Loma buildings of the Marine Physical Laboratory are in the left center, beyond NOSC (formerly Navy Electronics Laboratory).
The ship, as described by her master, Captain W. C. Crandall, in 1912: “is schooner-rigged, and as originally built was a ‘ketch’; that is, a boat with deck area forward of the mainmast large and unencumbered, the wheel being placed behind the rear mast. Her foremast was at first 65 feet high, carrying a boom and large mainsail, and her mizzen-mast 39 feet, rigged with a boom. She has a spoon bow and a 15-foot overhang. … The ‘Agassiz’ began work in
In January 1917, Scripps sold the ship to Pacific Coast Trading and Shipping Company, which used her as a coastal trader along Mexico. In 1918 she was seized briefly by the American Yorktown as a suspected German raider, but she was soon released. In 1920 she ended her days by running aground at the entrance to San Francisco Bay.
Alexander Agassiz (the second) (1962--1976)
L 180 feet; B 32 feet; D 10 feet; CS 11 knots; R 3,600 miles; E 17 days. Crew 18; scientists 13. UC-owned.
This former Army freight and supply vessel (Army FS-208) was acquired by Scripps on 18 April 1962 from the State Educational Agency for Surplus Property.[*]
[*] The first ship acquired at this time was the FS-227, and plans were begun on conversion. The FS-208 became available and required less expensive conversion. The FS-227 then was acquired by Texas A & M and converted to research as R/V Alaminos.
She had been built in 1944 by Higgins in New Orleans, Louisiana. The name was selected through a campus contest, won by Elizabeth N. Shor, who was given the honor of signaling the unveiling of the new name plate at the dedication ceremony.This vessel was used primarily by the Marine Life Research program (see chapter 3). On 8 November 1976 she was sold to Marine Power and Equipment Company, Seattle, Washington, to be used as a crab-fishing vessel.
Alpha Helix (1966-)
L 133 feet; B 31 feet; D 10.5 feet, CS 11 knots; R 6,200
This biological research vessel was built by J. M. Martinac Shipbuilding Company, Tacoma, Washington, for the Physiological Research Laboratory (see chapter 8). After launching herself, she was christened by Susan (Mrs. Per) Scholander. She was acquired by the institution on 26 February 1966, with funds provided by the National Science Foundation. The ship is operated as a national facility for biological, especially physiological, research.
After considering several other names, Per F. Scholander named the ship for the helical configuration of proteins and genetic material.
Argo (1959--1970)
L 213 feet; B 39.5 feet; D 15 feet; CS 13 knots; R 8,000 miles; E 60 days. Crew 32; scientists 24. Navy-owned.
This former Navy rescue and salvage tug (U. S. S. Snatch, ARS-27) was built in 1944 by Basalt Rock Company, Napa, California, and was provided to Scripps by the U. S. Navy on 20 July 1959. Scripps returned the ship to the Navy on 11 June 1970.
The institution refused to accept the Navy's name, so it cut the red tape and named her Argo. The name given by Scripps was “after Jason's Argo that some 3,000 years ago sailed eastward from Greece in search of the golden fleece of Colchis — one of man's first explorations of the sea,” and also as a reminder of California's early explorers, the Argonauts.
Argo's maiden voyage for Scripps was marred by mechanical problems (see chapter 15, International Indian Ocean Expedition).
After the Navy took the ship back, she sat in mothballs in Vallejo, California, for some time; she was finally towed to Taiwan to be scrapped.
Buoy Boats
Scripps had several buoy boats and one or more picket boats at various times from the late 1940s to the 1960s, for nearshore work. Some were provided to the institution by the Navy for contracts. One buoy boat ended its career on 20 September 1953, while being towed by the Horizon with recording equipment in use; the log of the Horizon reads:
This weather is too rough to be towing an open boat with no automatic bilge pump or cockpits watertight. … Sea & swell are such that turning around is impossible. … Bouy [sic] boat in tow on 340 meters of wire, taking sounding every 15 min. … lights out on bouy [sic] boat but still in tow, headed for the beach. 0227 [hrs] tow line parted, in 550 fms water, approx position 29°--31'-45” N 115°--37'30” W. … Apparently one leg of Bridle let go causing buoy boat to broach to, thereby filling with water & sinking. Cable not of sufficient strength to tow buoy boat to shallow enough water for salvage operations.
Crest (1947--1956)
L 136 feet; B 24.5 feet; D 6 feet; CS 10 knots; R 4,000 miles; E 30 days. Crew 13; scientists 8. UC-owned.
This former harbor minesweeper was built by Associated Shipbuilders, Seattle, Washington, in 1944 for the U. S. Navy, which transferred her to Scripps Institution on 4 December 1947. The ship proved to need extensive overhaul, which was done in a shipyard in San Pedro. Her first work for Scripps began in January 1949. In May 1956 Scripps returned the ship to the Navy.
The Scripps name was chosen from a contest on campus, simultaneously with the Horizon. The winner was Alfreda Jo Nixon, who received ten dollars and a large photograph of the ship.
Dolphin (1973-)
L 96 feet; B 22 feet; D 7 feet; CS 12 knots; R 1,700 miles; E 6 days. Crew 5; scientists 7. UC-owned.
This twin-screw diesel yacht was built in 1968 by Breaux Baycraft, Inc., in Loreauville, Louisiana, and was given to Scripps Institution by Robert O. Peterson on 21 December 1973. Several Scripps staff members had used the vessel for research cruises as guests of Peterson before he donated her to Scripps. The name was given by Peterson.
Ellen Browning (1918)
The minutes of the board of directors of Scripps Institution for 17 September 1918 read: “Mr. Crandall stated that the Navy had commandeered the boat ‘Ellen Browning’ and had fixed a value of $3000 therefor. …” A bill of sale to the Navy, which accompanied the report, said: “This boat was built by W. C. Crandall, Business Manager of the Institution, and paid for out of funds provided by Edward W. Scripps for the joint use of said Institution and Edward W. Scripps.” A letter in 1931 by George F. McEwen referred to the “speedboat” Ellen Browning, “used [some years earlier] for making collections and observations at sea for the Scripps Institution.”
Ellen B. Scripps (1965-)
L 95 feet; B 24 feet; D 6 feet; CS 9 knots; R 6,480 miles; E 30 days. Crew 5; scientists 8. UC-owned.
This research ship, built to plans modified (especially with advice from George G. Shor, Jr., and Maxwell Silverman) from those for offshore oil-supply boats, was built by Halter Marine Services, New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1965. Scripps acquired her in August 1965 from Dantzler Boat and Barge Company (Pascagoula, Mississippi), on a one-year lease with option to buy, and then bought her. The vessel's distinctive feature is a large afterdeck on which
The name was given by George G. Shor, Jr., for the institution's early benefactress. The ship was dedicated on 1 October 1965, by Ellen Clark (Mrs. Roger) Revelle, grandniece of Ellen Browning Scripps. The dedication was on the same day as the dedication of Revelle College of UCSD.
E. W. Scripps (1937--1955)
L 93.7 to 104 feet (depending on method of measurement); B 21 feet; D 12 feet; CS 9 knots, or — under full sail and a stiff Santa Ana wind — 12 knots; R 2,000 miles. Crew 4; scientists 6. UC-owned.
This auxiliary schooner — the largest constructed on San Francisco Bay to that time — was built for racing and pleasure cruising by J. H. Madden and Son, Sausalito, in 1924 for Russell Clifford Durant, son of W. C. Durant (who founded General Motors). She was christened Black Swan; she was black in color and “palatially fitted” in teakwood and mahogany. The scantlings were of Oregon pine, apitong, Port Orford cedar, and teak.
The next owner was Irving T. Bush of New York. Then actor Lewis Stone, a star in Andy Hardy films, bought the schooner. She went through name changes to Aurora and Serena.
In 1937 Robert P. Scripps purchased Serena to give to Scripps Institution. According to John Lyman, the grateful staff decided to rename the ship E. W. Scripps, but the donor commented: “There's too much Scripps around La Jolla already.” So the name “Matthew F. Maury” was selected, but Robert P. Scripps then objected, as a loyal son, and the original choice was retained.
For research work the 100-foot masts were cut to 88 feet, diesel fuel tanks were added, two winches were
[*] During the conversion, according to Lyman, “about two dozen pairs of ladies' shoes were recovered from her bilges.”
[7] From 1938 to 1941, the ship was used a great deal for research cruises, including two expeditions to the Gulf of California (see chapter 2).During World War II the ship was borrowed by the U. S. Navy for use by the University of California Division of War Research. At that time the deckhouse laboratory was doubled in size and a new diesel engine was installed. “The additional speed and weight of the new engine greatly reduced her rolling and pitching, and she became decidedly more comfortable to work in, thus increasing the efficiency of the personnel by decreasing the effects of mal de mer.”[8]
After the war the ship required a major overhaul and was limited to fairly nearshore work. Her last cruise for Scripps was in April 1955, to the San Benito Islands.
Michael Todd bought the E. W. Scripps to use in the movie “Around the World in Eighty Days” (as the paddlewheel steamer Henrietta), and later she was bought by Walter S. Johnson, Jr., for Pacific island trade from Tahiti to Raratonga. Her name then was Tiare Maori. On 4 January 1961 in the slipway in Papeete — where she was up for sale — the ship caught fire. A fireboat from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (then filming “Mutiny on the Bounty”) pumped water on the ship until she foundered and sank in six fathoms of water.[9] Scripps personnel on Monsoon Expedition in Papeete in March 1961 recognized the masts of their old ship above the water line.
Flip (1962-)
L 355 feet; B 12.5--20 feet; D 13.7 feet horizontal; D 300 feet vertical; CS up to 11 knots when being towed horizontally; E 14 days. Crew 6; scientists 10. ONR-owned.
This manned ocean buoy, which can be raised to a vertical position by flooding the ballast tanks, is not a self-powered vessel. See chapter 4 for information on Flip and on some of the other unusual craft of the Marine Physical Laboratory. Flip was built by Gunderson Brothers Engineering Corporation, Portland, Oregon, in 1962, was christened by Sarah W. (Mrs. Fred N.) Spiess, and was acquired by Scripps Institution on 6 August of that year. The Office of Naval Research has contracted her to the Marine Physical Laboratory.
The name was given by MPL as an acronym for floating instrument platform.
Gianna (1973-)
L 55.5 feet; B 14.3 feet; D 3.5 feet; CS 16 knots; R 480 miles; E 2.5 days. Crew 2; scientists 4. UC-owned.
This diesel pleasure cruiser was built by Cantiere Navale di Chiavari in Italy in 1969 for Howard B. Lawson of Newport Beach, California, who gave her to Scripps Institution on 27 December 1973. She was named by Lawson for the Italian version of his wife's name, Jane.
The Golden One (1962--1963)
L 38 feet; B 11 feet; D 3 feet. UC-owned.
This boat, built in 1930 by Matthews Boat Company, Port Clinton, Ohio, was given to Scripps by Elmer Bernstein of Los Angeles in December 1962; she was not put into use by the institution and was sold to Charles Watson of San Diego in August 1963.
Horizon (1948--1969)
L 143 feet; B 33 feet; D 13.5 feet; CS 11.5 knots; R 6,800 miles; E 48 days. Crew 19; scientists 16. UC-owned.
This formerly Navy-owned ocean tug (ATA 180) was built in 1944 by Levingston Shipbuilding Company, Orange,
The name was given following a contest on campus, simultaneously with the Crest. The winner was J. F. T. (“Ted”) Saur, who recalls that he won ten dollars and a drawing of the ship.
The Horizon, said H. William Menard, “was small and not above reproach. … People liked Horizon and she was always, as far as I know, a happy ship. Perhaps for that reason the charts now record Horizon Guyot in the central Pacific, from which were dredged some of the oldest rocks yet found in the ocean basins; Horizon Depth, which is the second deepest place in the ocean; Horizon Channel, in the floor of a flat plain in the Gulf of Alaska, and Horizon Bank, a drowned atoll east of the New Hebrides Islands in the southeastern Pacific. Few other ships have been so honored.”[10]
Scripps sold Horizon on 5 September 1969 to Pacific Towboat and Salvage Company in Long Beach. A later owner offered some of the ship's equipment to the institution, which re-purchased the A-frame and other items at scrap prices. In 1975 she was still in use in San Diego, owned by California Molasses Company.
Hugh M. Smith (1959--1963)
L 128 feet; B 29 feet; D 14 feet; CS 9 knots; R 10,000 miles; E 45 days. Crew 14; scientists 8. USFWS-owned.
This yacht (YP-635), built in 1945, was borrowed from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by Scripps Institution from 23 June 1959 until 4 November 1963, chiefly to replace the Stranger during the two-year Naga Expedition. The name honored Hugh McCormick Smith (1865--1941), who served as U.S. Commissioner of Fisheries from 1913 to 1922.
When Scripps gave up the ship, the governor of American Samoa requested her, and former Scripps captain Marvin Hopkins delivered the ship to Pago Pago. She operated from there for several years.
Macrocystis (1958--1964)
L 22.7 feet; B 8 feet; D 1.8 feet; CS 20 knots; R 75 miles. Crew and scientists 2. UC-owned.
This boat was built by Jeffries Boat Company, Venice, California, in 1958 for the kelp project of the Institute of Marine Resources (see chapter 6), and was named for the giant kelp. In November 1964 she was sold to LaRoy B. Wickline of San Diego.
Melville (1969-)
L 245 feet; B 46 feet; D 15 feet; CS 12 knots; R 9,840 miles; E 41 days. Crew 25; scientists 25. Navy-owned.
This research vessel, designated AGOR-14 (Auxiliary General Oceanography Research) by the Navy, was built at the Defoe Shipbuilding Company in Bay City, Michigan, in 1969, for research use by the Scripps Institution, which received her on 2 September 1969. She is distinguished by two vertically mounted, multi-bladed, cycloidal propellers, which enable her to move forward, backward, sideways, and around her own axis.
The name was given for Rear Admiral George Wallace Melville (1841--1912), engineer in chief of the U.S. Navy, who participated in three Arctic voyages, and was a contributor to improved equipment on Navy ships.
Oconostota (1962--1974)
L 100 feet; B 25 feet; D 10.5 feet; CS 11 knots; R 4,500 miles; E 16 days. Crew 8, scientists 6. Navy-owned.
This former harbor tug (YTB-375, later YTM-375) was built by Gulfport Boiler and Welding Works, Port Arthur,
The name was given by the Navy for Cherokee Indian chief Oconostota, who in colonial days was first friendly with the British but later allied with the French.
Orca (1956--1962)
L 100 feet; B 23 feet; D 7.5 feet; CS 8.5 knots; R 3,000 miles; E 18 days. Crew 7, scientists 9. UC-owned.
This one-time Coast Guard patrol vessel (YP42), built in 1926 by Defoe Boat Building Company in Bay City, Michigan, was bought by Scripps Institution in June 1956 from the J. W. Sefton Foundation. Scripps sold her to Murphy Marine Service, San Diego, in October 1962. Texas A & M later used her for research work. J. W. Sefton had named her for the killer whale.
Paolina-T (1948--1965)
L 80 feet; B 22 feet; D 9.7 feet; CS 8.5 knots; R 2,450 miles; E 30 days. Crew 9, scientists 5. Navy-owned.
This purse seiner was built in 1944 at the Colberg Boat Works, Stockton, California, and was purchased through Navy funds by Scripps Institution from fishermen brothers Michele and Guiseppe Torrente on 15 June 1948. Scripps returned her to the Navy on 17 March 1965. In 1975 she was under private ownership in the Monterey Bay area, with the name New San Joseph.
The original name was given by the Torrentes. In 1952 a campus contest was held to rename the Paolina-T and the newly acquired Spencer F. Baird, in order to release the latter name to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Three
Red Lion (1959--1963)
This 22-foot gasoline-powered launch was given to Scripps Institution by Dr. C. C. Curtis in January 1959, but was never put into use by the institution. In February 1963 she was given to Escuela Superior de Ciencias Marinas in Ensenada and was delivered to them aboard the Alexander Agassiz while en route to Cabo San Lucas.
ST-908 (1961--1973)
L 45 feet; B 12.5 feet; D 5 feet; CS 9 knots; R 655 miles; E 4 days. Crew 2; scientists 3. UC-owned.
This former Army harbor tug was built in 1945 by Burger Boat Company in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and was acquired by Scripps in 1961 through the State Educational Agency for Surplus Property, at the same time as the Alexander Agassiz. From 1973 until 1976 she was loaned to Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, which called her Artemia. In August 1976, she was sold to William H. Richter of San Diego.
Scripps (1925--1936)
L 64 feet; B 15 feet; D 6.7 feet. Crew and scientists 10. UC-owned.
This purse seiner, then named Thaddeus, was bought by Scripps Institution in September 1925, and was renamed Scripps. The following year she was painted University of California colors: a blue hull with gold stripes.
On 13 November 1936 an explosion and fire in the boat sank her at the dock. Living aboard were the captain, Murdock G. Ross, and the cook, Henry Ball. Ball died of his injuries a week later, and Ross never fully recovered. The salvaged hull was later put into use as a garbage scow, and Director Sverdrup asked the owner to change the name, which he did, to Abraham Lincoln. (For additional information, see Raitt and Moulton.[11])
Spencer F. Baird (1951--1965)
L 143 feet; B 33 feet; D 13.5 feet; CS 11.5 knots; R 6,800 miles; E 48 days. Crew 20, scientists 15. Navy-owned.
