32 THE OCEAN FLOOR 



worked out a number of exact methods of research and 

 analysis, from which deep-sea research has also profited. 

 These new methods were put to practical use in 1910 

 by the "Michael Sars" Expedition in the North Atlantic, 

 led by Sir John Murray and the Norwegian biologist 

 JohanHjort.'^ 



The methods were also employed by a number of 

 Antarctic expeditions. The culmination was the magni- 

 ficent effort made by the Germans on board the 

 "Meteor." " This cruise, originally planned by the 

 Austrian oceanographer A. Merz for the Pacific Ocean, 

 for want of a ship with a sufficiently large radius of 

 action had to be limited to the Atlantic. The results 

 gained there were, however, extremely important and 

 revealed unknown features of both the ocean ffoor and 

 the structure and movements of the ocean water masses. 

 The expedition made excellent use of the technique of 

 acoustic echo soundings then available, but their re- 

 sources for studying the ocean sediments were not 

 adequate and did not show any marked improvement 

 over those of the "Challenger" cruise half a century 

 earlier. The ordinary core-sampler which was used 

 rarely produced cores as much as three feet long, that is, 

 reaching back about 50,000 to 100,000 years in time. 

 Still, even these relatively short cores revealed a signif- 

 icant stratification of the sediment and indicated the 

 possibilities of climatological studies of late Quaternary 

 time, based on an analysis of the surface plankton shells 

 from Foraminifera found in different levels of the core. 



