368 ANNUAL REPORT SAOTHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1964 



a bathyspherelike elevator built into its stem so that, once in position, 

 investigators or workers can go down to the bottom or any inter- 

 mediate level by elevator and return home to Flip when their work 

 is done. 



The extraordinary success of the early attempts to drill toward the 

 earth's mantle — the MOHO project — will for scientific reasons, if no 

 other, make drilling the ocean bottom another routine survey proce- 

 dure. Instead of drilling from a rig floating on the hazardous, wavy, 

 stormy surface of the sea, with a threadlike string twisting through 

 miles of water before reaching the drill, the rig, power, and everything 

 will in the future be located on the bottom. 



It is most exciting for the scientist to explore the bottom of the sea, 

 because it has preserved the history of the earth in the layerings of its 

 sediments without the weathering, folding, and creasing of the pages 

 that occurs on land. Perhaps the best place to estimate the quantities 

 and recover the materials — meteorites — ^which come to the earth from 

 space is the undisturbed bottom of the sea. 



When we have blue-green lasers, possibly with choppers to reduce 

 backscattering, we will be able to see and photograph through the sea 

 water "window" a greater distance. Self-perpetuating ocean power 

 sources will be developed ; some will generate electricity by biological 

 means using bacterial anodes and cathodes. Missiles for the explora- 

 tion of space or other uses may be launched more cheaply from "silos" 

 in the sea. Undersea pipelines, already well developed, may carry 

 all kinds of fluids or fluidized substances under the sea with less 

 maintenance than land pipelines. Submarine freight transport may 

 be far more practical than surface vessels adversely affected by storm 

 and wind, and more economical than air freight because of the 

 buoyancy of sea water. 



Transit-type satellites have already proved their worth for naviga- 

 tion at sea, but this is just a beginning. Satellites can be used to 

 collect and retransmit data from buoys and ships at sea, to take 

 pictures of ice conditions near the poles, by infrared sensing to trace 

 ocean currents by the differences of temperature, and even for track- 

 ing the worldwide migration of certain sea animals with transmitters 

 attached. 



In the air we are accustomed to breathe, the inert gas nitrogen dilutes 

 our oxygen supply. Some of the most exciting experiments are those 

 that show that, for underwater breathing at high pressures, other 

 inert gases are superior, and various mixtures have been tried with 

 some success to prolong the length of time and the depths at which 

 men may stay under water. Extension of this research will show 

 us how to "condition" the air for underwater resorts, underwater mili- 

 tary establishments to service true submarines, and for cities if we 

 are driven to the protection of the sea to survive atomic attack. It is 