This former Army tug (LT-581) was acquired by Scripps from the U.S. Maritime Commission in August 1951. The Baird, as she was usually called, and the Horizon often sailed together on two-ship expeditions, and a certain amount of rivalry developed at times. The ship was returned to the Maritime Commission in October 1965. She was later in use by the Vietnamese government, under the name Tien Sa.
Her name had been given by the Navy for the outstanding naturalist, Spencer Fullerton Baird (1823--1887), who was the first director of the U.S. Fish Commission (see Paolina-T). The ship had been used as a research vessel by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prior to being acquired by Scripps.
Stranger (1955--1965)
L 134 feet; B 24 feet; D 14.5 feet; CS 12 knots; R 6,000 miles; E 40 days. Crew 14, scientists 10. UC-owned.
This yacht was built in 1938 by the Lake Union Dry
Those who rode the Stranger on trips to the Gulf of Alaska in 1956 and 1961 were not favorably impressed with her stability. Alan C. Jones commented after three weeks of Chinook Expedition in 1956:
The crew finally managed to untie the knots that held us in San Diego, and away we rolled in the great yacht. Twasn't long before BTs, oscillators, and roast pork were flying all over, especially in the living room.
Two days later a few of the Stranger Rangers emerged from the basement to become lounge lizards on the sun porch. By the fourth day all were recovered from the strange ailment that hit almost everyone off Point Concepcion.
…Ah yes, it's hard to beat this gracious living out aboard a yacht. The gentle motion (rolling up to and including 52 degrees![*]
[*] Once during this expedition a roll of 58 degrees was registered.
), the attractive, spacious living room (if one is really determined he can crawl through the maze of wires and tubes that completely fill the― 369 ―labs!), and the delicious meals expertly cooked to please the slightest whim of the happy tourist. (I've been trying for three weeks to get a soft boiled egg.)…One fine, moonlightless night the Stranger inmates had to scramble up the walls (or was it down?) to avoid being battered by flying objects when the yacht decided to lie on its side for a while. We were glad the yacht wasn't in the trough of the waves because the sun porch might have gotten damper than it did.[13]
In all fairness to the Stranger, her performance on Naga Expedition in the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea was very good (see chapter 15).
From 1941 to 1947 the ship was used by the University of California Division of War Research, under the name U.S.S. Jasper (PYC-13). Scripps Institution acquired the ship as a gift from N. A. Kessler on 22 April 1955, and on 9 March 1965 sold her to Charles H. Briley of Newport Beach, California. She was later in use by Teledyne Corporation and for them revisited Thailand. In 1976 she was operating as a cruise ship under the name Explorer.
T-441 (1955--1969)
L 65.6 feet; B 18 feet; D 6 feet; CS 10.5 knots; R 1,830 miles; E 5 days. Crew 5, scientists 4. Navy-owned.
This former Army cargo and passenger T-boat was built in 1953 by National Steel and Shipbuilding Corporation, San Diego, and was provided by the Army to Scripps Institution on 23 March 1955. Scripps gave her up on 20 August 1969, and the Navy provided her to the University of Connecticut.
Thomas Washington (1965-)
L 209 feet; B 39 feet; D 13.7 feet; CS 12 knots; R 10,000 miles; E 29 days. Crew 25, scientists 17. Navy-owned.
This AGOR-10 (Auxiliary General Oceanography Research) was built in 1965 by Marinette Marine Corporation, Marinette, Wisconsin, and was provided by the Navy to Scripps Institution on 29 September 1965. The Washington and her sister ship Thomas Thompson (of the University of Washington) had considerable engine problems during the first few years and had to operate at very reduced speeds until new engines were installed.
The name was given by the Navy for Admiral Thomas Washington, Navy Hydrographer from 1914 to 1916, “who served with distinction in the Navy for 40 years before his retirement in 1929.”
Utility Boat (1959-)
L 32 feet; B 13.5 feet; D 3.5 feet; R 200 miles; E 1 day. Crew and scientists 2. Navy-owned.
This small vessel, built by Jeffries Boat Company, Venice, California, was requested by H. William Menard as a workboat on the Argo, when that ship was being converted for oceanographic work in 1959. The boat was used to some extent as a “second ship” for seismic work with the Argo but proved of limited use in open ocean work. She was kept for nearshore work, chiefly by the diving program, after the Argo was returned to the Navy.
Some tried to call this boat the Argonaut, but the name has never caught on.
Most of the fleet home for Christmas in 1974, at the then-new dock of Nimitz Marine Facilities. Counterclockwise from left: Flip, Alpha Helix, David Starr Jordan of the National Marine Fisheries Service, the barge ORB (at end of dock), Alexander Agassiz, Melville. Angled behind Melville are Oconostota, Ellen B. Scripps, Dolphin. Not present are Thomas Washington and Gianna.
NOTES
1. “Proposed Development of Marine Biology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography,” proposal to Rockefeller Foundation, 15 August 1953, Appendix III.
2. Memorandum to staff, 22 December 1950.
3. “Odyssey of the Argo,” Oceans, Vol. II, Nos. 3 and 4 (September-October 1969), 28.
4. Manuscript, “MIDPAC — The First Big Step,” 17 August 1975, 7.
5. Memorandum to Carl Eckart, 20 April 1949.
6. In William E. Ritter, “The Marine Biological Station of San Diego; its History, Present Conditions, Achievements, and Aims,” University of California Publications in Zoology, 9 (9 March 1912), 176.
7. E. G. Moberg and J. Lyman, “The ‘E. W. Scripps,’ ” Records of Observations, SIO, Vol. I, No. 1 (July 1942).
8. Completion Report of UCDWR, 1946, 163.
9. Pacific Islands Monthly, Vol. 29, No. 6 (January 1959), 108.
10. “The Research Ship Horizon,” SIO Reference 74--3 (1974), 1.
11. Helen Raitt and Beatrice Moulton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography: First Fifty Years (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1967), 121--22.
12. Letter to Elizabeth N. Shor, 30 January 1974.
13. Letter of July 1956.
XV. Oceanography is Fun:
A Glimpse of the Expeditions
Scripps ships and trips depart so frequently and so far afield nowadays that it is next to impossible to keep track of them. That hasn't always been so.
In the early 1950s each expedition departure (except a few classified ones) drew a crowd of Scripps people and several reporters to the dock, and the arrival was equally hailed. Each trip had its “first”: a new region, a new kind of equipment, a new discovery.[*]
[*] Some of the expeditions created personal complications, which I feel obliged to omit — even though some of them were very much part of Scripps history.
“All these cruises,” said Revelle, “had essentially the same purpose: they were voyages of discovery in which new instruments for oceanographic exploration were pitted against the vast unknown of the Pacific Ocean.”[1]Exploration was only an excuse. After all, as Revelle also said:
Oceanographers are not such a serious-minded lot that they keep asking themselves why they are doing their job. The spiritual ancestor of most of them was
― 374 ―Ulysses. He was called the Wanderer, because he was the first to venture into the River Ocean, out of the salt and fishy Sea-between-the-Land, the wine-dark Mediterranean. Perhaps he disliked administration, hated farming, and was bored by Penelope. In any case, Ulysses managed to spend a great deal of time away from home. He never stated his reasons very clearly, but he still lives in the hearts of oceanographers.[2]
The spiritual descendants of Ulysses who found their sea legs just after World War II were a special breed. Many had seen Navy or Marine Corps service. Some had taken wartime courses in meteorology or radar or electronics. They were a bit suspicious of sophisticated “black-box” instruments, certain that they knew a better way to do the job, and eager to try. Their motto became: “Why couldn't we do it this way?”
At sea they gathered records and samples and specimens for science; ashore they gathered kava bowls, tapa cloths, cowry necklaces, vicuña rugs, carvings, “antiquities” — and memories.
Among similar institutions, Scripps has the advantage of having selected as its bailiwick the “south seas,” the ocean that holds the tropical islands “which lie like carelessly tossed necklaces on the velvet sea.”[3]
A few days of snorkeling on the reef of a deserted atoll in the Tuamotus [wrote H. William Menard]; a boat ride through basking sea turtles in the Revilla Gigedos; a stop at Robinson Crusoe's cave on Más a Tierra (now Isla Róbinson Crusoe), a climb on a giant stone image on Easter Island — these are not everyday pleasures, and so cherished more.
― 375 ―A cordial meeting on Ocean Island during Capricorn Expedition in 1952--53.
…I have stepped, waded, and swum ashore from a Horizon smallboat to many a beautiful, tropical
― 376 ―island — named but virtually unknown to the outside world. At Ocean Island we joined in a happy Micronesian wedding. At Lifuka we saw Polynesians riding horses through the surf as in a Gauguin painting. At Nuku Hiva we walked through the silent valley of Typee, made famous by Melville when it teemed with cannibals. At Vanua Mbalavu we saw the grass walks being swept clean of leaves each dawn.[4]
Harris B. Stewart, then a graduate student, waxed lyrical over Tonga:
Christmas dinner we had on the beach with two Tongan families. … A lei about my neck, a drinking cocoanut before me, a slice of breadfruit in one hand and a slice of pineapple in the other (the only way to eat breadfruit, a bite of one and a bite of the other), and a young native girl using a cocoanut palm frond to wave away the flies, warm sun filtering through the acacia trees above us, and the incessant booming of the surf on the barrier reef some 200 yards offshore, this was really living — oceanography at its best.[5]
Remote ports became collectors' items. Honolulu, for example, is only considered romantic by wives and girl friends who have never been there, but Hilo is somewhat novel. Before Mutiny on the Bounty was filmed in Tahiti (during which time, and since, swarms of visitors introduced alien customs into that charming land), Papeete was the port. Expedition planners pointed out, with a grin, that it was the only port in the south-central Pacific where fuel was available. Rapa Island was considered a high point, although the party on the Horizon, which wasn't even supposed to get there, didn't see much of the island, as the ship caught on an uncharted coral head on the way up the
[*] The motto of the local radio station.
(“cool” being barely above freezing); but not everyone yearns to visit Adak “National Forest” in the invariable fog — and the pine trees, planted by military personnel, are only five feet high. The few who have been to Pitcairn Island can always draw a respectful pause in maritime conversation by merely mentioning it. The Galápagos Islands are a favorite stop for readers of Charles Darwin. Easter Island is held worthy of a detour. Scripps ships found Port Victoria in the Seychelles before the tourists did.To a certain extent Scripps people feel that the entire Pacific basin — one-half the surface area of the world — is their domain. Sotto voce they sometimes mutter, “What are they doing in our ocean?” when they hear of an east-coast oceanographic vessel heading into the Pacific. When long-time Scrippsian Warren Wooster was departing to become director of the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences in 1973, he was presented with an ornate scroll that ended with the hope that he would find happiness in Miami, “in spite of being three thousand miles away from The Ocean.”
Scripps certainly has no monopoly on sunsets at sea, but Scrippsians enjoy them as much as do other sea rovers. Would-be poet Harris B. Stewart on Capricorn Expedition wrote of “another glorious sunset as the plug was pulled along the western horizon and all the light and color drained from the sky.” Fifteen years later Baron Thomas recorded in his log a sunset that was “enough to make a sailor out of any confirmed landsman as it was magnificently enhanced by the dark blue shades of the Sea as the day's last shimmering light was cast through each swell.” One crew member
[*] This veteran radioed from a summer trip through the Kamchatka Basin that “magenta sunrises at 0200 are a tourist must.”
Sunset hour is the relaxed time of day aboard ship. Shortly after supper, people start arriving on the fantail, one or two at a time, for a smoke or a cup of coffee, visiting quietly and gazing at the kaleidoscope of sky and sea. No photograph or string of words can capture those sunsets, because neither can encompass the entire sky or the gamut of nostalgia that makes a sunset at sea so special to each person.
Some at Scripps call them sea trips, others say cruises. Officially they are expeditions. Their purpose is to solve the mysteries of the deep. According to Willard Bascom, Roger Revelle liked to say, “You must go to the sea with a question.”[6] Robert L. Fisher said, “At sea you are betting that you and your people can get an answer. There's no better satisfaction.”
So expeditions have sailed from Scripps with questions and have come back with answers — and with more questions to be resolved another day. All have had their successes, their frustrations, and their sea stories. Memories of them are as kaleidoscopic as sunsets, and are enhanced by the distance of time.
Completing a net haul at sunset on Tasaday Expedition in 1974. Photo by Elizabeth Venrick.
When was the first Scripps expedition? In a way, it was three-quarters of a century ago, when some of the staff members took short trips on the yacht Loma that was owned by E. W. Scripps. A trip to the offshore islands then was an expedition, and an experience. In the 1930s T. Wayland Vaughan hoped to draw Scripps Institution into exploring the entire Pacific Ocean. His successor, Harald U. Sverdrup, was finally able to begin that exploration,
Operation Crossroads was a military project to test the effects of atomic bombs against naval vessels and to determine the environmental impact of the explosion on Bikini Island in Micronesia. The aim of the team of one thousand biologists, geologists, oceanographers, and technicians was “to carry out an integrated investigation of all aspects of the natural environment within and around the atoll: the currents and other properties of the ocean and lagoon waters, the surface geology, the identity, distribution, and abundance of living creatures, and the equilibrium relationships among all these.”[7]
Roger Revelle was the officer in charge of oceanographic studies, called at the time “the most complicated laboratory experiment ever undertaken.” Much later Revelle wrote: “The results, combined with those of later investigations in 1947 and following years, gave the clearest, most detailed pictures of an atoll and its flora and fauna that we possess, even today.”[8] He went on:
In order to make the tests as comprehensive as possible, Admiral [W. H. P.] Blandy and his technical assistant, Rear Admiral William S. Parsons, agreed that we should try to learn as much as we could about the possible effects of the bombs on the ecology and geology of the atoll. We also wanted to learn about the waves that would be produced by the air and underwater explosions and about the dispersion of radioactive materials in the lagoon and ocean waters.
Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, the Fish and Wildlife Service, government laboratories,
― 381 ―Scripps, Woods Hole, and the Universities of Michigan, Southern California, Washington and California joined the effort. An ancient hydrographic survey ship, USS BOWDITCH, was assigned to the task of making a pretest geological, biological, and oceanographic survey.[After the Bowditch had sailed, the historian of the project noted: “The entire country, because of the demands of this group and the radiological group, is now largely drained of oceanographic equipment and personnel since oceanography as a small prewar specialty has not had time to catch up with the demands put upon it by wartime developments.”[9]]
Three high photographic towers were constructed on Bikini Island [continued Revelle] to take time-sequence photographs of the waves, and heavily cased, wave-pressure recording devices built to withstand very high shock pressures, which we called ‘turtles,’ were planted on the lagoon bottom throughout the array of target vessels.
The theory of explosion-generated waves in shallow water was unsatisfactory, and in order to learn what to expect, we carried out a series of model studies in Chesapeake Bay, using various amounts of TNT. We also made seismic refraction and reflection measurements of the depth of the coral and the nature of the material beneath the atoll.
…The waves from the underwater explosion were about what we had predicted from our model studies, producing 12-foot high surf on Bikini Island. But completely unexpected was the behavior of the giant jet of foaming seawater that shot a mile into the air, and then fell back in a huge, doughnut-shaped mass of spray nearly 1,000 feet high which rapidly spread out and enveloped the entire array of target ships. The initial outward velocity of this ‘base surge’ was so great
― 382 ―that for a few moments we thought it was the water wave produced by the explosion, and that it would break right over the rim of the atoll.
Scripps scientists were well represented in this cooperative study, and some close associations were formed with other institutions. In the spring of 1947 Revelle directed a resurvey of Bikini Atoll for the Joint Operation Crossroads Committee of the Department of Defense. This was intended primarily to determine delayed or long-term effects of the underwater nuclear explosion. As a separate project at that time, several deep holes were drilled on Bikini Island, under the direction of the U.S. Geological Survey, to try to determine the geologic history of a coral atoll.
Revelle returned to the institution from his Navy service in the summer of 1948, and was soon gazing beyond the California Current that was under scrutiny by the Marine Life Research program. So little was known, so much was possible at Scripps with a fleet of ships, research money, and new equipment.
MIDPAC
So, in the fall of 1949 Revelle proposed the University of California Mid-Pacific Expedition:
By contrast to the Atlantic, the central and eastern Pacific is almost unexplored from a modern scientific point of view, but sufficient is known to indicate the existence of problems, the solution of which would be of the greatest importance in understanding the history of the earth.[10]
Revelle may have been thinking of the expedition by the Atlantis of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in
The plans expanded to include the Navy Electronics Laboratory and its Navy-operated ship, PCE(R)-857, thereby allowing for seismic-refraction studies which require two ships, and other programs. The Institute of Geophysics at UCLA also provided support. Letters and memos proliferated.
Midpac, Scripps Institution's first major postwar expedition (with a nod to the steadily continuing CalCOFI monthly cruises of that time), probably led to the custom of naming expeditions. In a typically brief memo for typically efficient reasons, Finn W. Outler, technical superintendent of the Marine Physical Laboratory, wrote to Revelle: “In order to save several reams of paper, a few typewriter ribbons and many hours of clerical time, I suggest we adopt ‘OPERATION MIDPEX’ in lieu of ‘JOINT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA — U.S. NAVY ELECTRONICS LABORATORY MID-PACIFIC EXPEDITION.”’ Revelle answered: “How about MIDPAC to distinguish from other things already in existence?”
