Ocean Frontier

(See Cover) In the uneasy years before the start of World War II, a Navy destroyer nosed through the warm waters off Guantanamo, Cuba. An experimental sonar gadget pinged steadily. It had worked perfectly on other occasions. But here in the Trop ics, it saw targets that were not there.

It missed targets that were there. The best Navy brains were baffled. So an offi cer was dispatched to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the shoul der of Cape Cod.

Down from Woods Hole came the U.S.'s only full-fledged oceanographic vessel, the trim ketch Atlantis. Led by a tall, smiling young Harvard professor with the wonderful name of Columbus O'Donnell Iselin II, Woods Hole's oceanographers began dunking thermometers in the water, quickly spotted the Navy's trouble. It was just a question of temperatures, they explained. Tropical sun had heated the water to a depth of 50 ft. The sound waves were bent by this temperature gradient, hiding a sub as effectively as if it were behind a hill. Equipped with a gadget of Woods Hole's devising, a bathythermograph, many a U.S. sub saved itself during World War II by finding a temperature "hill" in the ocean and slip ping behind it.

Wartime Romance. This momentous incident began a wartime romance be tween the U.S. Navy and oceanographers, whom most Government officials had until then considered a curious tribe of men messing about with sounding leads and little bottles of water samples. In the next few years, oceanographers at Woods Hole and its Pacific counterpart, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, Calif., trained hundreds of Navy officers--instructing sub men in how to use the sea's geography and mobile anat omy for concealment, teaching destroyer men how to trail their quarry through the sea's jungles.

Oceanographers mapped currents, furnished charts to air-rescue ships looking for downed airmen. Others analyzed the waves coming ashore at La Jolla and at Martha's Vineyard, Mass., were able to predict surf conditions for the landings on Sicily and Normandy. By studying the biology of barnacles, they produced a new, plastic antifouling paint that cut the Navy's fuel bill 10%.

New Frontier. With the ocean now transformed from a barrier to a new and menacing frontier from which guided missiles could be launched upon U.S. cities, the Navy's concern with oceanography has expanded. That concern has brought U.S. oceanographers money, men and resources they never dreamed of before the war, made their specialty perhaps the fastest-growing science in the world. The oceanographic fleet has grown to twelve ocean-going vessels backed by a swarm of small craft and expanding shore establishments full of expensive apparatus. The Russians have proved equally alert to the ocean's dangers and possibilities, have 14 fulltime oceanographic vessels roaming the seas.

What's more, other scientists have abruptly rediscovered the ocean. Geographers and geophysicists now realize that most of the world's surface lies beneath the ocean, and can now recite glibly the truism that the bottom of the ocean is not as well known as the near side of the moon. Discoveries follow every voyage. Under the Pacific, oceanographers have found deep trenches, at least one of them big enough to contain seven Grand Canyons, and a 1,000-mile range of high mountains that no one knew existed until just one year ago.

Above its still mysterious floor, the ocean is not homogeneous but is a vast, intricate structure of separate and distinct layers, each with its own character and individuality. In some places the layers curl up and mix; in other places they do not. Through the layers mighty rivers stream on largely unknown courses, often flowing in opposite directions close to one another. Exploration of this huge anatomy is just beginning. Realizing ever more clearly that most weather originates over the oceans, meteorologists are studying its mighty motions as the key to the world's climate. A change in the direction of the flow of an ocean current can change the weather for an area miles inland, shift the course of hurricanes, bring drought to fertile lands or rains to arid deserts. The ocean as a whole is a huge heat-exchange engine carrying heat from the boilers of the Tropics to the condensers of the Poles.

In a world going through the throes of a population explosion, earth scientists have rediscovered the sea, remember that the ocean contains the bulk of the earth's life, and that it is probably capable of producing more food than all of the earth's land. Says one oceanographer: "The ocean represents an inner space as important as outer space, but different."

