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A Bountiful Sea? A New Planet Discovery of the World Ocean Early Oceanography and the Challenger Expedition Post-Challenger Expeditions Scripps: Evolution of a Marine Research Center Lobster, scallop, and tuna are among the more expensive items on the seafood menu, and for good reasons. We like to eat these things, and there are many of us, and not so many of them any more. In fact, with regard to fish suitable for fine dining, there are now roughly 10 times fewer in the sea than only a few decades ago.1 Many other animals of the sea once or recently heavily exploited are similarly diminished, including, for example, sea turtles and large whales. Jellyfish, however, remain in sufficient abundance (fig. 1.1). Their nutritional value, in relation to weight, is low. Nevertheless, they are already finding their way into seafood restaurants , thus confirming a long-term trend away from catching highly prized predators such as tuna and swordfish, toward netting planktoneaters and invertebrates.2 For millennia, the relationship between people and the sea has been determined largely by human fondness for seafood. Fishermen had the most intimate knowledge of winds and currents and of the changes that come with the seasons . Also, of course, they knew where to go to find fish and crabs and oysters. Their prey was found in view of the land. Later on, with bigger vessels, fishing moved out into the open ocean away from visual contact with the coast. Fishermen discovered new riches: enormous aggregations of cod, schools of herring. In high northern latitudes, whales have long been part of marine hunting cultures. Not so long ago, in the nineteenth century, whaling was an important business in many coastal communities throughout the world. In New England, shore whaling off Nantucket and Long Island made a start around 1690. The business grew into a worldwide enterprise in the early 1800s, centered at New Bedford, where more than 400 whalers were registered at the Custom House in 1857.3 Yankee whalers knew the sea and the habits of whales.4 They were the sages of the sea well before oceanography emerged as a branch of the Earth sciences. Their knowledge was 7 ONE Discovering the Ocean OF FISH AND SHIPS AND PEOPLE closely tied to purpose, a link that has largely persisted into modern ocean sciences. The main lesson of the story of whale hunting, often retold, is that the sea’s resources are not inexhaustible , and that overexploitation will not engender restraint but will stop only after collapse of the resource or from outside intervention (in this case, the discovery of petroleum). As we have learned more about the ocean, motivated by the needs of fisheries, navies, and shipping, and also by curiosity, a new planet has entered our awareness, one where the ocean is the dominating feature of conditions on Earth. Winds from the sea bring the rain that determines where plants and animals on land shall thrive. Their patterns of distribution, in turn, determine the life-style of humans dependent on agriculture. Awareness that our planet has an enormous ocean, with island continents, starts with the discovery of the World Ocean around AD 1500. Knowledge that the deep ocean is cold and that its salt is the same everywhere are achievements of the nineteenth century. Since then, the science of the sea has expanded rapidly. The general pattern of this expansion, as seen in the large oceanographic institutes around the world, is nicely reflected in the history of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (“Scripps” for short), one of the largest and oldest of the genre. As it happens, Scripps is just over 100 years old: it was founded in 1903. A BOUNTIFUL SEA? The lesson learned from whaling—that the ocean’s resources are large but limited—has recently emerged again with respect to many other prey items that once yielded millions of tons of food, such as herring and cod (fig. 1.2). The collapse of these fisheries in the North Atlantic was not entirely unexpected. Warnings were sounded back in the early twentieth century .5 But optimism prevailed. As recently as 1967, the American fishery scientist W.M. Chapman averred that the total harvest of fish from the ocean each year could be expanded to some 2 billion tons, given the right technology. At the same time, Scripps oceanographer John D. Strickland preferred a much lower number, admitting a maximum of 600 million tons.6 Both guesses...

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