Science: Ocean Frontier

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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.