Curiosity & Avocation. The man who best exemplifies the growth of U.S. oceanography into a major science is Columbus O'Donnell Iselin II himself. Since the prewar days when he solved the Navy's temperature problems off Guantanamo, he has been longtime director of Woods Hole, seen its fulltime staff grow from a prewar 24 to the present 300, its fleet from one ship to five, is now its senior oceanographer.

Born in 1904 to a New York socialite family of Swiss origin, Columbus came to his specialty by a combination of inheritance and intellectual curiosity. The family vocation was banking, but its avocation was sailing. His great-uncle, C. Oliver Iselin, was four times a defender of the America's Cup. ("He could afford it --he married two rich women," says Columbus.) His father, Lewis Iselin, sailed less gaudily but no less enthusiastically, racing Star boats on Long Island Sound.

At the family's summer home in New Rochelle, N.Y., Columbus learned from the family carpenter how to use tools, built his first boat (called the Sponge, because it leaked) at the age of eleven. When he was in prep school he was spending school vacations sailing in waters as dangerous as the Bay of Fundy.

When he entered Harvard in 1922, he concentrated at first on mathematics because he thought it had something to do with the banking business. But the sea was in his blood, and in his junior year he discovered Professor Henry Bigelow, who was then officially a zoologist but whose real interest was oceanography. Columbus gave up all thought of banking. He ordered the schooner Chance built in Nova Scotia, on graduation set off in her for the icy coast of Labrador with a crew of college students on his first oceanographic trip. The student-scientists fraternized with Eskimos, exploded firecrackers in one another's beds, and otherwise acted their ages, but the Chance, loaded with real scientific apparatus, came back with useful data on the Labrador Current that chills the New England coast as far south as Cape Cod.

Report for $3,000,000. Iselin's demonstration that the little Chance (length, 72 ft.; displacement, 37 tons) could do serious scientific work was useful to Professor Bigelow, who was writing a report on oceanography for the National Academy of Sciences. Relieved to find that very large yearly sums for big vessels were not necessary, the Rockefeller Foundation gave Bigelow $3,000,000 to outfit and endow an oceanographic institute. Bigelow set up his institute in Woods Hole--a small town on a narrow strait ("The Hole") connecting Buzzards Bay with Vineyard Sound. The ocean is always a presence there, flowing around the town and through its small, snug harbors. Grey fog often drifts through the town, smelling of the sea, and sometimes hurricanes slam ashore. No better place exists to keep an oceanographer pleasantly mindful of his business.

Iselin helped Bigelow plan the Atlantis, which is still the only U.S. vessel to be designed as an oceanographic ship. The Atlantis was built in Copenhagen, and Iselin sailed her back to Woods Hole as her first skipper.

Rugged Science. A steel-hulled, 142-ft. ketch (tall mainmast forward, shorter mizzenmast aft) with berths for nine scientists and a crew of 17, the Atlantis was still a very small ship to cope for months with the North Atlantic in all its ferocious moods. She had a rather feeble engine, but sails were her main reliance. Such a laboratory makes oceanography a rugged science. While the little ship rolls and pitches, the scientists work round the clock, snatching bits of food and sleep during quiet intervals in their experiments. Dress is informal. In the Tropics, oceanographers favor ragged shorts or underdrawers; on North Atlantic cruises the men are generally cold and wet, and during the first week at sea most of them get seasick. "The best seagoing oceanographers," says Iselin, "are the result of picking over a lot of stomachs."

For the next ten years Iselin sailed with the Atlantis, crisscrossing the Atlantic and doing an oceanographer's chores--trailing thermometers at varying depths, testing water for density and salinity. In 1940 he became director of Woods Hole, saw U.S. oceanography transformed into a Naval auxiliary. For some reason, neither the German nor the Japanese navies ever got in touch with their oceanographers, who were excellent. "This made a hell of a difference in World War II," says Iselin.

