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One of the major events celebrating the centennial year of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (2003) was a reunion and symposium commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Scripps’s great MidPac Expedition and its predecessor , Capricorn. I am afraid that my opening remarks may have dismayed the veteran scientists gathered there, for I ventured that their great research cruise brought the age of European geographic exploration, which started with Prince Henry the Navigator 500 years ago, to a definitive end. I borrowed a thought that John Maynard Keynes had applied to Isaac Newton: they were the last generation to look upon the world through the eyes of the ancients. From our present vantage point in time, when every square meter of earth has been surveyed by satellite and can be “googled” at will, our challenge is no longer to discover what is there, but to understand how the many complex parts of the Earth’s systems interact. The challenge is not to push outward but to connect together. The fact that oceanographers just then had become involved with hydrogen bomb tests already presaged that the world to come was to be very different. A few, especially Roger Revelle , saw where things were going. We know now what the great pioneers did not: our civilization faces an entirely new situation. Humans have always altered their environment to suit their needs, but their impact reached global proportions only in the last 50 years. New words have since entered public discourse: biodiversity decline, disappearing fish, habitat fragmentation , deforestation, increasing drought, desertification, ozone hole, atmospheric brown cloud, retreating glaciers and mountain snows, melting Arctic ice, sea level rise, and the granddaddy of them all, global warming. The pristine state of nature, if it ever existed, has disappeared, and the world is going to be different tomorrow because of what we humans are doing today. We also know as never before that Earth science has an unshirkable obligation to help preserve our civilization and the planet that has supported it so lavishly—thus far. I sat down after my opening remarks wishing that someone would tell that story. I even had the momentary fantasy that I might, but it dissolved in the press of a busy director’s mundane affairs. So I greeted with great satisfaction Wolf Berger’s proposal to commemorate the centennial by telling the story of the great transition in our science. Wolf and his generation have had the never-to-be-repeated privilege of ix FOREWORD viewing the world through the eyes of both the ancients and the moderns. For Scripps, it has meant many things, especially the world before and after plate tectonics and climate change. With Elizabeth Shor’s assistance, Wolf relives how our great institution earned its place in intellectual history. And he does so with lyrical prose that makes the story both accessible and pleasurable for the general reader. CHARLES F. KENNEL Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1997–2006 Los Angeles and La Jolla April 2007 x F O R E W O R D ...

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