Science: Oceanographic Survey

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The "Executive Interim Committee"— such is the extraordinary name by which a group of naval officers and scientists is known. They have been meeting in Washington planning the initial steps of the proposed Naval Oceanographic Survey. For the first expedition of the summer they have planned a trip through the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, possibly to be extended through the Panama Canal to the Galapagos Islands. They have tentatively decided on the Solace, a merchant vessel of 5,000 tons, built in 1896 and converted into a hospital ship during the Spanish-American War, as their conveyance.

After the Executive Interim Commit: tee has matured its plans, they will be presented to a larger conference which will lay a program before the Secretary of the Navy; and, if all goes well, the matter will go to Congress, which will make the small appropriation necessary. Then, sometime in the summer of 1925, the expedition should set out.

The objects of the expedition will be as numerous as the sciences which it will represent. They are: to discover and examine the resources of the sea with a view to their development; to provide data for facilitating navigation and radio communication; to study various means, direct and indirect, of safeguarding human life; above all, to learn.

The importance of its work depends on a number of complicated natural relations, linked together much like the cow with the crumpled horn and her associates. For example: The rainfall of the South and Middle West is derived mostly from water evaporated from the Gulf of Mexico. This depends on the temperature of the air and the sea, the nature of the winds, the salinity of the sea. All this affects our great farming regions. On the other hand, the soil of our great farming regions, carried down as silt by the Mississippi River, is deposited on the floor of the Gulf. It carries with it food on which small oceanic organisms thrive. On these, in turn, fish feed. On fish, men feed. Also, the weight of millions of tons of silt on the Gulf floor may be responsible for volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in the Caribbean region. These, in turn, may dissolve in the ocean great quantities of chemicals which kill fish or the small animals on which the fish subsist.