Golden Age. War's end marked the beginning of the golden age of U.S. oceanography. For the first time in its life, Woods Hole had enough money. More Navy millions went to California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which matches Woods Hole in growth, and claims, with California confidence, the whole Pacific Ocean as its domain. Dr. Roger Revelle, director of Scripps, is an enormous man (6 ft. 4 in.) who looks as if he were specially designed, both physically and temperamentally, to study the Pacific Ocean. He asks such large questions as: "Where did the sea water come from? Are the oceans growing or diminishing? Are the continents growing?" He believes that study of the oceans, including their floors, their arcs of islands and their plunging deeps, will answer all these questions.

The war contributed more than money. War-developed sonar made depth measurements far more sensitive, giving oceanographers a more accurate look at the ocean's bottom than they had ever had before. The new loran, which can fix a ship's position within a quarter of a mile in daylight, night, or in the thickest fog, enabled a far more detailed and accurate study of ocean currents, and oceanographers launched zealously into new studies with their new tools.

Artery & Stabilizer. Ocean currents are of interest not just to navigators. They are the arteries of the ocean; they carry warm and cold water around the earth; they churn up and interchange cold bottom water for warm surface water. The so-called deepwater--comprising about 90% of all the ocean's water--hovers around 40DEG F., and acts as a huge stabilizer of the atmosphere's temperature. If, through some imbalance of nature, the earth received an extra 1% of heat in the course of a year, it would, applied to the air alone, raise the atmosphere's temperature an intolerable 27DEG F. The same amount of heat would raise the deepwater's temperature only .02DEG F. "Therefore we think that its circulation, or the rate at which its water is brought up to and taken down from the surface, profoundly affects the climate," explains Revelle.

Classic example of just how much difference a change in current can make occurs on the coast of Peru, which owes its cool, foggy but almost rainless climate to the cold Peru Current sweeping up from Antarctica. Once in every ten years or so, a current of warm water called El Nino (because it appears near Christmas, the birthday of El Nino, the Christ child) creeps stealthily down the coast. With it come tropical rains and disaster. Floods roar through dry valleys. Buildings not designed for rain leak or collapse. Worst of all, the warm water, which is only 100 feet deep, drives cold-water fish below the surface. Peru's famous guano birds, which feed on the fish, starve by the million, heaping the beaches with their corpses.

Deep & Narrow. Before the war, even such well-known currents had not been thoroughly mapped in detail. For Woods Hole oceanographers, the first order of business was a new study of the great Gulf Stream, which exports tropical water to northern Europe. With the aid of loran, the new Atlantis surveys proved that it is not a wide, steady stream, but a jet that whips from side to side over hundreds of miles and sometimes curls into eddies. It may run fast or slow or backward, and only the general sum of its motion carries warm water to Europe.

But the major discovery of postwar oceanographers was that huge currents flow far below the surface; often these currents move faster than their surface counterparts. One such discovery came in 1951, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sent a ship west of the Galapagos Islands to experiment with a Japanese technique of fishing for deep-swimming tuna. The scientists were surprised to see the fish lines drifting eastward while their ship was carried westward on the well-known equatorial surface current. The next year the Service's Townsend Cromwell established the reason: a hitherto unsuspected current, deep below the surface current and moving in the opposite direction. Later investigation revealed that the Cromwell Current is a tremendous thing. It is 250 miles wide, at least 3,500 miles long. Three hundred feet below the surface, its high-speed core flows eastward at up to 3 knots, carrying 1,000 times as much water as the Mississippi.

Years of patient measurements of water temperature, salinity and density have begun to pay off by providing oceanography with a substructure of theory. Doubting the conventional view that ocean currents are simply streams of water pushed around by prevailing winds, Henry Stommel of Woods Hole analyzed thousands of such observations, predicted that a current would be found flowing under the Gulf Stream in the opposite direction. In 1957 the Atlantis and the British oceanographic ship Discovery II went looking for this current. Their tool was an ingenious buoy invented by British Oceanographer John C. Swallow, which sinks slowly until it reaches a level where the sea water, compressed by the weight of water above it, has the same density as the buoy. There, the Swallow buoy hangs and drifts with the deep-down water, broadcasting strong pings of ultrasound that can be heard by listening ships on the surface. Dumped into the Gulf Stream, the Swallow buoys proved that Stommel's theory was exactly right. About 8,000 feet under the famed stream is a Counter Gulf Stream carrying cold water southward at 1/3 of a knot.