The Scripps custom of naming expeditions is unique among oceanographic institutions. Nautical phrases (Shellback, Downwind) and regional winds (Chubasco) — or the lack of them (Doldrums) — have dominated the list, but some prefer Greek mythology (Tethys, Amphitrite) or plain whimsy (Northern Holiday, Swan Song). The custom leads to confusion among the uninitiated, who are baffled to hear, “When I was in Lahaina on Show…” or “When I was out on Limbo. …”
With James L. Faughn as captain, the Horizon sailed away on Midpac Expedition on 27 July 1950, after a delay for engine repairs. She carried nineteen in the scientific party, and the 857, under the command of Lt. Comdr. D. J. McMillan, carried thirteen, of whom three were from
“Nick” Carter manned the radio shack on Horizon, and Revelle helped keep him busy relaying the shipboard news back home. The first report was on 14 August:
…We have found that exploring the ocean floor by any method in water three miles deep with current velocities up to two knots and winds up to thirty-five miles an hour is no picnic. But we are getting pretty well shaken down into an efficient working system. … We have a daily newspaper complete with cartoons. Movies in the evening and good radio communications, so we are not completely out of touch with the great world. Chow is plentiful and good, supplemented by an occasional albacore or dolphin.[*]
[*] This would be the dolphinfish (Coryphaena hippurus), called mahimahi by Hawaiians, not the marine mammal, the dolphin.
…
In about a month the explorers reached Honolulu, where, said Revelle in the next shipboard message, “the whole atmosphere in the islands was so delightful and relaxing that we found it difficult to remember the urgency of getting back to sea again. Almost everyone blossomed out in a bright-colored Hawaiian shirt, and nooks and crannies all over the ship are stuffed with Hawaiian things to be taken back to the families at home.” (Thus began another Scripps custom, that has been followed on many a voyage to many an island; Scripps homes abound in “native crafts.”)
The 857, in fact, did not remember the urgency of getting back to sea, and was detained in Honolulu for repairs to the clutch. (Many of the families of the Navy crew members of the 857 met the sailors in Honolulu, and
Without pausing to await their companion, the scientific party on the Horizon set out to explore the 50,000-square-mile area from 700 to 1,050 miles west of Hawaii, and from 18 to 20 degrees north, throughout which they ran sounding lines at right angles to the regular shipping tracks. On 9 September they proudly announced the discovery of a new mountain range, the Mid-Pacific Mountains:
…a great elongated mountain range extending in a northeasterly direction towards Necker Island in the Hawaiian chain and some sixty miles wide. These MidPac mountains are dominated by a scarp on the southern side averaging a mile high and sloping downward toward the deep Pacific floor south of the mountain range at an average angle of about six degrees. … In one basin Jeff Frautschy's corer showed alternating layers of globigerina ooze and red clay overlying a well-sorted sandy gravel with rounded pebbles of volcanic rock. Seismic reflection measurements by Russ Raitt indicate a sediment thickness in these basins of about 1300 to 2200 feet. [James M.] Snodgrass and [Arthur E.] Maxwell find that the temperature appears to increase with depth in the sediment about one degree Fahrenheit per twenty-five feet. We are now surveying a flat topped sea mount 920 fathoms deep near the southwestern end of the range. Our first dredge haul on this sea mount, skillfully supervised by Bob Dietz, brought up fragments of shallow water limestone to all appearances like the beach rock at high tide level near Kaneohe or Bikini. … For the moment
― 386 ―our big winch, appropriately nicknamed Massey's[*][*] John Massey was the ship's chief engineer.
Tinker Toy, is behaving reasonably well. … We are all gratified that we have such consistently excellent radio communications through WWD, thanks to Frank Berberich and Nick Carter. It helps to bring a small feeling of home to this otherwise lonely ocean. All on board are well and as happy as can be expected this far from home. …
The 857, also working en route after its delayed departure from Honolulu, caught up with the Horizon, and both ships continued on to Bikini for a seismic-refraction profile of that atoll and of nearby Sylvania Seamount, as a followup of Operation Crossroads. They then sailed on to Kwajalein, from where Revelle and eleven others returned home by airplane, and Raitt took over to continue seismic-refraction profiles. Although much disappointed at not finding the explosives he had been promised at Kwajalein, Raitt was able to complete almost all of the planned survey of the atoll with explosives supplied by the Navy base there. While the seismic work was being done near Bikini and Kwajalein, field parties camped ashore for chemical and geological studies. Raitt and Dietz flew home from Kwajalein on the second port call there, and the ships turned homeward, sailing by sun and star. For the Navy's air-sea rescue system, they regularly set off four-pound Sofar bombs, one of which discharged by the Horizon provided a distance record for propagation of underwater sound of 3,500 miles and was called “the shot heard round the Pacific.”
Captain Faughn kept home base up to date on their progress. On 16 October he sent word to Revelle:
Crossed 180th meridian at noon today. … Everything going well and everybody happy to be on God's
― 387 ―side of the time meridian X Do you want to join the anchor pool[*][*] A wager as to when the ship will drop anchor at the dock.
and if so, what is your best E.T.A.?[**][**] An abbreviation that an oceanographer's wife learns early: estimated time of arrival.
X Passed our first ship in the night, quite a friendly sight.
Revelle guessed 26 October at 2359 hours for the anchor pool, but he was overly optimistic, for the Horizon pulled in on 28 October. The 857 arrived six days later. Science writer Andrew Hamilton found the “pair of salt-encrusted vessels” at the dock:
Not substantially larger than Magellan's Trinidada and Vittorio, the little ships were loaded to the scuppers with statistic-filled notebooks, newly-drawn charts and graphs, slim, plastic tubes of mud, odd pieces of rock, coral and fossilized shells, hundreds of bottles of seawater and pickled fish, and an assortment of bent and battered scientific gear that would delight any junk dealer.[11]
The scientists had already been counting their accomplishments. The Mid-Pacific Mountains were the most dramatic discovery, although not completely unexpected. Before the expedition H. William Menard and Robert S. Dietz (then both with the Navy Electronics Laboratory) had plotted the many known guyots and shoal spots within the area to be surveyed, but not until the Horizon zigzagged across the area with a continuous echo-sounder did the vast extent and continuity of the geological feature become known.
Menard was pleased to have confirmed his guess that the Mendocino Escarpment — a submerged cliff half a mile high
With their improved Kullenberg corer, the geologists had acquired ten cores up to 24 feet long from as deep as 2,800 fathoms, and they retrieved a number of shorter cores with the gravity corer, but problems with the big winch on the Horizon prevented the taking of really long cores. “We used to bet a bottle of beer[*]
[*] Scripps ships carried beer at that time, were “dry” for many years, and since 1971 have carried beer and wine.
on what we would find in any particular core,” wrote Revelle to Edward Bullard; “the chances always seemed about even that we would get globigerina ooze, red clay, volcanic ash or various modifications and combinations of these.”[12]Raitt's seismic-refraction profiles near the atolls provided strong evidence that such features are indeed coral reefs around volcanoes. These profiles, in combination with similar work done earlier on Project Crossroads, and with drilling done by the Atomic Energy Commission and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in 1950--52, verified the existence of lava beneath the coral, and so provided the final proof of Darwin's theory of the origin of coral atolls as volcanic peaks that had slowly submerged. Raitt also gained a thousand miles of seismic-refraction profiles in the deep ocean. Previous calculations had indicated that at least two miles of sediments should have accumulated over the millenia. But the seismic work indicated that only 1,000
An improved underwater camera, designed and manned by Carl Shipek of the Navy Electronics Laboratory, provided photos of the remote sea floor 20,000 feet down that showed ripple marks presumed to be from previously unsuspected deep currents. A borrowed geomagnetic electrokinetograph — nicknamed the “jog log” because it required right-angle measurements, hence jogging, by the ship — provided surface-current measurements that showed eddies instead of the presumed straight-line currents toward the equatorial region. Meteorologists sent radio-equipped balloons 100,000 feet into the air and found the weather there as variable as that which surrounded them.
The biologists found the equatorial waters rich in plankton, and noted the great numbers of fish and squid that darted into the light of lanterns hung over the side at night. They collected hatchetfishes, with rows of night-sparkling photophores along their sides, and other midwater creatures.
Richard Morita found surprising life elsewhere: bacteria, in a state of suspended animation, from cores taken from the bottom 9,000 feet down, which, when brought to “normal” atmospheric pressures, began to grow rapidly. He kept these alive aboard ship, and Claude ZoBell continued to culture them in a specially developed pressure chamber at Scripps after the expedition.[*]
[*] Biologists haven't quite forgiven Revelle for the “beer incident” on Midpac. He removed some of Morita's bacteria samples from the refrigerator in order to cool the beer. Morita naturally protested, to which Revelle replied, “Young man, you must realize that there are times when beer is more important than biology.”
In moments of whimsy the oceanographers taped eggs to the hydrographic wire and lowered them as deep as a mile and a half; the eggs returned to the surface unbroken — but scrambled inside. Oranges similarly treated, and
A historic first on Midpac was measuring the flow of heat through the ocean floor.[*]
[*] Scientists on the Swedish Deep Sea Expedition in 1947 and 1948 had tried for such measurements, but succeeded in getting only two they considered reliable. Bullard believes that they probably measured only the warming of the probe by friction, especially as they jiggled the instrument up and down to prevent it from becoming stuck.
It was the climax of a long-term aspiration of Edward (“Teddy”) Bullard, then professor of physics at the University of Toronto, who spent the summer of 1949 as a visitor at Scripps. He had been seeking the use of a research ship with a suitable winch, and this he found at Scripps. Engineer James M. Snodgrass and graduate student Arthur E. Maxwell joined the project, and, using the facilities of the Scripps workshop and their own hands, the three fashioned a device for measuring temperature gradient, following Bullard's design — in spite of much contrary advice from kibitzers.The heat-flow instrument devised that summer was a “very clumsy apparatus … thoroughly old-fashioned,” according to Bullard, who said that he preferred to depend upon known equipment: galvanometers from the British Admiralty, “which were very robust,” photographic recording, thermocouples, standard reversing switches, and “no electronics.” The probe consisted of a thick, hollow steel tube about fifteen feet long, plus a recording chamber with a galvanometer to measure temperature differences between the thermocouples. As an innovation, the unit was made watertight with 0-rings, which proved very effective.
James M. Snodgrass (left) and Arthur E. Maxwell straightening the heat probe after a lowering on Midpac Expedition, 1950.
The first tests were made from a platform — “a sort of gallows,” said Bullard, built in the marsh at Mission Bay. These demonstrated that the long probe would indeed penetrate mud to its full length. But the allotted time was
Maxwell modified and rebuilt the original instrument and joined Midpac Expedition in the summer of 1950. Time after time the clumsy device was lowered laboriously to the sea floor, where its own weight drove the long probe into the sediments. It was then left in place for half an hour to dissipate the heat of friction from its plunge into the mud. Invariably, the probe returned to the surface with a sharp curve from the pull of the cable while the instrument was in place, but the probe could be straightened and used repeatedly. At each station a sediment core was also taken so that the thermal conductivity of the material could be determined in the laboratory.
We managed to get at least seven good measurements of temperature gradients in the bottom muds [wrote Revelle to Bullard]. All but one of these indicate a gradient around 0.12° C per meter. If your conductivity estimates can be used, this means that the heat flow from the sea floor is the same as that from the continents. To me, at least, this is a very surprising result, but apparently you slyly suspected it all along. … In any case, it is obvious that measurements of this type are of great interest and should be made in many different parts of the oceans. They are not at all easy to do, however, and much credit is due Jim Snodgrass, John Isaacs and Arthur Maxwell for successfully pushing them through this summer.[13]
News releases about Midpac Expedition brought prompt response from feature writers and from an inquisitive public. Revelle answered many of the letters, for he believed that “if the story of such expeditions is properly told it cannot help but quicken the imagination of the people of California and increase their understanding of the need for further work of this kind.”[14] He admitted to being “most anxious to convince the people of California, and particularly the Regents of the University, that one of the proper functions of this Institution should be to explore the entire Pacific Ocean.” He was a true disciple of Harald Sverdrup.
So Revelle and others who had sailed on Midpac Expedition spoke to scientific and civic groups far and wide, and provided information to many a magazine writer. They patiently replied, too, to the disciples of Colonel James Churchward, who believed in a lost continent of Mu. This vast land was supposed to have occupied much of the central Pacific Ocean and to have been inhabited by 64 million people in “fine large cities at the mouths of mighty rivers.” The Lemurian Fellowship, located near San Diego, was established on a belief in Mu, which the members feel was destroyed by “one grand cataclysm” 26,000 years ago. Revelle refuted the Mu enthusiasts by pointing out that fossils dredged from the Mid-Pacific Mountains were of reef animals that had become extinct 30 to 40 million years before, not of the remains of an early civilization. He gave a similar reply to believers in Atlantis, who were even placing it in the wrong ocean.
Oceanography had reached a new high, Revelle felt, as he wrote to Louis Slichter, director of the Institute of Geophysics at UCLA, which had also provided funds for Midpac:
In general I feel that the summer's work amply justifies our belief in the scientific interest and importance of exploring the deep Pacific with modern
― 394 ―instruments. It is quite evident that the Pacific sea floor has been a scene of great and continuing geological activity, and it would appear that we cannot go much further in understanding the history of the earth until we know a good deal more about what has happened under the ocean. Much can be learned with presently available instruments and techniques. I know of few fields in geology or geophysics where the potentialities are so great.[15]
Midpac Expedition was only a beginning. As Revelle said to feature writer Andrew Hamilton, “We've only scratched the Pacific's bottom.”
Much of the scratching had been done from the end of a worn wire. The good piece of hydrographic wire was lost on the first lowering, but Frautschy had foresightedly put aboard all the junk wire he could find on the day of sailing. He spliced the pieces together into the wire that was used for the rest of the expedition. On examining it afterward, Faughn found that the wire had been spliced nine times, had seven kinks, and needed eight more splices.
NORTHERN HOLIDAY
The following year, 1951, brought Northern Holiday, the expedition name that introduced subtlety into the custom. A “holiday” in Navy parlance is an area in which work has been left undone; to oceanographers the Gulf of Alaska was that kind of holiday.
Departing on 28 July, with John Isaacs as expedition leader, the Horizon first surveyed the Mendocino Escarpment, which was found to extend 200 miles farther west than previously known, and then the ship continued with
Night before last [radioed Isaacs] we passed over great shoals of salps and comb jellies that slipped under our bow and boiled out of our wake feebly protesting with flashes from their cold blue lanterns, pelagic flints, sparked by the steel of the Horizon's hull. Today at noon a shout brought everyone from chow; not 100 yards off our beam glowed a great green brown Japanese glass float. Swiftly it was astern and steady on its solitary course. We would have liked to have stopped and picked it up but we are not very maneuverable underway with cables streaming astern to the jog log and thermitow. These are invaluable but unbeautiful instruments that give us a wealth of oceanographic data. They stop us from chasing glass bubbles.[16]
Flanked by hungry goony birds (Black-footed Albatrosses), the Horizon turned northward into the Gulf of Alaska, where Harris B. Stewart celebrated his birthday by “bringing in the biggest seamount of the trip … the one they have been saving the name Scripps for.” And Scripps Seamount it officially became — 11,400 feet from seafloor to summit. In the “interminable Aleutian fog and drizzle” of Kodiak, Warren Wooster took over as expedition leader. “The grey wet skies seemed to merge with the grey wet ocean,” he complained, “and we were never certain whether our casts were from the surface downward or from some intermediate position.”[17]
The innovators devised a new method of collecting seafloor samples, described in a poetic message by Wooster:
The sea is an unpredictable mistress. Yesterday she soothed us into relaxation, pouring over us warm blue
― 396 ―waters, breathing gently, deluding us with her beauty. Last night as we slept she cast off the veil of pretense, raged at us bitterly, flung salt in our eyes, even now is tossing restlessly beside us. While we were on good terms with the sea we sought the westward extension of the Mendocino Escarpment, were not successful until 70 miles south of our last crossings a month ago. Here we found the same depression, crest and then drop off from 2400 to 3000 fathoms. To the north and south cores of red clay were obtained. The northern core was accompanied by an incredible manganese nodule weighing more than 100 pounds. Neatly tied up in 10 meters of hydrographic wire.
Harris B. Stewart entered the event in the coring and dredging log of 10--11 September 1951:
― 397 ―Drawing by Harris B. Stewart of the manganese nodule acquired by a “unique bottom sampling method” on Northern Holiday Expedition in 1951.
