EXPLORING THE FLOOR 41 



remarkable deep-sea cruises was undertaken by Ameri- 

 can oceanographers, several from the famous center of 

 oceanographic research at Woods Hole with its ship the 

 "Atlantis" — cruises inspired and directed by Maurice 

 Ewing of Columbia University and his team of workers. 

 We were first made aware of this work through an 

 article in the National Geographic Magazine in the fall 

 of 1948.^-' Ewing, who had already made his name 

 known through his seismic investigations of the sediment 

 layers and the rocky substratum on the shelf of the 

 eastern coast of the United States, found means of 

 extending that work to great ocean depths, with highly 

 interesting and important results. Moreover, a certain 

 amount of coring work was carried out from the 

 "Atlantis" by means of a corer resembling the one 

 Kullenberg had described but without any lining tubes. ^ 

 So far very few of the results obtained from the study of 

 these cores have been published, although extensive 

 studies of the bottom topography of the northwest 

 Atlantic Ocean, investigated by means of a recording 

 fathometer, have been published by Tolstoy, one of 

 Ewing's collaborators. 11 



From another well-known oceanographic research 

 center, Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, 

 a number of deep-sea research cruises have been sent 

 out in the course of the last few years, the results of 

 which so far have been published only in part. Espe- 

 cially remarkable are the discoveries made on these 



