History of Oceanography

Introduction• Reasons for exploration abound………• 1. acquiring territory• 2. seeking wealth• 3. looking for new ways to get to places• 4. Curiosity• *The basic human need to know and

understand.

Humans have always been driven by great questions

• Early Explorers- had those attributes but were limited by the technologies available to probe the depths. Even today, scientists rely heavily on nets, dredges, and remotely deployed devices to sample and document the nature of the deep sea.

• Going more than a 100 feet or so below the ocean’s surface is another matter.

Ignorance about the ocean and lack of understanding about the relevance of the fundamental ways people everywhere are connected to the sea underlie the indifference and complacency that have let to abuses imposed by people in recent years with dire consequences to our future

• In the 20th century, tremendous investments were made in aviation and space technologies. Meanwhile, we have neglected the ocean and it has cost us dearly.

Early History• A. Navigation- Art of

navigation had to be developed. The Phoenicians developed navigation and in 2000BC were investigation the Mediterranean, Red Sea and the Indian ocean.

• Phoenicians used charts like the one below

B. Greeks and Romans• Pytheas- worked out a

simple method for determining latitude.

• Eratosthenes –first to determine the world’s circumference.

• Ptolemy- produced a map of the world that represented Roman knowledge at the time. He introduced lines of latitude and longitude on his map & included the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa

III. Middle Ages• After the fall of the Roman empire

and the rise of Christianity, the Mediterranean was dominated by the Moslem Arabs.

• Cosmas- devised a map that showed the Earth to be flat.

Vikings• In the late 9th century, the Vikings expanded west and conquered Iceland

and then sailed to Greenland and continued west and discovered New Foundland. During the 13th century, the climate cooled and the N. Atlantic became choked with ice; thus the end of the Viking expansion.

IV. Age of Discovery (1492-1522)

• Christopher Columbus (1492)

• -reached the Bahama Islands

• Ferdinand Magellan (1522) circumnavigated the globe.

The Formative Years• Captain James Cook

(1728-1779)• Contributions:• 1. First accurate maps of the S.

Oceans.• 2. Discovered many islands in the

S. seas ex. Hawaii• 3. Conquered the disease scurvy

• Ben Franklin- Charted the Gulf Stream.

• Matthew Fontaine Maury –(1806-1873)- Known as the farther of Oceanography. He made contributions to safe navigation and he standardized the methods of making nautical and meteorological observations at sea

• Charles Darwin-(1809-1882) H.M.S. Beagle in 1843. Published the “Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs” which correctly describes the formation of coral atolls.

• Sir John Ross (1777-1856) took bottom measurements and collected animals from depths of 1.1 miles in Baffin Bay.

• Sir James Clark Ross (1800-1862) undertook a similar mission in the Antarctic where he recovered bottom dwellers to depths of 4.3 miles. He realized that the animals that he recovered were the same species his uncle had recovered in the N. Atlantic. This led him to the conclusion that the deep ocean must be uniformly low temperatures.

• Edward Forbes (1815-1854) Studied the vertical distribution of life in the oceans. He concluded that plant life is limited to sunlit zone near the surface.

VI. The Ocean as a Laboratory• Challenger Expedition (1872)-

major turning point in the study of the ocean. First time a major scientific study was done on the ocean

• Achievements:• 1. 492 deep sea soundings• 2. 151 open water trawls• 3. 263 water-temp. observations• 4. 133 bottom dredges• 5. 4,717 new species of life

classified• 6. depth of Mariana T. 26,847 ft.

• Alexander Agassiz-had the prominent role in processing the Challenger collection.

• Victor Hensen (1835-1910)-coined the word plankton and developed quanitative methods of study

• Fridtiof Nansen (1861-1930) aboard the ship the Fram which was frozen in the ice in the Arctic. It drifted for 3 years and proved that no continent existed in the Arctic. He also developed the Nansen bottle which is still used today for taking temperature and measuring salinity in the ocean depths.