Word: oceanic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...very large yearly sums for big vessels were not necessary, the Rockefeller Foundation gave Bigelow $3,000,000 to outfit and endow an oceanographic institute. Bigelow set up his institute in Woods Hole-a small town on a narrow strait ("The Hole") connecting Buzzards Bay with Vineyard Sound. The ocean is always a presence there, flowing around the town and through its small, snug harbors. Grey fog often drifts through the town, smelling of the sea, and sometimes hurricanes slam ashore. No better place exists to keep an oceanographer pleasantly mindful of his business...
...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...
Years of patient measurements of water temperature, salinity and density have begun to pay off by providing oceanography with a substructure of theory. Doubting the conventional view that ocean currents are simply streams of water pushed around by prevailing winds, Henry Stommel of Woods Hole analyzed thousands of such observations, predicted that a current would be found flowing under the Gulf Stream in the opposite direction. In 1957 the Atlantis and the British oceanographic ship Discovery II went looking for this current. Their tool was an ingenious buoy invented by British Oceanographer John C. Swallow, which sinks slowly until...