No Quiet Place. This discovery gave a wholly new look to theories about the circulation of the Atlantic. The long-established notion of nearly stagnant ocean depths is now doubtful. Photographs taken of the bottom show ripple marks much like those caused by tidal currents on bathing beaches. Ocean basins with ripple marks on their bottoms must have been stirred by currents at some time in their past, and they may be stirred still.

The problem is not just academic. If the oceans are to be used for the disposal of radioactive wastes, oceanographers must find stagnant basins where wastes can be dumped with assurance that they will stay out of circulation until their activity has been stilled by time. Warns Iselin: "If you louse up the ocean with atomic waste, you louse it up for thousands of years. The British pump stuff into the Irish Sea, which can take a lot. But one day . . ."

New Ice Age? Oceanographers believe that man is approaching the point where he can try large-scale experiments on the ocean. Not all of them like this prospect; they feel that tinkering with the ocean without sufficient knowledge may be extremely dangerous. They are aghast at the project much discussed by the Russians, of using atomic energy to clear the Arctic Ocean of ice to help Siberian sea transport. Dr. Maurice Ewing of Columbia University's Lament Geological Observatory believes that the Northern Hemisphere's comparative freedom from continental glaciers is due to Arctic ice. Winds blowing off the Arctic Ocean are now dry, but if the ice were removed, they would become moist, dropping snow on nearby lands. The snow would pack into ice, and glaciers would start creeping south. Once the process was started, it might be impossible to stop before icecaps covered large parts of Europe and the U.S.

Another risky experiment with the oceans may have already been tried inadvertently. The temperature of the earth's surface depends to a considerable extent on the atmosphere's small content of carbon dioxide (about .03%), which permits short-wave sunlight to pass but impedes the escape of longer heat waves into space --the so-called '"greenhouse" effect. Since 1860 modern man's furnaces and auto exhausts have spewed out 360 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Warns Revelle: "By 2005 we will have added to the atmosphere some 1,700 billion tons of carbon dioxide--about 70% of the amount now present in the atmosphere. We believe that most of this will be absorbed by the ocean, but this means that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, if nothing else happens, will increase about 20%."

Result could be that air temperature would increase by 1DEG to 2DEG Centigrade. "Southern California might dry up completely if the temperature rose in the way we think it might--making it an impossible place to live, rather than almost impossible the way it is now." The ocean will also grow warmer, and will be forced to release dissolved carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This will increase the greenhouse effect. At some point in this chain reaction, the Antarctic icecap will melt, adding enough water to the ocean to drown nearly all of the earth's great cities.

No one can estimate for sure the ocean's ability to absorb CO2. But man's future may depend on it. Concludes Revelle: "Man is moving and shaking the great globe itself in spite of himself. We may be disastrously changing the climate."

Swarm in Sunlight. With their mounting knowledge, oceanographers are talking with new confidence of the ocean as a source of food. Life began in the sea, and most of it lives there still, grazing on the microscopic plants that swarm in the sunlit upper waters. At the end of a long food-chain (diatoms, protozoa, tiny crustaceans, little fish, etc.) are the fish, lobsters, shrimps and whales that are hunted by humans. Says Iselin: "We are not harvesting the seas. We are just hunting--catching something here and there."

Oceanographers are helping the hunters by plotting the trails fish follow, which are mostly determined by shifting ocean currents and the consequent shift in water temperatures. But they are also thinking about the possibility of fertilizing the ocean. Some parts of it are naturally rich and boiling with life. The water of breaking waves in such areas is green and turbid because it is full of microscopic plants and animals grazing on them. But large parts of the ocean are deserts with hardly any life. Their breaking waves are sapphire blue, the color of clear and lifeless water. Fish migrate away like cattle from a grazed-out range.

