Science: 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.