Science: Ocean Frontier

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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 40° 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 27° F. The same amount of heat would raise the deepwater's temperature only .02° 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.