In fertile parts of the sea, the surface water is kept supplied with nutrients by some sort of upwelling that brings rich bottom water to the surface. In far northern and far southern parts of the ocean,--the surface water gets so cold and heavy in winter that it sinks and is replaced by bottom water that contains plant nutrients. Currents carry these nutrients to other seas, e.g., the Labrador Current off the Newfoundland banks, the Peru Current off the coast of South America, and produce rich fishing grounds.

Unless they are fertilized by currents from colder areas, tropical seas are largely sterile. Since the richest harvests of the sea derive from bottom water rising to the surface, oceanographers have long had the notion of creating artificial upwelling in sterile parts of the ocean. One possibility is a nuclear reactor sitting on the bottom and slightly warming the water around it. The warmed water will rise, carrying nutrients to the surface and turning clear water, admired only by tourists, into rich, turbid pastures. Another way would be to pump deep water into some closed area, such as a Pacific atoll, to make a kind of concentrated fish farm.

Serpents in the Depths? Despite the new outburst of exploration, many mysteries remain. The creatures that live in the depths of the ocean are still only slightly known, and they may include the famed sea serpents of salty folklore. Sea-serpent sightings have diminished of late, but Revelle thinks this may be because fast, noisy, modern ships make poor platforms for serpent sighting. Sperm whales dive for gigantic squid up to 50 ft. long that live at great depths and have never been captured by man. Why should not the squid have companions down there?

Chief sea-serpent man is Biologist John D. Isaacs, who is working out ways to catch the inhabitants of the depths of the ocean. One under study is a disk several hundred feet in diameter, with floats around the edge and ballast in the center. When it reaches a predetermined depth, the ballast will be detached, and the floats will pull the net upward. As it rises, it will inflate with water just as a parachute inflates with air, scooping up any giant squid and sea serpents on the way.

Fossil Volcanoes. Geologists and oceanographers who look to the ocean's bottom have found that the ocean is a gigantic museum, where geological specimens are preserved like flies in amber. Among the most interesting of these geological fossils are the guyots, the flat-topped extinct volcanoes that dot the Pacific floor. How did they get down there, the oceanographer asks. Did their weight force them into the earth's crust, like corks pushed into putty? Did the ocean increase in volume and rise above them?

A recent discovery is evidence that an enormous volcanic eruption may have darkened the sky when man was in his stone-chipping stage. Cruising down the west coast of South America, Lament's Vema discovered a layer of clean white volcanic ash up to twelve inches thick. Other explorations have found layers of similar ash in many parts of the Pacific and Atlantic. Dr. Ewing suspects that all the ash came from a series of stupendous eruptions along the spine of the Andes, estimates the date as 68,000 years ago. It must have been a black time for paleolithic man.

Mysterious Trenches. An ocean-bottom problem that fascinates all oceanographers is the origin of the deep troughs that are found mostly in the Pacific. The deepest ones, e.g., the Tonga Trench, the Marianas Trench, have narrow V bottoms that are clear of sediment. They are uneasy parts of the earth's crust. Deep-focus earthquakes rumble out of them, and generally volcanoes spout near by.

Dr. Revelle suspects that the trenches may be part of the mechanism by which continents grow. The first step, he thinks, is for a slow current in the earth's plastic mantle to start flowing horizontally and then curve downward (see diagram). Where it makes the dive, it drags down a strip of the crust, forming a V-bottomed trench which after many millions of years fills with sediment. Eventually the downward current in the mantle stops flowing. Since the mantle rock at its sides is heavier, it moves in, forcing upward the dragged-down crust and the sediments in the trough. Final result is that the former trench pokes above the sea, appearing as an arc of islands set with volcanoes, like Japan, or a curving shore of young mountains, like California.