On Station #47 — With more faith than the circumstances warrent [sic], we lowered rig over at 2116 [hr]. … we let out the full 6300 m. [of wire] available, & at 2150 started her back up. At 6159 [m.] the winch ground to a halt, groaned, & shivered, & the accumulator accumulated to beat the band. … At 0235 [hr] with 112 m still out one of the weirdest things I ever saw occurred. A great splash & dripping occurred at the wire, we were dipnet fishing & stared unbelieving as a great rock rose on the wire above the surface. We shreiked [sic] at George to stop the — [sic] winch & there twisting lazily — securely wrapped with 4 or 5 strands of wire was what is undoubtedly the finest geological specimen ever brought up from the abyss. We had him raise it to the top of the bucket — my heart, I am sure stopped beating until we had it securely aboard — Reidel [William R. Riedel] kept saying ‘don't let it fall, don't let it fall.’ Hains [Robert
― 398 ―B. Haines] brought a wire comealong & took the strain of the 100 m & the coring tube off the bottom & we gently — even lovingly — undid the wire & gently lowered the thing to the floor of the bucket. Great manganese globules measuring as much as 5 inches in diameter were pyramided on the top of the specimen, a piece measuring 2'1" × 1'9" and 13 inches high, weighing probably 120--140 lbs. We are restraining ourselves (with difficulty) from breaking off a chunk to see if it is MnO2 all the way through. It looks as though it might be, but we will preserve it as it came up till older & wiser oceanographers have looked & marveled. …
Wooster's radio message continued:
This unique bottom sampling method was tried on the next station, resulted only in snarls and jumbles. Yesterday's station featured a hydrographic cast to 4000 meters. The core liner contained enough water for additional samples at a depth of 5500 meters. Almost all wire was off the winch and deeper cores will surely require abnormally low tides. Surface waters are warm and very low in nutrients. A twenty minute net tow yields enough plankton to cover one's thumb. Dip netting is unproductive although squid and dolphinfish are frequently seen. If one puts the midwater trawl in the water, the wind begins to blow within the hour. …[18]
Among the acquisitions of Northern Holiday Expedition were some fine catches from the just-developed Isaacs-Kidd midwater trawl: from 2,200 fathoms came “small jeweled lantern fish, bright red shrimp, long-fanged viper fish, deep purple jellies, transparent squid and a host of other creatures,
The return leg of the expedition also added a new geologic feature: a straightline boundary between regions of different depths, similar to the Mendocino Escarpment but less extreme. Stewart directed the crossing of this suspect feature eight times — in spite of the crew becoming “a bit teed off” at what they felt might be a delay in their return home on September 26 — and thus outlined the Murray fracture zone.
SHELLBACK
The next expedition, in the opposite direction, was almost called Southern Holiday, but wiser heads (with an eye on funding sources) prevailed. As the cruise was to cross the equator half a dozen times — the first of those also a first for a Scripps ship — it became Shellback (and used the same abbreviation, SH). Another cooperative venture, under the heading of Operation Co-Op, this study of “one of the least known oceanic areas of the world” — west of Central America and northern South America — included the Scripps ship Horizon, NEL's PCE(R)-857 again, and the Gilbert, the Hugh M. Smith, and the Cavalieri from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Personnel from the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission and the U.S. Weather Bureau also participated.
The Horizon sailed on 17 May 1952, with Warren Wooster as expedition leader. “The first SIO vessel to work in the southern hemisphere hesitated briefly Sunday as she crossed the line, then plunged bravely into the southern winter. The hesitation was caused by a visit from Neptunus Rex and his court, a villainous lot who quickly converted a large undisciplined mob of pollywogs into a sturdy band
In Lima, the Horizon hosted an open house for 200 Peruvian guests, and when the ship came into Guayaquil, Ecuador, some of the ship's party accepted an invitation to fly to Quito to greet President Galo Plaza Lasso, an alumnus of the University of California. Local papers gave wide and cordial coverage to Co-Op's ships in each port. Enroute home the shellbacks paused at the Galápagos Islands, where, among other explorations, they snared “20 assorted orange, red, white, green, and black and white fish.”[21]
The ship reached home on 27 August, laden with fishes, hydrographic and plankton samples, records on current movements, live marine iguanas, and other souvenirs. One of the captured iguanas had leaped overboard far at sea and had been last seen trying vigorously to rejoin the ship.
CAPRICORN
Capricorn Expedition followed, in the fall of 1952. The workhorse Horizon and the Spencer F. Baird slipped away without fanfare, for the first part of the trip was devoted to Operation Ivy, the first thermonuclear tests. Several of the Scripps scientists who had participated in the atom bomb tests were also on that trip. John Isaacs recalls sitting in a small skiff with three others — the four of them alone in an endless ocean; as the first burst came and the mushroom cloud began to spread, Willard Bascom phrased it aloud:
The participation of Scripps in this work brought a formal commendation to the institution and also one to Willard Bascom from the Chief of Naval Research, Rear Admiral C. M. Bolster, for “outstanding performance” in a “herculean project.”
After the classified work had ended, the ships turned to more customary oceanography. Helen Raitt joined the expedition in Tonga, at the invitation of Revelle, after she had met the ship in the hope of spending the short stay in port with her seagoing husband. Her book, Exploring the Deep Pacific,[*]
[*] W. W. Norton, 1956. Revelle's talk to civic and scientific groups about Midpac Expedition was often presented under that title, which Helen Raitt used for her book on Capricorn with Revelle's approval.
cheerfully recounts the portion of Capricorn on which she sailed. For that cruise, the ships carried new deep-sea echo-sounders, and the Spencer F. Baird was outfitted with a newly built winch and enough wire to reach the greatest ocean depths then known.Although the ocean mysteries appealed to the Capricorn adventurers, so obviously did the land. Harris B. Stewart wrote of a drive in Fiji:
Up rugged mountain spurs lush with tropical vegetation on a narrow twisting gravel road, down into tangled green valleys, every turn with a view more beautiful than the last. Flame red flamboyant trees and wild bouganvillea, fern trees and cocoanut and banana palms, mango, papayas, and breadfruit. An occasional patch of dalo with its big arrowhead-shaped leaves and a native village just the way you feel it should look with its thatch-roofed huts, naked children, a stray
― 402 ―dog or two, palms, shore, and a lazy curl of smoke from a cook fire fighting its way up through the heat of noonday. …[22]
Capricorn was the first Scripps expedition to carry scientific divers, who enthusiastically explored coral reefs and a submerged shallow peak, Falcon Shoal, “one of the volcanic up-again down-again islands of the world.”
The captain who had carefully navigated us [wrote Willard Bascom] to the position of the island shown on the charts, was on the bridge scanning the horizon for land when the echo sounder showed the rock rising almost vertically toward the keel. He leaped to ring the engine room telegraph for full astern. Unmarked rocky pinnacles hundreds of miles from land are enough to scare anyone and the R. V. Baird churned to a stop, throwing a turbulent foam out over water less than twenty feet deep. The ship then retreated to an ultrasafe distance, where it sulked and the scientists who wanted to have a close look had to row a long way to see Falcon.
Using self-contained diving equipment for the first time in the Tongas, we dove down to have a look. The fresh dark basalt of the recent volcano was studded with little coral colonies just getting their start in life and already tiny angel fish swam through their branches. Walter Munk even jammed a thermometer into the soft volcanic rubble to see if there was any trace of volcanic warmth remaining.
Roger Revelle (left) and Jeffery D. Frautschy gloating over the wire cable delivered to the Spencer F. Baird on the eve of departure on Capricorn Expedition, 1952.
Although no one had really doubted that corals do attach themselves to volcanoes and grow in this way, it is a sight that few men have actually seen. We were a little awed to be present at the birth of an atoll,
Interest was high at that time in the mysterious deep scattering layer, discovered by Russell Raitt, R. J. Christensen, and Carl F. Eyring in 1942, but ten years later still an enigma. Near the Tonga Trench one evening, as the layer's upward motion was being watched on the echo-sounder, eager divers begged to go overboard to gather sample denizens for identification. Permission was granted, and quite soon an exultant diver surfaced, holding aloft his collecting bag, and calling, “I've got it! I've got it!” He had carefully selected, by hand, the larger objects barely visible in the underwater murky gloom — but alas, quick scrutiny in better light on deck showed that someone had just flushed the head.
As the years went by, so did the Scripps expeditions. In 1953, on the centenary of Commodore Matthew C. Perry's visit to Japan, Transpac Expedition transited the Pacific to Japan. At an audience with Emperor (and biologist) Hirohito at the palace laboratory, members of the expedition presented him with a rare mollusk that they had dredged not far off his shores. Robert L. Fisher, expecting that the audience would be shoeless, selected his most brilliant crimson socks and, as he bowed, he was rewarded with an approving gasp from the distinguished host. At Bayonnaise Rocks — never scaled before or since — Warren Wooster, Fisher, and seaman Stanley J. O'Neil risked life and limb to collect fresh rock samples not far from where a Japanese research ship had disappeared during a violent eruption the previous year.
Transpac was followed by Cusp Expedition, along the west coast, and by Chubasco, which sailed southward, both in 1954. That year and the next took most of the institution's fleet — Spencer F. Baird, Horizon, Paolina-T, and
After these trips came Norpac, Eastropic, and Equapac expeditions; then Chinook, to the Gulf of Alaska; Acapulco Trench, to Central America; Mukluk, into the Bering Sea.
Then came the year that was eighteen months long.
INTERNATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL YEAR
On 5 April 1950 a dozen scientists conversed sociably on the unsolved mysteries of the earth at the home of James A. Van Allen in Silver Spring, Maryland. Floyd McCoy of Pitcairn Island, descendant of a Bounty mutineer, knew naught of their conversation then, but because of them he was working to help solve the earth's mysteries several years later. Also because of them, the palm trees on remote Clipperton Island were rearranged.
At the Van Allen home, Lloyd V. Berkner of the Carnegie Institution proposed an International Year for a frontal attack on the unknowns of the earth and its atmosphere, similar to the Polar Years of 1882 and 1932. The suggestion caught on, and so committees were formed, nations joined in, and on 1 July 1957 began the International Geophysical Year (IGY), which, with casual disregard for the calendar, was designated to continue until December 1958. The time was selected to coincide with the peak of the eleven-year sunspot cycle, with a concurrent eclipse, and as the silver anniversary of the second Polar Year. It was not, said Revelle, designated as “a year in which we should all be kind to geophysicists” — although, considering how much they had to do, perhaps we should have been.
The international committee that coordinated the IGY was the “Comité Special de l'Année Geophysique Internationale” (CSAGI). Most of the sixty-plus participating nations set up their own national committees; in the United States this was under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, and was chaired by Joseph Kaplan of UCLA. For the many scientific fields to be covered, separate panels were established, to consider proposals of special projects. In the United States these were managed through the National Science Foundation.
As the year opened, Kaplan defined its scope: “Scientists of the world are going to take a long and special look at our earth — at its wrinkled crust, its hot heart, its deep seas, its envelope of air, its mighty magnetism, its relationship to outer space.”[25]
So, during the IGY, rockets and satellites went up, probes and dredges went down. Meteorologists, physicists, astronomers, glaciologists, oceanographers — all had observations to make. Projects were established from the equator to the poles. The “year” began auspiciously two days early,
In and beneath the vast seas lay some of the answers to the riddles of the earth: How does water move throughout the ocean? How fast is the exchange of water from the Antarctic to the equator? Can the ocean contain radioactive wastes safely and harmlessly? How do the oceans affect weather? How great is the change in sea level throughout the world? What causes the long waves and storm surges that invade beaches from time to time? What is the shape of the sea floor? What lies beneath it? Hoping for answers to these questions, during the IGY 75 research ships plied the high seas; eight of them were American, and three of those, Scrippsian.
In addition, Scripps was in charge of an island observatory program, which established 16 stations throughout the Pacific Ocean to measure sea level fluctuations, ocean temperatures and salinities, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. William G. Van Dorn also set up equipment for measuring earthquake-caused tsunamis. Under coordinators Jeffery D. Frautschy and June G. Patullo, a call went out for personnel to man the island stations. For the station on Tahiti, “a veritable flood of applicants” came forth, said June Patullo, but with a smile she noted that “for some reason we are unable to understand, we have no volunteers for Jarvis.” For that bit of land, two miles long and one mile wide, 1,500 miles south of Hawaii, a volunteer was finally found: Otto Horning, a man who preferred solitude, and who had the mechanical ingenuity to keep the equipment operating. He had previously lived alone on equally lonely Palmyra Island. Horning died on Jarvis Island while in the service of the IGY, and his native assistant (whom Horning had recruited from another island) notified British authorities. Audley A. (“Al”) Allanson of Scripps and his wife completed the IGY observations on Jarvis.
The most important man to the survey [concluded June Patullo] was the individual observer. On Arorae, a small speck of British land just south of the Equator in the western Pacific, Neemia Matiota and his Gilbertese neighbors kept a tide gage working for more than two years. Five hundred miles to the west Captain Steve Dexter, with the assistance of the British Phosphate Commissioners, ran what is probably the best complete station of the Scripps-operated stations: Ocean Island, where both sea level and temperature and salinity observations were observed for more than two years. A couple of thousand miles southeast of these two, a French citizen of Tahitian-Polish ancestry, Malinowski by name, found time between his duties as weather observer, radio operator, and postmaster on Rurutu to take a good series of both kinds of data at that hilly green island. A young man working on Guam as Observer in Charge of the U.S. Coast Survey's geomagnetic station received a box of equipment from us and then wrote us a puzzled letter asking what to do with it. We explained to our embarrassment that our supposed arrangements had somehow gone awry; nevertheless Dave Newman [the young man] agreed to take the boat observations we requested and did a first-class job.[26]
In the Tuamotu Islands one time, the observers' boat sank a mile from shore, to which two of the three men (one American and one Polynesian) swam; they returned with an outrigger canoe to rescue their older companion, who had remained clinging to an equipment box. They radioed for replacement supplies and soon resumed work.
Drying plankton nets on Transpac Expedition, 1953.
Another figure in the island program was Martin Vitousek, who with his wife ran the supply boat from Fanning Island to the lonely outposts of Jarvis and Palmyra.
On Pitcairn Island, Floyd McCoy serviced a sea-level recorder, collected sea-water samples, and measured the vertical temperature structure of the water throughout the IGY and for a year beyond it. This fourth-generation descendant of one of the original Bounty mutineers was saving his earnings for a trip to the United States with his Australian-born wife. In 1960 the McCoys spent six months touring the United States, the first couple from Pitcairn to visit this country. Their final stop was at Scripps to visit with acquaintances made through the IGY.
Downwind Expedition was the first of three that Scripps sent out as part of the IGY. From October 1957 to February 1958, the Horizon and the Spencer F. Baird logged 40,000 miles throughout the southeastern Pacific on a track laid out to take advantage of following winds and currents (hence “downwind”). H. William Menard was overall expedition leader for the first half of the cruise, and Robert L. Fisher for the second half. The emphasis was on geology, geophysics, and chemistry.
The ships worked together and separately, carrying out seismic-refraction profiles, hydrographic casts, coring, dredging, continuous echo-sounding, current measurements with the “jog log,” and collecting water samples for radio-isotope analysis, air samples for carbon dioxide content, plankton samples, bathythermograph readings, and ocean-floor temperature measurements. From their disadvantageous point far above the structure they sought, the
The East Pacific Rise was of particular interest to Menard. That a shallow area existed between Tahiti and Chile had been known since the Challenger crossed it in 1873. Alexander Agassiz also found shallower soundings on a reconnaissance aboard the Albatross in 1900, from which the name Albatross Plateau was derived. After 1946, soundings from U.S. Navy ships traveling to and from Antarctica helped define the great bulge in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. Downwind Expedition crisscrossed the area and found that the rise was indeed a major distinctive topographic feature: a curving bulge from near New Zealand to the coast of North America, 2,000 to 4,000 kilometers wide, 13,000 kilometers long, and two to three kilometers high (with a few isolated volcanoes rising higher). Along the crest of the rise the earth's crust proved to be unusually thin, and the rate of heat flow from the earth's interior was unusually high; shallow earthquakes were already known from the region. Seismic studies showed that the mantle bulged upward beneath the rise. Crossing the rise transversely were a number of straight lines of mountainous topography — fracture zones — characterized by islands and submarine volcanoes. Menard theorized that a youthful convection current in the mantle could explain the upward bulging of the mantle; this would force the crust to arch upward and would create a system of tension cracks, susceptible to wrench faulting, parallel to the rise.
Where the land met the sea, the Downwind wanderers explored the coral reefs of Fakarava Atoll; the social life of Tahiti; the coral growths of the channel into the harbor at Rapa Island; Alexander Selkirk's cave on the Juan Fernández Islands; the cuisine and viniculture of Antofagasta, Viña del Mar, and Santiago, Chile, and the pisco of Callao and Lima,
That lonely rock was rumored to be a great place to acquire lava carvings simply in exchange for worn clothing. But an unusual rush of visitors to Easter Island shortly before the Downwind ships reached it had sadly depleted the supply of carvings. However, cooperative islanders sat up all night carving the soft rock into distinctive faces (rather like the giant carvings for which the island is famed), which they exchanged for the old — and new — clothing of the visitors. Meanwhile, “in best tradition Scripps moonlight tiki sneaking society covered other side [of] island like locusts. Travelled on foot, by borrowed jeep and, groan, on horseback. Examined pictographs, statues, craters, made ethnological studies.”[27]
In Lima the oceanographers had discovered the whim of the public's interest in the ocean: reporters who met the two ships on 15 January expressed interest at first only in the hydrographic and biological aspects of the voyage, of keen interest to the country dependent upon fishing. The geologists took a back seat. But that afternoon an earthquake of magnitude 7 struck southern Peru and killed 28 persons in and near Arequipa. From that moment, said Fisher, “only geophysical and philosophical geology could get a line” from the representatives of the press.[28]
En route home the Downwinders on the Baird composed and recorded their odyssey in twenty-three verses and nine choruses, entitled “Downwind Calypso.” (There was very little demand for copies — perhaps because of such outrageous rhymings as seven with haven, discover with rubber, and overjoyed with employed? Original poetry composed at sea by oceanographers has a limited market.)
