THE WATERS OF THE CENTRAL PACIFIC 



Within the vast area of the central Pacific are some loca- 

 tions at which fish are more likely to be found than at others. 

 Some of these locations are semiiiermanent and relatively 

 well-known features of the current patterns of the Pacific 

 Ocean. Others are only beginning to be discovered. Most of 

 what is known of the oceanograiihy of the area is based on 

 work of the BCF Laboratory in Honolulu. Now this Labora- 

 tory is planning to conduct its most e.xtensive oceanographic 

 pro.ject. 



Project Porpoise 



In the year 1838, the United States Government embarked 

 on an enterprise with goals that seem modern. One ob.iect 

 of the U.S. Exploring Expedition was to attempt to link 

 the distribution of the rich and heavily exploited whale 

 stocks to the oceanography of the South Seas. The enter- 

 prise involved sending a fleet of small wooden sailing ships 

 through lands still fabulous, including an area then probably 

 more remote, in a sense, than the moon is to us today. This 

 was Antarctica, whose very existence as a continent was 

 then debated. There Yankee sailors in tarred hats chased 

 penguins and planted the 26-starred American flag on a peak 

 in what is still known as Wilkes Land, after the commander 

 of the expedition. 



Large-scale oceanographic-biological expeditions are not 

 common even today. When the Laboratory in Honolulu 

 decided to spearhead a multishij) cooperative investigation 

 of the biology and oceanography of a wide area of the central 

 Pacific, it fittingly looked back more than a century and chose 

 for the project a name associated with this pioneer American 

 effort to relate marine biology and oceanography. 



The name is Pro.ject Poriwise. It comes from the 240-ton 

 gun brig. Porpoise, which staunchly withstood the perils of 

 Cape Horn and the Antarctic and the languors of the South 

 Seas, to circumnavigate the globe and in 1842 to sail into 



New York Harbor as the field phase of the expedition came 

 to an end. 



Pro.iect Porpoise has grcnvn out of the interest of oceano- 

 graphers, meteorologists, fishery biologists, and ornitholo- 

 gists in the factors that are associated with the weather, 

 the current, the fishes, and the birds of the trade wind zone 

 of the North Pacific. It stems directly from the Trade Wind 

 Zone Oceanography Pilot Study, conducted by the Laboratory 

 in Honolulu in 1964-65 under the leadership of Gunter R. 

 Seckel. 



During the pilot study the research vessel Toioiscnd 

 CromirrU made cruises near the Hawaiian Islands each 

 month for 16 months, covering a fixed pattern that was as 

 broad as time allowed. The field studies ended early in July 

 1065. Since that time, the data have been processed and are 

 now ready for publication; descriptive studies of the region 

 also are being prepared. 



These studies have yielded two principal findings. The 

 first is that around the Hawaiian Islands, the waters above 

 the .■5,000-foot depth are layered like a cake, each layer hav- 

 ing distinctive physical and chemical characteristics trace- 

 able over hundreds or even thousands of miles. The other 

 finding relates to oceanic fronts. During World War I, 

 Scandinavian meteorologists found that many changes in 

 the weather could be accounted for by the meeting of air 

 masses of contrasting physical properties, one cool and dry, 

 the other warm and wet, for example. For this phenomenon 

 they chose the word, "front," by analogy with the contested 

 frontlines in the current war. Later, "fronts" between cool 

 and warm water were found at sea. They are well docu- 

 mented for the shallower layers and can account for sharp 

 differences in the distribution of commercial fishes. In the 

 equatorial Pacific, for example, yellowfin tuna are often 

 caught in considerable quantities near surface fronts. The 

 Trade Wind Zone Oceanography Pilot Study offered further 



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