8 



water activities that many equate with some of the much better- 

 supported programs of the National Aeronautic and Space Admin- 

 istration. 



The comment^ "much better supported" is relative so to clarify, 

 it may be useful to consider the current level of funding for NURP, 

 about $16 million supporting six regional centers and several cross- 

 cutting programs. This is accomplished for significantly less than 

 the price tag of the space shuttle's famous new toilet, $23 million. 



Despite the efforts of Congress to save NURP and the various 

 programs associated with it, this aspect of our nation has a tenuous 

 hold on the future — the apparently unwanted offspring of an 

 agency mandated to oversee the nation's oceanic and atmospheric 

 interests. Private industry has recognized the need for undersea 

 technology and research especially in connection with the develop- 

 ment of offshore oil and gas interests. But for the investment made 

 by industry, domestic and international and by foreign govern- 

 ments, technology available for civilian use would be at about the 

 level that aerospace technology was a half a century ago. 



Of course, U.S. taxpayers have put forward billions of dollars to 

 implement significant advances in underwater technology for mili- 

 tary applications, but little of the resulting technology or the 

 knowledge derived from it has been made available for civilian use. 

 I will avoid the temptation to speculate about what we could do 

 with the cost of one nuclear submarine or any other significant 

 piece of military hardware, but I do reflect sometimes on what 

 might have been accomplished if NURP and its predecessors had 

 been appropriately supported over the years. I try to imagine what 

 we might now know about the nature of the planet, about how 

 much better prepared we could be to cope with the global environ- 

 mental changes that are now taking place. Instead, NURP's mis- 

 sion has been neglected at precisely the time costly questions about 

 ocean systems beg to be answered. 



An example of this neglect was apparent soon after I joined 

 NOAA as Chief Scientist in 1990. Budget recommendations at the 

 time included significant sums for ocean research from satellites 

 that would look at water masses from high above and for fleet 

 modernization so that the ocean could be more effectively explored 

 from the surface. Ships support traditional oceanography, and cer- 

 tainly a great deal of important information has been gained about 

 the ocean by staring into a bucket of material that has been 

 snagged fortuitously from areas that we would know perhaps on 

 the same scale if we used a standard oceanographic technique to 

 explore Washington, DC, or my backyard in San Francisco, that is, 

 by flying in the sky several thousand feet above and dragging a net 

 and grabbing bits of this and that and taking it back to the surface 

 and from that try to piece together detective-like about what is 

 happening below. 



Certainly, there are techniques today that are much more sophis- 

 ticated than the so-called traditional oceanographic techniques, but 

 ocean scientists are still limited very much by looking at the sea 

 from the sky above and from ships on the surface. Many have for 



' Slides were used to illustrate these comments. 