The second Scripps IGY expedition was Dolphin, led by John A. Knauss, from March to June 1958; its purpose
Knauss led the third IGY expedition also, from 1 August to 30 September 1958. The Horizon, the Spencer F. Baird, and the Stranger all sailed on that trip to explore the currents in the region of light winds near the equator — which gave the name Doldrums Expedition. The oceanographers returned puzzled at the ocean's circulation, for this expedition had discovered an unexpected large flow of water deep beneath the equatorial countercurrent.
Biologists took advantage of the available transportation to do some studies for several weeks on Clipperton Island, where they supplemented their ship stores with “fish, wild spinach, tern eggs, coconut meat, coconut apples, and coconut palm salad.” Conrad Limbaugh and the other divers studied shark behavior from what they called a shark cage, but which was really a diver cage, for the divers were inside taking notes on the sharks outside. They found the Navy's shark repellent to be at least 90 percent effective, they determined that the somewhat controversial fluorescent fabric for swimwear deterred sharks, and they observed that sharks find their prey chiefly by smell.
Entomologist Charles Harbison of the San Diego Museum of Natural History was in the Clipperton group and collected “so many insects that he would not even estimate the number.” The biologists together collected invertebrates, vertebrates, and plants until they estimated that Clipperton had become “the best collected island in the eastern Pacific.”[29]
Clipperton Island, “one of the loneliest, most isolated and smallest islands in the Pacific Ocean,” is the only coral island in the eastern Pacific. It lies 670 miles southwest of Acapulco, Mexico, and is distinguished by one 65-foot-high guano-covered pinnacle in its five square miles of coral sand
Scripps biologists contributed slightly to international misunderstanding in 1958. They accepted France's claim to the isolated bit of rock, and they accepted botanist and Frenchwoman Marie-Hélène Sachet of the U.S. Geological Survey (also on the staff of the National Academy of Sciences) as a member of the land party, although Scripps was not really accustomed to having women on expeditions then. Differences of opinion arose between Limbaugh and Miss Sachet, essentially over who was in charge of what: it was, after all, her island; he was, after all, scientific leader. But Limbaugh had the last word, for he and three others stayed two weeks beyond the others, and during that time, partly because bad weather prevented them from accomplishing much scientific work around the island, the cast-aways occupied their time by transplanting young sprouting coconuts to the northeast side of the atoll, neatly set out to form the letters “U C.”[*]
[*] I haven't been able to find anyone who has been to Clipperton since, to tell me whether the planting survived.
NAGA
Scripps did not wait long after the International Geophysical Year for another venture into international oceanography. The theoretical preliminaries were at the Ninth
In Bangkok, Harold J. Coolidge, Executive Director of the Pacific Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and Roger Revelle, as a member of the UNESCO International Advisory Committee on the Marine Sciences, conferred with Thai officials on the possibility of setting up a program to investigate the marine resources in the Gulf of Thailand and of the adjacent South China Sea. Revelle was very favorably impressed by the level of technical ability and the dedication of the Thai officers in the Royal Thai Navy Hydrographic Office.
Revelle went on to Vietnam, by invitation, to consult there with government officials. He was convinced that “real possibilities existed on the broad shelf southeast of Viet Nam for the development of extensive bottom fisheries,” and he urged that a survey of the South China Sea be taken. UNESCO was interested in Revelle's recommendation, but felt that it probably would not be able to enlarge its marine program to the necessary financial stage for several years.
So Revelle proposed sending a Scripps ship to Vietnam and Thailand for a three-year survey, which would provide the double advantage of gathering the oceanographic information and simultaneously training scientists of the adjacent countries in research methods and equipment. Coolidge agreed with the idea and urged that a proposal be submitted to the U.S. State Department's International Cooperation Administration (ICA, now known as AID, Administration for International Development).
Revelle not infrequently put the cart before the horse:
Early in January 1958 Dr. Revelle wrote Dr. Coolidge briefing him on the results of his trip to Viet Nam and giving him in some detail an outline of what he thought a U.S. sponsored program should attempt to accomplish. He cautioned Dr. Coolidge that he had not yet had an opportunity to discuss this proposed undertaking with either the Regents or the senior administrative officers of the University of California. Furthermore, he added that there was not yet wide agreement on the part of the Scripps staff that the Institution should attempt such a difficult enterprise in such a remote area of the world. However, he pointed out that the Scripps Institution had traditionally taken the position that scientific studies of the Pacific Ocean were its responsibility and that he felt they could not and would not dodge this responsibility when the need was urgent.[30]
Meetings and counter-proposals, correspondence and temporary setbacks occupied the next several months. The George Vanderbilt Foundation of Stanford University became a participant and for a while it appeared that Vanderbilt's yacht, the Pioneer, would become the survey ship. The United States Operations Missions in several countries in the proposed area were consulted. Coolidge journeyed out there to discuss the project and found “general agreement in principle,” even much enthusiasm in places, but enough administrative setbacks to call forth the remark: “The battle of the South China Sea is still raging but I am afraid we are losing the engagement.”
John A. McGowan gathering squid — and ink — on Transpac Expedition, 1953; Robert Gilkey maneuvering dipnet in background.
In June, however, the United States and Vietnam signed an agreement to undertake the oceanographic study. Thailand soon joined in the agreement. In due time ICA and Scripps worked out an acceptable proposal, and a grant from the U.S. Public Health Service and some funds at
The objectives of what was to become a two-year project in southeast Asia were:
…to foster science in Southeast Asia in an acceptable form including:
To demonstrate the importance of oceanography and marine biology in relation to fisheries.
In cooperation with the governments concerned, to train oceanographic and fisheries scientists and technicians, to develop scientific understanding and appreciation, and to accelerate the progress of science in the Gulf of Thailand and adjacent portions of the South China Sea.
To lay scientific and administrative groundwork for early and continued development of marine resources in the Gulf of Thailand and adjacent portions of the South China Sea.
In mid-1958 Captain Faughn entered the picture, as project officer. James L. Faughn is a patient man, soft-spoken, and with a quick sense of humor. These attributes certainly helped as the preliminaries continued to drag over many more months. (The State Department is not the simplest organization for scientists to work with.) A major boost to the undertaking was Anton Bruun's acceptance of the post of scientific leader. Bruun was an internationally recognized Danish oceanographer who had participated in his country's Dana Expedition in 1928--30, had led the Atlantide Expedition in 1945--46, and had led the Galathea Expedition of 1951--52. He and Faughn both went to Vietnam and Thailand in January 1959 to discuss the forthcoming survey. They found much interest and cooperation, and they also found a name for the project: Naga Expedition,
The Scripps ship Stranger was finally assigned to Naga Expedition (and was replaced at home by the Hugh M. Smith as a loan from the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries). Into the shipyard went the Stranger for repairs, alterations, and refitting, under the direction of Faughn, who added the duties of captain to those of project officer. Installed on the Stranger for its two years of duty, miles from home, were: a frame for handling equipment over the side of the ship instead of the stern; a side-mounted lift-net constructed by Marine Facilities personnel, who even cut the eucalyptus saplings necessary for booms; the trawl winch formerly on the E. W. Scripps; 7,000 meters of new three-eighths-inch wire for the trawl winch; two new reels of three-sixteenths-inch steel cable for the hydrographic winch; and two-meter rings for handling Stramin nets for plankton sampling (Scripps biologists, accustomed to one-meter nets, were skeptical of the unfamiliar Danish ones, but those who used them developed “a certain respect” and “a growing attachment” for them). Also, “at the urging of the Project Officer and with the approval of the Director, the existing dark colors of the vessel were changed to more suitable tropical white which had the added effect of giving her a much improved and yacht like appearance.”
Personnel began to volunteer for Naga Expedition, beginning with the entire crew of the Stranger, as well as crew members from other Scripps ships, and the Stranger's crew was assigned en masse to the outward journey. They and members of the scientific staff who expected to participate in parts of Naga Expedition attended a series of lectures on the cultural and political background of southeast Asia, and Thai language sessions as well.
In May 1959, Faughn set June 15 as the sailing date.
“The Stranger,” said Faughn, “came out of the shipyard two days before the sailing date. … She looked very nice in her fresh coat of paint but the fact that it was still wet didn't help the loading and stowage problem much.”
She sailed on schedule, ocean-hopped to Honolulu, Guam, Manila, Nhatrang (Vietnam), and reached Satahib Naval Base near Bangkok on 24 August 1959. Said her captain later:
…By the time the vessel arrived in Bangkok all optimism about smooth sailing under tropical moons or sunlit skies was wholly confined to the uninitiated and to those too distant to be personally affected. The most charitable thing that can be said for full-blown monsoons and for unscheduled depressions travelling across the China Seas is that they serve effectively to temper both the enthusiasm of the overly romantic and the criticism of the overly dogmatic.
The vessel was very soon put into service for a ten-day orientation cruise from Bangkok for a group of local participants. That proved so successful that the decision was made to replace all but three of the Stranger's crew with local men who would serve in the dual role of crewmen and scientific trainees.
In some ways [said Faughn] this was the most critical decision to be made in the following two years. The Stranger represented the most expensive, the most essential and the only irreplaceable piece of equipment of the program. On her continued and safe operation depended the entire endeavor and the lives of her crew.
The successful operation of the vessel on cruise after cruise repeatedly justified the confidence with which the above-mentioned decision was made and the resulting benefits were immediate and lasting. Overnight the Stranger ceased to be a stranger and the ship and the expedition became and remained a local country project. No better model for international cooperation at the “grass-roots” level could have been devised.
The seasonal northeast and southwest monsoons are the dominating factor in that part of the ocean surveyed by Naga Expedition. Determining the seasonal variations in the ocean itself and in the life within it was among the major objectives of the program. For the Gulf of Thailand area, cruises were planned as five cross-sections at varying intervals apart, each cruise to be about 2,000 miles long and to take 14 to 17 days. For the South China Sea the cruises were to include six lines about 100 miles apart, nearly perpendicular to the eastern coast of Vietnam and running out about 250 miles; these would take 30 to 40 days. The South China Sea cruises were set up to stop once at Saigon and twice at Nhatrang in Vietnam on each trip to accommodate two separate groups of trainees, as transportation for them to Thailand was not feasible.
The ten survey cruises that the Stranger carried out had generally the same programs, when the weather permitted. At each station the oceanographers and trainees took Nansen bottle casts, bathythermograph measurements, routine weather observations, plankton tows, surface-net hauls, midwater trawls, bottom-trawl samples, bottom-sediment samples, dipnet samples, surface-temperature measurements, and station-position determinations. Between stations, chemical analyses, biological classifying, and general observations of birds, fishes, current discontinuities, and various other phenomena kept everyone occupied.
It was a successful and thoroughly international venture. “One of the most heartening aspects of the mutual labor and close association on board the Stranger was the remarkable ease with which friendships developed among the young Vietnamese, Philippine, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Thai and Hong Kong students and the rather effortless manner in which all accepted instruction from a staff consisting at times of nationals from the United States, France and Denmark.”
Also, said Faughn, “Chief Petty Officer Wong Potibutra, of the Royal Thai Navy, managed somehow to solve the intricacies of an American research vessel's most complicated apparatus — her commissary department — to the satisfaction and deep gratitude of his multinational crew and shipmates.”
By no means was all the work accomplished on the Stranger. Laboratory facilities were provided to the Naga participants at the Hydrographic Office of the Royal Thai Navy, at the Thai Department of Fisheries, and at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. In addition, local ships and small craft were provided by the Department of Fisheries, the Royal Thai Navy, and the Oceanographic Institute of Nhatrang.
Theodore Chamberlain of Scripps spent two months in Bangkok during Naga, teaching a course in marine geology. Edward Brinton spent a year there from March 1960, and he directed the analysis of biological field collections from the cruises at Chulalongkorn University. Margaret Robinson worked up the bathythermograph records and provided the cards for distribution; the next year she spent six months in Thailand under UNESCO sponsorship to teach the staff of the Thai hydrographic office how to analyze the temperature and salinity data gathered on Naga.
“From the data gathered,” wrote participant Eugene C. LaFond shortly after the end of the expedition, “combined
The area near Thailand surveyed by Naga Expedition proved to support a phenomenally large number of species of fishes and invertebrates, nourished by blooms of plankton brought on by the monsoons. Many of the species collected were previously undescribed forms. Even the fish markets and the fishermen's landing areas turned up unknown species, often gathered by fishermen quite close to shore. The South China Sea, however, was found to be much less productive, apparently because of fast-moving and shifting currents.
A great deal of the preliminary work on the oceanographic collections was done at the laboratories provided to Naga participants, especially the sorting of plankton samples, chemical analyses of water samples, and preparation of bottom-topography charts. Then much of the oceanographic, geologic, and topographic material was carried to Scripps for more detailed study, although some material was left in laboratories in Thailand; most of the fish collections were transferred to the George Vanderbilt Foundation at Stanford University. Preliminary reports were put out soon after the end of the expedition, and other Naga reports are still being published as the wealth of material continues to be analyzed.
The training program was considered to have been a very successful part of Naga Expedition. As a fringe benefit, Bangkok, at least partly because of Naga, became a favorite Scripps stopping place, both as a port and as a welcome stopover on trips beyond.
On 24 June 1961 — two years and ten days after departure — the Stranger returned to home port, under the command of Frank Miller, who had taken over as captain the previous November. The homeward personnel included sixteen Thais, who had participated in training cruises in their own waters and were continuing their learning while sailing, as “postgraduates.” Captain Faughn greeted the ship at the dock, having wound up Naga's details in Bangkok and arrived home just a few days ahead of the ship.
Expedition leader Anton Frederik Bruun died six months after Naga Expedition, on 13 December 1961, while delivering a lecture in Copenhagen. The death of this gentle man, defined by Carl L. Hubbs as “one of the world's leading ichthyologists, oceanographers, general biologists, and scientific statesmen,”[32] was a great loss to oceanography.
INTERNATIONAL INDIAN OCEAN EXPEDITION
Before the return of Naga Expedition, Scripps was participating in another international venture, for it had found another horizon to travel beyond.
The late 1950s were a time of international optimism, especially in the sciences. The International Geophysical Year contributed to the optimism. A desire to solve world problems through scientific programs led to the establishing of a number of international committees, councils, and congresses.
SCOR, the Special Committee on Oceanic Research, established in 1957, was one of these. It was “an international group, organized by the International Council of Scientific Union, and charged with furthering international scientific activity in all branches of oceanic research.”[33] SCOR helped lead to the First International Oceanographic Congress and from there to the International Indian Ocean Expedition.
Roger Revelle was president of the International Oceanographic Congress, which was held at the United Nations headquarters in New York from 31 August to 11 September 1959. The sponsors of the well-attended affair were the American Association for the Advancement of Science, UNESCO, and SCOR. About 40 Scripps staff members attended parts of the congress, which drew 800 oceanographers from 38 countries. They spoke of many things: fluctuations in sea level, the composition of sea water, ocean currents, the habits of deep-sea creatures, the origins of life, and the sliding of continents. They discussed new techniques and new equipment, especially manned submersibles and improved deep-sea cameras. Many visited the Soviet research ship Mikhail Lomonosov, 330 feet long and conspicuously displaying a bow emblem of the earth encircled by a satellite. She had sailed into New York harbor bearing 40 Russian scientists to participate in the congress. Other research vessels were on display as well — five from American east-coast institutions — and Jacques-Yves Cousteau's Calypso, complete with her diving saucer.
At the congress two dramatic forthcoming projects were announced: a four-year international study of the scarcely studied Indian Ocean, and drilling a hole through the Mohorovičić discontinuity to the earth's mantle (see chapter 12). Both projects sent Scripps scientists to sea again.
That congress was credited with providing “the necessary impetus to arouse great public interest in oceanography
The scientists of the sea always have a faraway spot in mind when the “willingness to sponsor and finance” arises. There sat the Indian Ocean in 1959, one-seventh of the earth's surface: a potential source of food for the one-quarter of the world's population that lived along its shores; a region of monsoons, wind reversals that create upwelling and currents that impinge on all the oceanic circulation. There it sat, a mass of water scarcely probed by oceanic tools, a void — a holiday.
Arguments were marshaled so quickly for studying the Indian Ocean that just a few years later, when Warren Wooster “tried to find the genesis of the expedition,” he “gave up after he had traced it to a conversation in the bar of the Commodore Hotel during the First International Oceanographic Congress in 1959”[35] — a not-at-all-unlikely setting for oceanographic genesis.
As with the IGY, nations joined in, with “big and elaborate” ideas. “The plans evoked indifference, in some cases hostility and in others open opposition, but they emerged in an environment that, historically, was peculiarly favourable to their development.”[36] Early in 1960 SCOR appointed an International Indian Ocean Working Group of 28 members; the chairman was G. E. R. Deacon, Director of the National Institute of Oceanography in England, and vice-chairman was V. G. Kort of U.S.S.R. In the United States, five working groups were set up: marine geology, geophysics, and bathymetry; biological oceanography; physical and chemical oceanography; meteorology; and data handling and analysis. Thirteen other countries established programs and provided ships, while nine additional countries participated in projects ashore. “It was agreed from the outset that the international program for the Indian Ocean
Although called the International Indian Ocean Expedition, the project was actually a collection of separate expeditions by 40 ships from 1959 to 1965. As one participant noted during its interim, “It is by no means a tightly planned, thoroughly coordinated and directed project.”[38]
For its part in IIOE, Scripps was soon ready. The institution had already planned to enter the Indian Ocean in 1960, as soon as its “new” ship was ready. From the Navy in 1959 it had acquired the ARS-27, quickly renamed Argo, which went into the shipyard to be converted to research use by rearranging to provide laboratory space, and by adding a six-ton crane and a winch that could handle 45,000 feet of heavy cable.