Only a small part of the ocean bed is yet known in any detail. Recent surveys have shown that large areas of the bottom are covered thickly with rounded, blackish nodules that have grown as crusts around some nucleus, sometimes a shark's tooth. They are mostly iron and manganese oxides, but they often contain considerable amounts of copper, nickel and cobalt. "The amounts are absolutely staggering," says Dr. Henry Menard of Scripps. One 10-million-sq.-mi. area in the Pacific, he estimates, has nodules worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per square mile.

New Imp. Today oceanography is working to perfect its tools. There are intelligent buoys, which can be anchored at sea, and queried by radio for oceanographic and meteorological data. Other buoys sink to the bottom, where they can record currents, take pictures of their surroundings. They will be brought to the surface months later by a small charge of TNT exploded near by, which triggers their ballast-release mechanism.

Columbus Iselin's pet gadget is a monstrous underwater noisemaker developed at Woods Hole. Ordinary echo-sounding devices for exploring the bottom use relatively feeble waves of ultrasound whose delicate echoes are apt to get lost in background noise. Another common system is to explode TNT and pick up the echoes of the powerful shock waves that it sends to the bottom. But explosions are cumbersome, expensive and dangerous.

The "Imp" (for impulse generator) is a massive steel casting with two flexible hoses for high-pressure hydraulic fluid sticking out of one end. At the other end is a metal diaphragm about eight inches in diameter. Inside are extremely powerful springs, cocked by hydraulic pressure. When the springs are released, an internal hammer hits the diaphragm and a single, enormously powerful pulse of energy strikes through the water. The Imp now at Woods Hole gives a shock equivalent to the explosion of a good-sized block of TNT, and Imps several hundred times as powerful are a possibility. They can be suspended under a ship or built into its hull, sending down waves that will strike through the bottom sediments far into the rock beneath.

Pistols & Trolley Cars. Iselin has not forgotten that his money comes chiefly from the Navy. Though he does not say so out loud, it is obvious that a device like Imp, which simulates the effect of a controlled explosion, could be far more effective against subs than present electronic devices for echo ranging. Says Iselin: "We know that sound pushed out by explosives can go, at some levels, for thousands of miles. There isn't an ocean in the world big enough to lose the sound of a pistol fired at the right depth." He is fully conscious of what such an improvement could mean for U.S. security. "If Mr. Eisenhower could say to Khrushchev, 'We can see every one of your submarines in the seas around us,' we would be in a far better cold-war position today." Iselin is unimpressed with present nuclear subs. The power plants are too noisy. "Going to war in a nuclear sub is like going duck hunting in a trolley car," he says.

Oceanographers are also busy producing detailed maps of new currents, temperature gradients and the topography of the ocean floor, so that a U.S. submarine, submerged for days, can have an accurate idea of where it is when it launches its missiles. "Any future war at sea will be one between Indians and city boys," he explains. "We want to be sure our boys become the Indians. They can learn to take advantage of the terrain they live in." Even study of waves can prove useful. "On an aircraft carrier, the system now is for a guy to stand at the end of a flight deck. He feels the rhythm of the waves through the crepe soles of his shoes, and lets the plane land or waves it off depending on the feeling he gets underfoot. A machine could do this far better, perhaps also introduce balancing stability effects to make more landings possible."

Today U.S. oceanographers have a wary eye on the Russians, some of whose vessels are far in advance of anything the U.S. has at sea. Partly because of this pressure, U.S. legislators did not flinch at a report by the National Academy of Sciences recommending an appropriation of $58 million for oceanography for 1960, and there is a good prospect it will be voted.

But like all true scientists, oceanographers are only incidentally interested in the military overtones of their science. They hope that knowledge of the oceans will lead to knowledge of the earth, then of the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy. It may help answer such questions as: Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? "Adolescents ask these questions," says Revelle, "but grown men do not. It is not because they are unimportant questions, but because grown men have given up." The oceanographers have not given up.

Or, in the words of Columbus Iselin: "The cold war and the scientific effort run parallel much of the time. They're both geared toward our learning more. Each has a different motivation. One is survival, and the other is curiosity."

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