Meanwhile, the longest trip yet undertaken by Scripps was being planned: Monsoon Expedition. Robert L. Fisher, chairman of the U.S. Working Group on Geology and Geophysics, was also the overall coordinator for the institution's part in IIOE. Maps and charts brought forth a new list of ports to be savored: Darwin, Djakarta, Port Louis. Out came National Geographics and travel folders: “Isn't Bali where the dancers are?” “Have you heard about the Kandy dancers in Ceylon?” “Couldn't we visit the Seychelles?” “How about the temples at Mahabalipuram?” “At where?” Wives were soothed with promises of sapphires from Ceylon, silks from India — and everything in the world from Hong Kong. Not that the wives had any choice — for the descendants of Ulysses had that restless look again.
The Argo sailed on 23 August 1960, with Revelle wishing her “Godspeed, a safe return, and many discoveries.” Her departure, he said, was “a great event in the history of
[*] Besides shipyard delays, the Argo had an unusual last-minute sailing complication: of all things, counterfeiters. When the ship left the yard in Tacoma after conversion, some of her crew had been hired in that city. Two of those concluded that far-off ports would be ideal for passing homemade ten- and twenty-dollar bills. In San Diego before sailing, they grew restless, so they headed for the nearest foreign soil: Tijuana. Their first counterfeit bill was instantly spotted by an alert bartender, and they found themselves in the Baja California state penitentiary for six months until they waived extradition and were returned to the United States for trial. Their suitcases of bills had been removed from the Argo before sailing by Treasury Department officers.
That lack became critical ten days later:…things started breaking down. … On one horrible morning the steering cables started to unravel at 3 AM, the big winch stripped all the teeth off its gears at 5, the smaller winches developed overheated bearings at 6, the compressor for the main meat-freezer blew its top at 7, and at about 9 one of the engineers reported that we were leaking salt water into a fuel tank at a high rate. By afternoon we had shifted all the meat into a refrigerator and reset its controls to make it a freezer, had patched the steering cables with light-weight wire, brought in the equipment that was on the end of the winch cables by hand, and had changed our plans and headed for Honolulu steering with the engines.[39]
Eleven days in Honolulu took care of “about 40 different repair jobs,” and the ship went on to a rendezvous with an odd piece of lonely ocean:
We of Argo send greetings from a point outside of space and time. At 0845 local time this day 25 or 26
― 429 ―September Argo stopped on a station at latitude 0, longitude 180[*][*] Sometimes called the west pole.
— neither north, south, east, west nor any particular day. Progress continues as we punish polliwogs and gather data on Scripps' longest shakedown cruise to date.
Neptunus Rex, [Captain Laurence] Davis, G. Shor
In Cairns, Australia (where Shor reported finding the natives friendly and the beer outstanding), negotiations were completed for chartering a local ship to make two-ship seismic-refraction lines possible. The tubby launch Malita (Bert Cummings, Master) thus temporarily joined the Scripps fleet for two months of work in the Australia-Indonesia area. The Scripps scientists who sailed on Malita considered it a memorable experience.
The Argo worked through Indonesian waters, zigzagged across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, turned southward and then crossed back to Fremantle, on to New Zealand, and then dipped far south below the Antarctic circle for water samples and bottom cores before returning to warm up in Tahiti and head for home. In honor of her name, the ship sailed into home port, on 18 April 1961, triumphantly bearing a golden fleece draped across the bow. Harmon Craig, expedition leader on the final leg, ceremoniously presented the dyed sheepskin to Jeffery Frautschy at the dock.
The port lists for the three Scripps cruises for the International Indian Ocean Expedition read like a travel agent's dream — although they more often proved the agents' nightmare as plans changed constantly and equipment became lost or strayed. The two IIOE trips after Monsoon — Lusiad Expedition and Dodo Expedition — established a new pattern for Scripps trips: year-long cruises, with a periodic
Lusiad Expedition (May 1962 to August 1963) gained the record as the longest Scripps sea trip: 41,670 miles by the Horizon[*]
[*] The first part of Horizon's voyage was called Zephyrus Expedition and became Lusiad when Horizon joined Argo in the Indian Ocean.
and 83,000 miles by the Argo. The veteran Horizon, the first Scripps ship to cross the equator (on Shellback Expedition in 1952), became on Lusiad the first Scripps ship to sail around the world. Her route to the Indian Ocean was through the Panama Canal, across the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and through the Suez Canal. Among the exotic loot aboard on her return on 19 February 1963 was a large female Aldabra tortoise, acquired somehow in the Seychelles Islands by Captain Marvin Hopkins for the San Diego Zoo. Although estimated by enthusiasts aboard ship to weigh close to a thousand pounds, she proved to be a mere 385. Madame Rupee endured the long sea trip very well and settled in easily at her new home.The Argo on Lusiad sailed for the Indian Ocean in the opposite direction and spent ten months in that ocean before returning across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal, to become the second Scripps ship to circumnavigate the globe. In addition to geological-geophysical reconnaissances in company with the Horizon, much of the time of the Argo in the Indian Ocean was spent on a concentrated study of the equatorial current system in a project with former Scrippsian John A. Knauss, who had become dean of the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography. The character of the Indian Ocean currents proved different from that of the Pacific and
The two ships worked both together and separately on Lusiad Expedition, and, as Fisher reported by radio, on one occasion reached very different ports simultaneously:
Argo arrived Kerguelen 11 November holiday. First ship eleven months. [Norris W.] Rakestraw reports two cheek welcome by 60 inhabitants francaises. Collected rocks, mail. … Same day Argo gaulic frolic Horizon welcomed coolly by several hundred Saint Paul rockhopper penguins.
Dodo Expedition, again using the Argo, followed in 1964, placing its emphasis on geology and geophysics in the Indian Ocean area. It also worked with the British ship Discovery on a cooperative study of the Somali Current.
Scripps's part in the International Indian Ocean Expedition officially ended in July 1965, but that was only a beginning for the reported accomplishments. From the depth soundings gathered by the many IIOE expeditions, including the three Scripps cruises, coordinator Robert L. Fisher compiled a topographic chart of six million square miles of the western Indian Ocean. Geologists and geophysicists from a score of institutions defined the structure of the Indian Ocean region and fitted it into the emerging picture of sea-floor spreading, aided by drilling carried out there for the Deep Sea Drilling Project in 1972. Reports using data gathered by IIOE will continue to appear for many years.
A special program set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations was a review of oceanographic and meteorological information pertinent to fisheries development in the Gulf of Aden and adjacent parts of the Arabian Sea and the western Indian Ocean. This
Perhaps the most important finding of the Indian Ocean Expedition, so far as fishery oceanography is concerned, is the extremely high rate of primary productivity, and large standing crops of phytoplankton and zooplankton in the Arabian Sea, especially along the western side … one of the more productive parts of the World Ocean.[40]
The expeditions presented in these pages are only a sampling — early ones, elaborately organized ones, and a smattering of others — of the many carried out by the Scripps Institution. A few others have been cited in earlier pages within their disciplines.
Putting together one of the major expeditions requires patience, persistence, and long lists. H. William Menard presented effectively in Anatomy of an Expedition[41] how a typically complex trip such as Nova Expedition can originate and get under way. Diana Midlam and R. Nelson Fuller enumerated what was put aboard the Argo before the eight-month Zetes Expedition set out in 1966:
Ten thousand pounds of fresh meat, 92,000 gallons of fuel oil, 100 gallons of chemicals, 1,000 pounds of granulated sugar, 55 mesh net tows for trapping ocean organisms, 47,000 gallons of fresh water, two electronic “fish” for sensing and recording the ocean's salinity, temperature, and depth; and. …
― 433 ―When the work is all done: Fred Dixon, Chief Engineer Frank G. Fish, and John Sclater relaxing on the fantail of the Thomas Washington. Photo by Tom Walsh.
Five buoys, 40 quarts of buttermilk, 400 pounds
― 434 ―of sand, eight cases of soap powder, 60 gallons of bluegray paint, and 27 sets of Arctic foul-weather gear. ……a case of cellulose sponges, 12 cans of brass polish, nine cases of paper towels, 20 gallons of pine oil disinfectant, 50 flashlight batteries, a gross of No. 3 lead pencils, 36 pads of yellow ruled paper, and 12 boxes of paper clips, not to mention tide and current tables and all the forms for handling navigational computations.
…Also stored are two scoop shovels, a bag of cement and the 400 pounds of sand, eight cases of ammonia, 16 cases of Purex, 24 brooms, two cases of Ajax, and three cases of Handi-cream. …
…Also on hand are 840 sheets, 840 bath towels, 420 pillow slips, 200 cooks' aprons, 500 dish towels, and 60 bedspreads.[42]
There were innumerable boxes of dry stores as well, and many other items — too much of some, not enough of others. Equipped with such paraphernalia, the Scripps ships go to sea year after year, racking up miles, sometimes gliding over glassy aquamarine water, sometimes wallowing in storm-spawned swells — and steadily wresting samples and specimens and answers from the enigmatic sea.
NOTES
1. In Helen Raitt, Exploring the Deep Pacific (New York: W. W. Norton, 1956), x.
2. In Robert C. Cowen, Frontiers of the Sea (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1960), 12. Copyright © 1960 by Robert C. Cowen. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
3. Roger Revelle in Helen Raitt, loc. cit., xi.
4. “The Research Ship Horizon,” SIO Reference 74--3 (1974), 4.
5. Letter of 18 January 1953.
6. Hole in the Bottom of the Sea (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1961), 138. Copyright © 1961 by Willard Bascom. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
7. Roger Revelle, “Foreword,” U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 260 (1954), iii.
8. “The Age of Innocence and War in Oceanography,” Oceans Magazine, Vol. I, No. 3 (March 1969), 13--14.
9. Joint Task Force Memo, 11 May 1946, 15.
10. Proposal, 10 October 1949.
11. Manuscript, “We've Only Scratched the Pacific's Bottom.”
12. Letter of 14 October 1950.
13. Letter of 15 October 1950.
14. Letter of 4 December 1950, to writer Milton Silverman.
15. Letter of 16 October 1950.
16. Radio message, 9 August 1951.
17. Radio message, 6 September 1951.
18. Radio message, 14 September 1951.
19. Radio message, 9 August 1951.
20. Radio message, 31 May 1952.
21. Radio message, 13 August 1952.
22. Letter to Francis P. Shepard, 18 January 1953.
23. Hole in the Bottom of the Sea, 39--40.
24. Milner B. Schaefer, “Introduction and summary,” Limnology and Oceanography, Supplement to Vol. 7 (1962), iii.
25. Life, 15 July 1957, 19.
26. “The IGY and Mean Sea Level,” Naval Research Reviews (May 1960), 22--23.
27. Radio message, 7 February 1958.
28. Radio message, 31 January 1958.
29. Conrad Limbaugh, “Introduction,” IGY Clipperton Island Expedition, SIO Reference 59--13 (1959), 3.
30. Report on Naga Expedition by James L. Faughn; this section has been summarized and quoted from that report.
31. “Oceanography and Food,” Naval Research Reviews (November 1961), 11--12.
32. Copeia, no. 2 (1962), 481.
33. Proceedings of SCOR, Vol. I, No. 1 (1965), iii.
34. Georg Wüst, “Proposed International Indian Ocean Oceanographic Expedition, 1962--1963,” Deep-Sea Research, Vol. 6 (1960), 245.
35. Daniel Behrman, The New World of the Oceans (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), 394.
36. J. V. Leyendekkers, “The International Indian Ocean Expedition,” Australian Journal of Science, Vol. 27, No. 6 (December 1964), 153.
37. International Indian Ocean Expedition-United States Participation in the International Indian Ocean Expedition, 1961, 1.
38. Leyendekkers, loc. cit., 153.
39. George Shor, letter of 26 November 1960.
40. Institute of Marine Resources, Annual Report for the Year Ending 30 June 1967, IMR Reference 67--17, 22.
41. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1969.
42. News release, January 1966.
The campus in 1938.
XVI. Back on the Beach
THE CAMPUS
In the first chapter is a glimpse of the Scripps Institution in 1936 — the place that would launch a thousand trips. There were then about thirty people at the laboratory by the sea, in three main buildings. Today there are slightly more than a thousand people at Scripps Institution, located — when in port — in a myriad of buildings on the campus and in an assortment of off-campus locations from Sorrento Valley to Point Loma.
The physical changes on the campus were most dramatic during the 1950s, when oceanography was expanding. Prior to that the only extensive building project was the repair of the pier in 1946, when buildings and grounds superintendent Carl Johnson supervised the jacketing of the pier pilings with steel and concrete and the redecking of the structure. In 1950 the Aquarium-Museum was built, as well as the north garage and the west garage in the service yard. The purchasing and storehouse building was added in 1953. The first addition to Ritter Hall followed in 1956, and it turned the face of the campus toward the sea. The
By then, the School of Science and Engineering had been established, and the new general campus was being planned. The “cafeteria” was preempted for the office of the first chancellor, Herbert F. York, plus the Director's office, other administrative offices, and some laboratories. (The lunch stand was added on the northeast corner of New Scripps Building in 1961.)
The peak year for building was 1960, when the second addition to Ritter Hall, and Sverdrup Hall and Sumner Auditorium were all completed. The occasion was acknowledged in a historical ceremony on 18 May 1961, at which the name plaques of each building were appropriately unveiled: Sumner Auditorium by Mrs. Francis B. Sumner, widow of the building's honoree; Sverdrup Hall by Mrs. Harald U. Sverdrup, widow of the building's honoree; New Scripps Building by Mrs. J. G. Johanson, niece of George H. Scripps; and the new wing of Ritter Hall by Mrs. W. W. Hawkins, widow of Robert P. Scripps.
The flat area of the campus was suddenly brimful of buildings. The internal roads were rearranged (which eliminated a particularly attractive planting of succulents on the turn to the library), and most of the old cottages on the south end of the campus were removed. Revelle apologized in May 1960 that “there has been dust, mud, dirt, noise and a general mess caused by construction for a long time,” even as he noted that the institution had to expand “in the national interest,” and predicted that “all the people of La Jolla very shortly will be proud of Scripps Institution.”[1]
Perhaps to avoid the building confusion, more Scripps people than ever before went out to sea in 1960; nine major expeditions that year logged more than 90,000 miles, and
In 1962 a small building was constructed near the landward end of the pier, and later a 60-foot steel tower was added; this facility was used until 1971 by researchers from Berkeley and UCLA on sea-water conversion methods. In the basement of that building were stored the Scripps sea-floor rock samples. When the sea-water conversion project ended, Scripps researchers moved into the building, and in 1973 the Shore Processes Laboratory was built on its roof.
The only other addition on the flat area of the campus during the 1960s was the Physiological Research Laboratory west of the Aquarium-Museum in 1965. That group also built a facility to house dogs, horses, and sheep for research projects, just below radio station WWD in Seaweed Canyon[*]
[*] Also called snake Canyon, or Rattlesnake Canyon, for obvious reasons.
(so named because city trucks dumped seaweed there from La Jolla Shores and Scripps beaches). The building of the “farm” in 1965 put an end to the seaweed dumping, and to other extramural activities in Seaweed Canyon, such as the dumping of garden trimmings by nearby residents, the pistol-practice range of the campus police, and an archery range.The obvious direction for further expansion was up the slope. Walter Munk chose a scenic site there for the Scripps laboratory of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, built in 1963. The Hydraulics Laboratory, slightly uphill from IGPP, followed in 1964. It served first as an echoing setting for a lively farewell party for the Revelles; then the distinctive building with the wave-shaped roof was outfitted with a wave-and-tidal basin, a wind-wave channel, a wave-and-current channel, a granular fluid mechanics test facility, and a fluidizing channel.
During the 1950s and 1960s, various of the campus cottages were removed, and others were converted to offices
[*] The last tenants, George Bien and family, moved out of T-24 in 1969.
In 1951 a group of Scripps staff members purchased the 40 acres of land comprising Scripps Estates Associates on the canyon rim above the institution and developed it into 42 homesites and a privately protected coastal-canyon preserve.The graduate students set up their social center in the late 1960s, when they were given the use of T-8, a one-story house at the south edge of the campus that had been purchased when the land for the south parking lot was acquired. The center at first was under the auspices of the Dean of Student Activities of UCSD, until 1968 when a Scripps Student Committee was formed. Students renovated the building, which they call Surfside, into a recreation center, with a ping-pong room, pool table, change room, and storage rack for surfboards. Volunteer labor, some funds from the office of Student Affairs, and proceeds from vending machines on campus made the renovations and recreation facilities possible. TGIF — the weekly beerbust — began at Surfside in January 1968. As the student committee reported to staff luncheon in September 1969: “The purpose of this party was to provide a friendly atmosphere where the entire SIO community could meet and get better acquainted. This party has been very successful.”
The uphill trend in construction has continued into the 1970s: the Deep Sea Drilling Building was completed in 1970, across La Jolla Shores Drive from the main campus; the Norpax building was completed in 1975, below the Fishery Oceanography Center (which was built by the federal government in 1964 and was renamed Southwest Fishery Center in 1970); the Carl Eckart Building to house the Scripps Library was completed in December 1976; and the Marine Biology Building was nearing completion at the close of 1976.
The library had long outgrown its space, even after extensive remodeling in the mid-1960s provided to it the entire building, which had also contained, at various times, a museum, an auditorium, some non-library offices, the mail room, and the telephone switchboard (a lively social center in its day). From 15,000 volumes in 1936, the library holdings had increased by the end of 1976 to include: 113,608 bound volumes, more than 26,000 maps, 3,843 microforms, 20,611 reprints, 27,312 reports, documents, and translations, 5,753 serial titles, and 120 linear feet of historical archives. Of necessity, during the 1970s some volumes had to be stored in other locations, some in the basement of IGPP and others in buildings at Camp Elliott.
The first full-time professionally trained librarian for Scripps, Roy W. Holleman, began in September 1950, soon after the retirement of longtime librarian Ruth Ragan. Besides extending the oceanographic collections, Holleman in the latter 1950s began assembling an all-subject general library for UCSD. Joseph Gantner succeeded Holleman from 1963 to 1966, when he transferred to the upper campus. William J. Goff, then assistant librarian at Scripps, and holding master's degrees in both geology and library science, succeeded Gantner in 1967.
For many years the Scripps library has been distinguished by its broad coverage of ocean-related literature — and equally distinguished by the cheerful helpfulness of its staff.
One long-discussed construction project that has not come to pass is the “Scripps Island.” The concept of creating a unique replacement for the Scripps pier began in the early 1950s. The “Island” grew in conversation to incorporate a harbor, various underwater laboratories, aquarium facilities for research and holding purposes, data cables for relaying a number of continuous measurements, facilities
In 1964, shortly before leaving Scripps, Roger Revelle appointed a committee to consider the “Island,” which became formalized as first, the Offshore Research Facility, and later, the Experimental Inshore Oceanographic Facility. Early in 1967, through the Foundation for Ocean Research and the city of San Diego, funds were provided for preliminary design studies of a research platform. As William A. Nierenberg pointed out:
Whatever measurements one wants to make, whatever operations one would like to conduct, however one wishes to employ a man in the sea, the greatest fraction of the effort and the greatest source of danger is at the air-sea interface….We visualize an Island connected by causeway to shore sufficiently far out past the surf zone and that much closer to the canyon area, so designed with particular installations and instrumentation, that the problem of inserting a man or his equipment into the sea and retrieving them become relatively trivial operations, thus reserving the maximum of the effort for engineering or scientific work.[2]
In November 1967, Robert H. Oversmith became the project engineer, and, with the engineering firm of Sverdrup and Parcel and Associates,[*]
[*] Headed by Leif J. Sverdrup, brother of Harald U. Sverdrup.
he prepared a preliminary design of a horseshoe-shaped laboratory, 300 feet long and 200 feet wide, to be located adjacent to Scripps submarineSome Scripps researchers were beginning to question the cost involved, especially in relation to the research benefits. A poll in 1972 showed that “only a very small fraction [of the Scripps staff] would make intensive use of the facility, two-thirds would use it only occasionally, if at all.” The “Island” was shelved. Douglas L. Inman, one of the early proponents, commented that “not building the island made us learn how to develop the technology of working in the open ocean, at which we have been very successful.”
THE ADMINISTRATION
Throughout the years of greatest expansion of the Scripps Institution, the dominant figure on campus was Roger Revelle, a man who has been described as physically and temperamentally designed for the study of the deep oceans. Physically he is big — six feet, four inches tall, and with oversized hands and feet. Temperamentally he is broad: he has a wide grasp of knowledge and assimilates material quickly. There is a quiet self-confidence about this big grave man, yet also humility, and he listens with interest and sympathy.
Revelle's history at Scripps, as noted throughout these pages, was a long one: from 1931 to 1964, from graduate student to director and dean.
He was born on 7 March 1909, in Seattle, where his father practiced law. When he was seven, the family moved to Pasadena, California. Revelle attended Pomona College in Claremont, where he intended to study journalism, but
After earning his Ph.D. at Scripps in 1936, with a dissertation on the Carnegie cores, Revelle spent a year in Europe, chiefly at the Geophysical Institute in Norway, and returned to Scripps as an instructor. In 1941 he became an assistant professor and joined the U.S. Naval Reserve, through which he was assigned to duty at UCDWR (see chapter 2). As he told it long afterward:
…a year and a half later [Commander Rawson] Bennett [head of the sonar design section of the Bureau of Ships] arranged for my transfer to Washington, ostensibly to the Hydrographic Office. Unfortunately, the Hydrographer, a charming and gentle admiral, was somewhat out of touch. He could not think of anything for an oceanographer to do, except to examine some old echo soundings that showed shoals and banks off the west coast of Central America where later ship crossings had found only deep water. I appealed to Bennett to give me a job that might be more relevant-to the real world, and he set me up as officer in charge of what amounted to an oceanographic subsection in the Bureau of Ships….From this vantage point I was able to help guide and foster the Navy's growing involvement in oceanography
― 447 ―throughout the latter part of the war and the early postwar period.[3]
Immediately after the war, in the U.S. Naval Reserve, by then with the rank of Commander, Revelle served as head of the geophysics branch of the Office of Naval Research, and was in charge of the oceanographic investigations of Operation Crossroads in 1946 (see chapter 15). Much later he recounted his return to Scripps in 1948:
Harald Sverdrup, the little great man who had already begun to transform the institution, felt he must return to Norway, and that is when a struggle began as to who should be his successor. Harald Sverdrup and Carl Eckart were determined that I should have the job, even though I was still in Washington, working for the Office of Naval Research. But there was a great deal of equally determined opposition.
It was resolved by Carl [Eckart] agreeing to become the Director; he asked me to be his Associate Director. Although I didn't realize it at the time (he never let on), this was actually a ploy on Carl's part, with Harald's encouragement, to create a situation in which the opposition to my appointment might be diminished. As soon as Carl judged that this had happened, he resigned, and I took his place, first as Acting Director and then as Director.
After I assumed the job, I rapidly gained a reputation as a poor administrator. But in some ways, compared to Carl, I was an administrative genius. The difficulty was that he took the job too seriously. No detail was too small, no problem too unimportant, for him to attack it with meticulous and elaborate care, giving attention to every detail, and examining every
― 448 ―alternative. The rigor in definition and precision of thought, and the inability to leave any loose strings untied, which were his great strengths as a scientist, were just what was not needed as an administrator. I remember he spent a good deal of time trying to tidy the Scripps Institution up; it was quite a messy place in those days and this was a completely frustrating job for him.[4]
Revelle, as the director, had his defenders and his detractors. He also had big ideas, which he was eager to carry through, sometimes too quickly. “I think I'm undiplomatic,” he once said. “I just bull things through.”[5] Eckart, however, felt that Revelle had “the ability to put knowledge and enthusiasm together in words that excite people.”[6] Not always a good speaker, he was nevertheless at times almost an orator on the possibilities in oceanography during his Scripps days. His enthusiasm came through in a mellow resonant tone in measured, sometimes hesitant, phrases.
Big projects appealed to Revelle, and he was intent upon keeping Scripps in the forefront while other institutions were moving into oceanography. The most intense booster for the institution, Revelle was also the keenest recruiter — of people whose imaginative approach to their discipline appealed to him and who could contribute to oceanography. Some of these arrived, fired with his enthusiasm, to find that they did not even have an office, certainly not a laboratory. Assistant Director Jeffery Frautschy or other campus officials would scurry to find them space and funds.
Revelle had — and has — a great respect for the capabilities of science in helping to solve world problems. While at Scripps, he was drawn into a great many international committees: various UNESCO appointments; Atoms for Peace; the International Geophysical Year; the International
Through his committee obligations, Revelle knew a great many oceanographers throughout the world. He had a way of persuading them to take on projects that required a great deal of time and energy. An example is the summary treatise, The Sea: Ideas and Observations on Progress in the Study of the Seas.[7] The classic text of 1942, The Oceans, by Sverdrup, Johnson, and Fleming, was indeed somewhat out of date twenty years later. Maurice N. Hill of the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics in Cambridge, England, said: “Revelle suggested that we produce another such volume containing ideas and observations concerning the work accomplished during the twenty years since this masterpiece. It was suggested that this new work should not attempt to be a textbook but a balanced account of how oceanography, and the thoughts of oceanographers, were moving.”[8] Hill served as general editor of the new work until his death in 1966, when Arthur E. Maxwell of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution took on the task. The first volume of the treatise came out in 1962, “from the pens of many authors,” noted Hill. By 1974 the project had reached five volumes (in six books) in an invaluable summary of all the vast field of oceanography except marine biology. Naturally, many of the contributors were Scrippsians.
Revelle has always had an impressive impact:
…At a sleepy meeting in Paris, a big slouching man rose to his feet and began to speak of geology at sea [wrote Daniel Behrman]. His voice and presence filled the committee room.
He told of oily uncomfortable ships, of the great grinding mills that destroy the sea floor in the deep trenches, of the maps of this realm that were no better than the land maps of the seventeenth century. More than any other single figure, Revelle is responsible for the introduction of oceanography into public affairs. He began as a marine geologist and geophysicist; he has evolved into a statesman of science.[9]
At home base during the 1950s Revelle began envisioning a new kind of university, one that started at the top. He carried on a long campaign, and he gained some political foes along the way; but the result was the establishment, first, of the Institute of Technology and Engineering, then the School of Science and Engineering, housed on the Scripps campus from 1958 to 1963, and from that the entire campus of the University of California at San Diego.[*]
[*] The campus was first known as the University of California at La Jolla, and one Scripps dissertation came out under that name, in 1961. But pressure from the rest of the city led to changing the name. La Jolla is, after all, within the city of San Diego.
Revelle has credited Carl Eckart as being his co-worker and goad throughout the early planning, and he has pointed out that many others also devoted a great deal of time to founding the new campus, but the drive was certainly Revelle's. The innovative features were the multi-college concept within the one big campus, and opening the college at the graduate-student level first, taking off essentially from Scripps Institution into other fields of science and later,As Walter Munk said: “It was an interesting experiment to watch a bunch of sailors start a university.”[10] In addition to a great many hours of planning, those sailors contributed the dormitory names for the first college — for noted exploration ships[*]
[*] Helen Raitt, a participant on Capricorn Expedition, compiled the list of dormitory names.
; they donated the trident symbol to UCSD; and they awarded the name, Revelle College, for the sailor who started it all.Ten years after Revelle's idea had become a full campus of the university, Chancellor William J. McGill looked back at its founding:
This is the end of an era at the University of California, San Diego. The era began with Sputnik and with the national panic which that little beeping Soviet satellite created. Sputnik's effects on American education were on the whole remarkably positive, and they were in full ascendancy when UCSD was born a decade ago. Only in such an era could the extraordinary beginnings of UCSD have been conceived, much less attempted, and only in such an era could the attempt have been brought off successfully. It was an era of unparalleled national investment in education, especially in science. The Russian Sputnik fathered many new American university campuses and caused the sudden dramatic expansion of many old ones. It was a time of bold educational planning, of sudden affluence for professors, and a pervading sense of limitless vistas of academic excellence, both here and throughout the country — but especially here.[11]
Revelle's last few years at Scripps Institution were interrupted times at his home base. From October 1961 to
Revelle is remembered fondly by those who have been long at Scripps, one of whom said just after his departure: “It is a great tribute to Roger, I think, that he has retained the cordial regard and friendship even of those who have felt that his shortcomings as an administrator were serious.” Part of his popularity was no doubt due to his enthusiasm for oceanography just as that field was undergoing its greatest expansion. Revelle knew and liked oily ships, from the 64-foot Scripps and 94-foot E. W. Scripps to the 213-foot Argo, and he understood oceanographers, himself included. “The chief motivation of most oceanographers I know,” he once said, “is the sheer excitement of finding out what has never been known before.”[12] He went on to speak of what oceanography could accomplish for the world, but, as always when Revelle spoke, his theme was “Oceanography is fun.” That phrase, which he used oft-times, has been joked about — almost every time the seas start sloshing over the fantail or the winch jams — but the joking is done by men who knew Revelle at Scripps and who go back to sea themselves again and again. As one of those said later, “When Roger was around, things were always exciting.”
Revelle's fiftieth birthday is remembered fondly too. The idea of a surprise party for the occasion of 7 March 1959 was mainly John A. Knauss's, who provided his house for the event and established the theme of Cannery Row. (A
“The conspiracy grew and there were visits back and forth” — as people thought of ingenious gifts and ideas. The Shors' house across the street from Knausses' was decorated with “models” to represent the Bear Flag Restaurant in Cannery Row. All of Revelle's family, except himself, knew of the event, so it was arranged that Roger and Ellen would have dinner at their daughter and son-in-law's (George and Anne Shumway's) house, about a block away from Knausses', while the party assembled. At 8:30 the crowd strolled to the Shumways', where Scripps police officer Howard (“Mac”) McKelvey led off with his siren, and Roger was summoned forth — to his complete surprise. Serenaded by the wheeze of a calliope (played by chemist-musician Charles D. Keeling), he was seated upon a litter and borne up the street on the shoulders of an honor guard, amid confetti and banners, to be deposited in the midst of the festivities.
It was a great party. The gifts represented Scripps ingenuity at its best. The punch was remarkable. And it seemed as if everyone at Scripps was there. The finale was the arrival of a giant box, which opened to reveal “Texas Bobbie” Roberts (a striptease artist, about six feet tall). Revelle vanished into the box and the two were carried off triumphantly. Texas Bobbie's breathless comment later was: “I never knew there was so much to learn about oceanography!”
Nan Limbaugh (left) and Thea Schultze, at the farewell party for the Revelles in the Hydraulics Laboratory, 1964.
One who deserves a great deal of credit for having kept Scripps running smoothly during Revelle's absences is
Fred N. Spiess, director of the Marine Physical Laboratory, stepped in as acting director of the institution in 1961. This native Californian, born in Oakland in 1919, had graduated from Berkeley in physics in 1941 and had immediately entered Navy submarine school. During World War II he made thirteen submarine patrols. Spiess received his M.S. at Harvard in communication engineering and his Ph. D. at Berkeley in physics. In 1952 he joined the staff of MPL and in 1958 he became director of that laboratory.
When Revelle left in 1964, Spiess became director of Scripps, partly as an interim measure while a second chancellor for UCSD was being sought. Spiess helped complete the negotiations for establishing the Physiological Research Laboratory (see chapter 8), and he expanded the programs in biology and chemistry at the institution. His valuable contributions to the development of Flip and the Deep-Tow instrument package are cited in chapter 4.
In July 1965, William A. Nierenberg became director of Scripps Institution. Physicist Nierenberg was born in New York city in 1919. He received his B.S. from City College of New York (with one year at the University of Paris), and his Ph. D. from Columbia University. He was a participant in the Manhattan Project during World War II. After the war he taught at the University of Michigan, and in 1950 became professor of physics at Berkeley. In 1953-54, on leave from Berkeley, he was Project Director of Columbia University's Hudson Laboratories, then returned to Berkeley until his appointment at Scripps. From 1960 to 1962 he served in Paris as the Assistant Secretary General for Scientific Affairs of NATO, and he was simultaneously Professor Associé at the University of Paris.
At Berkeley Nierenberg established the Atomic Beam Laboratory on the main campus and the Atomic Beam
This hoarse-voiced, staccato-talking man is disconcertingly able to talk and listen simultaneously. His interest in ocean research and his pride in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography are unending. He is a strong advocate of using the right — and best — equipment for the job at hand, which he often ensures by negotiating for the necessary funding. The task has not been easy, as the money available for increasingly expensive marine research has become much more difficult to obtain during the 1960s and 1970s.
One of the earliest programs that Nierenberg advocated when he became director was computers for the larger Scripps ships. The Deep-Tow group of the Marine Physical Laboratory actually carried the first Scripps computer system — a PDP-8 computer — to sea on the Thomas Washington in the fall of 1966, for use in calculating navigation for the acoustic transponder and to provide a digital-data logging capability for the magnetometer and the precision echo-sounder of the Deep-Tow system. In the following year an IBM 1800 Data Acquisition and Control System — the “Red Baron” — was installed on the Thomas Washington, through joint sponsorship of Scripps and International Business Machines. At first IBM provided personnel to service the system, but Scripps soon decided to hire its own technicians, engineers, and programmers, to service the shipboard equipment and programs and also to participate in other underway projects. The Shipboard Computer
As Nierenberg said in 1969: “In many ways I feel that I am reliving my life, watching the development of the computerized ship and its effect on oceanographic research,” for he had been deeply involved in the development of the applications of computers to nuclear physics and particle-physics research while at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.
William A. Nierenberg (right) and Ed Coughran (then with IBM) inspecting the new shipboard computer system, 1966.
Nierenberg also established the Applied Ocean Engineering Laboratory at Scripps in 1969, under the financial support of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. For this unit a steering committee of distinguished scientists was established, to select significant projects in advanced engineering marine research. Marion W. Johnson was the project manager until 1971, when Gerard H. Fisher succeeded him; both of them had previously been at Columbia University's Hudson Laboratories. The several programs supported by ARPA at Scripps for several years were: instrumentation and installation of mid-ocean buoys, under the direction of John D. Isaacs and in a cooperative project with the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University; research on stable floating platforms, under the direction of Fred N.
Also established at Nierenberg's instigation was the Center for Marine Affairs, which began in 1970 under a grant from the Ford Foundation. Warren S. Wooster first headed the group, which brought together specialists from the social sciences, law, government, and oceanography to explore the conditions for freedom of oceanic research and for determining international pollution policy. In 1973 the center, then headed by Gerald L. Wick, was placed in the Institute of Marine Resources, and, in cooperation with Mexican agencies, also undertook a study of long-range marine resource management issues related to desert coasts, with emphasis on the Baja California coastline.
In service to the nation and its oceanography, Nierenberg presided as chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere (NACOA) from October 1971 until February 1975, and he has continued as a member
Nierenberg was also chairman of the Department of Defense Advisory Board for Project AGILE from 1969 until 1972. He has served as an Advisor-at-Large to the Department of State, as a member of the United States Commission for UNESCO, the JASON Divison of the Institute for Defense Analyses, the National Academy of Sciences' Space Applications Board, the California Advisory Commission on Ocean Resources, the President's Science and Technology Advisory Group, the Advisory Committee on Law of the Sea, and a number of other national and international panels and boards. He sometimes saves committee-commuting time by piloting an airplane himself to and from meetings, having become a proficient pilot during the 1970s.
Like most of his predecessors as director, Nierenberg has tried to organize the diversified marine institution into a logical administrative unit, and he has admitted that Scripps doesn't lend itself to being organized.
For years the administrative organization of Scripps has been joked about (“the only state institution that is run by the inmates”), and occasionally deplored. “The Scripps Institution has never been planned,” wrote former director Eckart in 1965, “and many of the organizational features have just happened.” Perhaps the most honest appraisal of the organization appeared in the thin volume, Manual of Rules and Procedures for the institution, in 1951:
Organization Chart of the SIO
To be supplied later
An outsider who was speaking kindly of the institution noted, in 1973, that it has “an organizational and management structure that has remained relaxed and flexible. The very informality of its management has been an important factor in its past accomplishments.”
The flexibility has resulted from the institution's dual role as a graduate teaching school and a research organization. Appointments overlap within the research divisions and the organized laboratories, with inevitable confusion to the uninitiated (and sometimes to the accounting office). The academic staff includes both a professorial series and a parallel research series — some of whom also teach classes.
Over the years Scrippsians have grumbled at rules and procedures imposed from “above” — Berkeley, or UCLA (to which Scripps was attached for administrative academic affairs until UCSD was established), or UCSD. Spiess deplored in 1962: “We are already tending in the large scale administration of the University to rely too readily on use of ratios, formulae, IBM machines and broadly applied rules as substitutes for direct knowledge and sensitivity on the part of those who must make decisions.” The freedom created originally by the awareness that Scripps was an independent research laboratory from 1903 until 1912, and furthered by the distance from Berkeley to Scripps during the early years, has never been readily yielded. When aggravated, Scripps officials are inclined to suggest that a certain recommended action might be contrary to the original deed of transfer in 1912 and to remind reformers that certain university policies are stated by the Regents of the University to be “not applicable to…the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.”[*]
[*] Similarly exempted from certain policies, as defined in 1961, were the Agricultural Experiment Station, the Lick Observatory at Mt. Hamilton, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratories at Berkeley and Livermore, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.
And memories at Scripps are long.Example: Sverdrup was sharply criticized in the spring of 1947 by President Sproul for not having notified him of the early negotiations to establish the Marine Life Reserch program. The reprimand was undeserved, for Sverdrup had indeed provided the information, but others in the university administration had failed to get it to Sproul. Sverdrup received an apology.
Example: Revelle drew a reprimand from Sproul in 1954 over the negotiations to transfer the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offices from Stanford to Scripps, which Revelle had discussed fully with Sproul in person earlier. “I believe what we have done so far is kosher,” replied Revelle, “and a necessary preliminary to formal negotiations.” He was allowed to proceed.
Example: In the mid-1950s one of the university regents suggested that the Scripps Institution should be moved to Santa Barbara, possibly over a twenty-year period. The university campus there was in the process of moving from its downtown Santa Barbara location to its present site nine miles west of the city on the shore. Scripps administrators were appalled. Revelle's masterful reply (mostly derived by Frautschy) logically explained the impossibility — even absurdity — of such a disruption to Scripps. The lack of ship berthing and of sources for marine supplies and equipment, the absence of cooperating Navy facilities, the shortage of available personnel in the smaller city, and even the “somewhat poorer weather conditions” of Santa Barbara were cited as “serious disadvantages,” as well as the expense of moving equipment and personnel and the tragedy of breaking off the half-century record of scientific observations from the Scripps pier. It was even noted that the Santa Barbara faculty might not indeed “welcome the influx of a rather specialized laboratory with a budget and staff twice as big as their own.” The cost of transfer was boldly estimated as
SOCIAL ACTIVITIES
The formality that was typical during T. Wayland Vaughan's era at Scripps began to change in the 1930s, and the changes continued after the war. Shirt sleeves became more common than suit coats; Hawaiian and Tahitian shirts were special favorites. Military-style crew haircuts were in vogue after World War II and, until the late 1960s, only an occasional beard was seen, usually an indication that the “bearded wonder” had recently returned from a long sea trip. The lunch area became known as “Bikini plaza.”
Almost everyone addressed one another by first name, from director to graduate student. As a crew member said, “It's kind of hard to call a guy ‘Mister’ when you've passed the salt to him at mess aboard ship.”[13] The students, many of them veterans, were part of the extended family, and for a long time, as it was not uncommon for a student to take six to ten years to complete his studies and his dissertation. Students were often expedition leaders, on long as well as short cruises.
For many years, the women's group, Oceanids, was the tone-setter for campus social activities, and was also the service group for special events and visitors. In the 1940s Mrs. Francis B. (“Mom”) Sumner had been the leader of what was first known as “Scripps Wives,” a sewing and social group that devoted much time to projects for servicemen. In 1946, according to Helen (Mrs. Russell W.) Raitt, “a group of enthusiastic young student wives took the initiative and organized a wives' club,” which was also endorsed by the faculty wives. In April 1952, Mrs. John S. (Sally)
The organization was open to all women connected with the institution: staff wives and student wives, women employees, and women students. Not all eligibles attended the activities, of course, but there was a broad scattering of regulars throughout all disciplines and all ranks. The members provided and served refreshments at all special occasions on campus, served as ushers for campus-sponsored lectures, and hosted a Christmas party (originally for the children, in a carry-over of the custom established by Gudrun Sverdrup), an Easter-egg hunt, dances, potluck dinners, and some lectures. Funds for these events were usually raised through ticket sales to a night at the Old Globe Theatre. The organization set up special interest groups — book review, bridge, folk dancing, sewing, and others. Helen Raitt and Carol Schultz were the prime movers for starting Oceanids' information-filled monthly newsletter, “Bear Facts,” in 1962. Newcomers were welcomed cordially, as potential cookie-bakers and ushers as well as new members of the oceanographic family. Lonesome wives whose husbands were at sea could find news items, a respite from loneliness, and a word of sympathetic understanding at Oceanids' gatherings. The organization has become the women's group of the entire UCSD campus.
Members of Oceanids plus many staff members contributed to the performance “Flip” in 1960; this original
[*] “Flip II” and “Flip III” were presented in 1961 and 1962, but they were not so thoroughly oceanic in theme.
A much-appreciated welcoming custom was established by Edith Nierenberg in 1965, when her husband became director: a coffee party and introduction to the campus for all new wives and women employees of Scripps. The event usually has included a walking tour of several of the institution's laboratories, to provide a glimpse of the variety of researches. The hostesses — who are “oldtimers” — find that the gathering helps them understand their campus better.
A well-attended summer event throughout the 1950s was the family beach picnic, with games and prizes and beer. This was enthusiastically sponsored by the local chapter of the California State Employees Association, of which Ben Cox was a longtime official. (The annual beach picnic that was resumed in 1969 is hosted by graduate students and funded anonymously.)
Town and gown turned out to celebrate the University's Charter Day every March, often at Scripps in the form of an open house and public lecture. The 1951 Charter Day presented the dedication of Vaughan Aquarium-Museum (see chapter 9). In 1952 the Horizon and the Crest carried a hundred visitors out to sea for a demonstration of oceanographic equipment at work; to the delight of Carl L.
In 1957 a display of oceanographic equipment was set out on the Scripps pier for visitors to view, and a continuous film program was offered in the library. The institution's first robed academic procession distinguished the evening ceremony that year, when Robert Maynard Hutchins addressed an overflow crowd on the subject of “Science and People.” And in 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt, 75 years old, erect and firm-voiced, exhorted an even larger audience in San Diego's Russ Auditorium: “We have to wake up, change our views, and realize this is a different world today.”
It was the world of Sputnik and space — and “inner space,” as oceanography was beginning to be called. In that era, while envying the money being expended in the space program, Scripps scientists were wont to observe: “We know less about the ocean's bottom than the moon's behind.”[*]
[*] This remark, which Bob Fisher believes may have been first used by Athelstan F. Spilhaus, appeared many times in speech and print by oceanographers, often oddly bowdlerized. In 1940, long before Sputnik, Harald Sverdrup wrote: “…we live on the shores bordering the largest ocean on earth, an ocean less charted than the surface of the moon.” (“Research in Oceanography,” California Monthly, December 1940)
The campus in 1949.
The campus in 1963.
Scripps and its offspring, UCSD, in November 1975. Photo by Phil Stotts.
Other special events on campus brought out the institution's families and many townspeople. On 22 April 1952, a sizable crowd greeted the Galathea, called “one of the world's outstanding pieces of oceanographic scientific equipment.” The 80-meter-long frigate was homeward bound on the Danish Deep Sea Round the World Expedition when she paused for several hours off the Scripps pier. Visitors went out in smallboats to consume Danish pastries (and Carlsberg beer, the Carlsberg Foundation being the chief financial support of the two-year expedition), and to admire the oceanographic accoutrements, especially the giant winch that could handle seven miles of cable. Expedition leader Anton F. Bruun told of gathering great numbers of sea anemones, sea cucumbers, worms, clams, and crustaceans from ocean depths greater than six miles in the Philippine Trench.
In October 1958 the campus greeted newly inaugurated University President Clark Kerr, who reviewed the Scripps fleet, which was emblazoned in the university's colors, blue and gold. With some tricky maneuvering, Horizon, Spencer F. Baird, Stranger, Paolina-T, T-441, Buoy Boat, and even minute Macrocystis lined up, bow toward the beach, just beyond the Scripps pier, to honor the visitor.[*]
[*] Only Orca was unable to participate, as she was in the shipyard.
The end of the International Geophysical Year in 1958 was climaxed at Scripps by the visit of the Soviet research ship Vityaz to San Francisco. Americans were still chagrined at the success of Sputnik I in 1957. What might Soviet scientists be capable of doing in oceanography? For the Vityaz visit a flurry of letters began in October 1958, from Revelle to IGY and state department officials, and finally mutual invitations by radio flitted between the institution and the ship (which was not allowed to visit San Diego). When the 363-foot vessel sailed into San Francisco on 18
December, she was met by a large crowd that included 20 Scripps scientists who had flown up to ask questions and to take the grand tour. The following day the Horizon sailed into San Francisco, bearing some of the Scripps seismic group to join the fun. The American oceanographers were much relieved to find that Soviet methods of exploring the ocean were similar to, and no better than, their own. John Tyler summed it up: “Walk into any [Vityaz] lab and you will find differences in technique and in detail, with some ideas you like and some you don't like.”[15] The great size of the Soviet research ship, its twelve separate laboratories, a scientific party of 65 people, and the many concurrent programs were considered by Scripps people to be generally not advantages (especially as all participants were expected to stay for the entire expedition, many months long). From San Francisco ten of the Soviet oceanographers were flown to Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego. The guests were hosted for dinner, in twos and threes, at Scripps homes, with other staff families as additional guests — a form of entertainment that especially appealed to the Soviets, who asked many questions about American homes and family life. Their own interpreters, a few Russian-speaking Scrippsians, and considerable arm-waving kept the conversations flowing.
On 27 September 1966, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey visited Scripps Institution, in his capacity as chairman of the National Council on Marine Resources and Engineering Development. He was provided with what he called “a very exciting tour” of the institution and some of its novel equipment, after which he declared: “We're on the threshold of a new age of exploration….Our dreams for the oceans are not those of the poets and the prophets. They are practical dreams….We intend to develop the bountiful resources of the sea to serve man's pressing needs.”
In the same capacity three years later, on 23 October 1969, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew arrived at Scripps for what newsman Bryant Evans called “probably the shortest and most concentrated survey course in oceanography in history.”[16] En route to a Palm Springs vacation, Agnew was on the campus for only an hour, and was shown sediment cores taken by the Deep Sea Drilling Project and deep-sea tide capsules of IGPP. Campus officials had only scanty warning of the brief visit, but Director Nierenberg was able to fly home from England (via Washington, D.C.) to welcome the visitor. (On the airplane he spilled soup on his only necktie and had to borrow one from Carl L. Hubbs — patterned, typically, in whales.)
After very elaborate preparations, Emperor Hirohito of Japan visited Scripps Institution on 9 October 1975, during his first trip to the United States. Biologist Hirohito was very interested in the marine specimens set out for his inspection, and was presented with a fine specimen of the “living fossil” Neopilina collected on Southtow Expedition in 1972.
The brunt of arranging details of the visits of such distinguished visitors fell to the Scripps branch of the Public Affairs Office, headed by R. Nelson Fuller from 1965. For some years that office has been responsible for providing information on Scripps researches to news media and for handling official visits to the institution in cooperation with the director's office, as well as answering requests for oceanographic information that arrive at the institution by letter and telephone by the dozens each week. Since the mid-1960s the Scripps Public Affairs Office has also coordinated, edited, and published the annual reports of the institution.
Until the late 1940s, the publicity duties of the institution were handled chiefly by the director's office, aided by various staff members. For example, during the 1930s a
In 1950 Thomas A. (“Lon”) Manar joined the staff to prepare the reports of the Marine Life Research program. In the latter 1950s he became the public information officer for Scripps, and handled coordination with the news media as well as institution-sponsored events, such as Charter Day programs. For some years Scripps offered a lecture series annually in cooperation with the La Jolla Theatre and Arts Foundation, which required considerable coordination on details by Manar. When UCSD was established, the Scripps public information office came under the auspices of the upper campus.
And Now…
In 1940 Harald Sverdrup wrote:
Oceanography may sometime in the distant future give us a many-colored picture of the oceans, but at the present time we have only started working with a large and intriguing puzzle game, each one of us trying
― 475 ―to put together pieces of similar color, hoping that all the fragments can be joined into one complete picture. It is as yet far too early to guess what this picture will look like, but it is not difficult to visualize oceanography as a unified field of research.[17]
The picture is not yet complete, but a great many pieces of the puzzle have indeed been put into place. The unified field of research has grown into a complexity of institutions and disciplines. It utilizes equipment that Sverdrup could not have envisioned 40 years ago: sea-going computer systems, satellites for navigation, research platforms that stand on end, electron microscopes, devices that glide from the depths of the sea when called.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography no longer stands alone, but shares its field with dozens of other oceanographic research organizations. While there is a certain rivalry amongst them, there is also a great deal of cordial cooperation. In fact, the trend in oceanography since the latter 1960s has been toward multi-institutional research projects. As Nierenberg said in 1971: “The developing attitude on the part of government managers is the growing dependence on the ‘larger’ programs. These are important programs that require major concentrations of manpower and money because of either synoptic or engineering considerations.”[18]
Such projects — which simultaneously involve a number of researchers at several institutions — have occupied a great deal of the director's time and that of the principal investigators: the Deep Sea Drilling Program, discussed in chapter 12; developing Norpax, which expanded into a major research effort from the North Pacific Buoy Project; establishing Geosecs, which has drawn in a wide range of oceanographic and meteorologic researchers; the Alpha Helix program, which has attracted hundreds of researchers
“These projects,” continued Nierenberg, “make extraordinary demands on the limited manpower of the oceanographic community, but they are very rewarding in their results and applications.”
That seems to be it: Oceanography is not only fun, as Revelle said; it is also very rewarding.
Director Nierenberg driving Emperor Hirohito of Japan to the end of the Scripps pier, 9 October 1975.
NOTES
1. San Diego Union, 10 May 1960.
2. Letter of 11 May 1967.
3. “The Age of Innocence and War in Oceanography,” Oceans Magazine, Vol. I, No. 3 (March 1969), 10.
4. Talk at memorial service for Carl Eckart, 3 November 1973.
5. Mary Harrington Hall, “Revelle,” San Diego & Point Magazine, Vol. 13, No. 7 (May 1961), 43.
6. Ibid.
7. New York and London, Interscience Publishers.
8. The Sea, vii.
9. The New World of the Oceans (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 398.
10. “The Nth Campus Problem,” Bear Facts (May 1966), 2.
11. “A University in Motion,” published by Friends of the Library, UCSD, 1969, 6.
12. In Andrew Hamilton, “The Skipper at Scripps,” Think Magazine (November-December 1963), 13.
13. Ibid., 12.
14. Bear Facts (January 1969), 1.
15. Summary by T. A. Manar, 15 January 1959.
16. San Diego Union, 24 October 1969.
17. “The Unity of the Sciences of the Sea,” Sigma Xi Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Autumn 1940), 105.
18. SIO Annual Report, 1971, 7.