192 EFFECTIVENESS OF THE COMMITTEE ON OCEANOGRAPHY 



is developing, and I feel that this particular cooperative project will produce 

 good results both scientifically and from the point of view of international relations. 



The committee might be interested in some of the background work that the 

 Surveys Panel has put into this. I have here the original questionnaire sent out 

 to the Panel members last March in which they were asked for their agency's 

 views on such a cooperative effort in the tropical Atlantic. I have the May 8 

 Panel report on the results of this questionnaire, the minutes of the August 4 

 meeting of the Panel at which this was the main agenda item, and the minutes of 

 the Panel meeting last December 1 at which the current status of the project 

 was discussed. I will leave these for you, for the record, Mr. Chairman, for I be- 

 lieve it will be of interest to this committee to see how such a program has been 

 developed by the Panel. I am sorry that the minutes of yesterday's productive 

 meeting are not yet available. 



The first real function, then, of the Ocean Surveys Advisory Panel has been in 

 the field of developing a national program of oceanographic surveys. The 

 second function has been the initiation and fostering of interagency cooperation 

 at the "wet deck" level. 



There are numerous examples since the inception of the ICO of the type of close 

 cooperation to which I refer. Probably the first, however, was the 1960 Ex- 

 plorer Expedition of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Actually aboard and carry- 

 ing out programs planned closely with the Coast Survey were personnel from the 

 Weather Bureau and the Navy Electronics Laboratory, from the Marine Physical 

 Laboratory and the Tuna Oceanography Research Group of the Scripps Institu- 

 tion of Oceanography, and from Oregon State College. In addition, programs 

 were planned and carried out in conjunction with the Geological Survey, Bureau 

 of Commercial Fisheries, National Museum of the Smithsonian, Bureau of Mines, 

 Public Health Service, and even the Census Bureau and the Post Office Depart- 

 ment. It was, indeed a cooperative expedition. I have brought with me, Mr. 

 Chairman and will leave for your committee the first copy of the report on this 

 expedition. This copy was especially collated and bound by personnel of the 

 Government Printing Office prior to the regular run of the report, due for delivery 

 to the Coast and Geodetic Survey later this week. I am pleased to present you 

 with this first copy. However, a program in which the Ocean Surveys Advisory 

 Panel played a more important role was the United States' first attempt at the 

 oceanwide surveys program. The U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey ship Pioneer 

 during calendar year 1962 started the oceanwide surveys in the North Pacific. 

 It was indeed the beginning of what the Panel hopes will in time become a full- 

 scale international oceanwide survey program. The guidelines under which the 

 survey was planned and carried out were those of the NASCO report and of the 

 Surveys Panel of the ICO. It was not just a Coast Survey show. The Weather 

 Bureau had a meteorologist aboard carrying out part of their upper atmosphere 

 program and contributing immeasurably to the success of the whole venture by 

 his careful surface weather analyses and predictions. The Weather Bureau was 

 sufficiently pleased with this cooperative venture, that they are doubling the 

 meteorological program on the Pioneer this season. The Geological Survey had 

 several people aboard, both geophysicists and geologists. 



The former worked closely with the geophysicists of the Coast Survey in both 

 the towed magnetometer program and the shipboard gravity meter program. 

 Their geologists carried out an extensive program of sediment studies on the 

 sediment cores collected by the Coast Survey. They also worked closely with 

 the meteorologist and ran analyses of radioisotopes in collected rainwater. The 

 Bureau of Commercial Fisheries Laboratory at Seattle had a man aboard whose 

 program of plankton sampling and midwater trawls was closely integrated in 

 the planning of the station operations. He also worked closely with two biologists 

 from the University of Hawaii who were aboard carrying out studies of the 

 phytoplankton productivity. Their studies, in turn, depended heavily on the 

 water temperature and chemistry data obtained by the Coast Survey in their 

 oceanographic station program, and the data from these water samples were also 

 used by the Geological Survey scientists interested in the chemical exchange 

 across the water-sediment interface at the bottom. 



There was also aboard from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography a radio- 

 chemist supported by the Atomic Energy Commission. He was collecting and 

 concentrating water samples for determinations of the cesium 137 concentration. 

 These various scientific programs were not carried out on the former not-to- 

 interfere basis, but were in fact planned as part of the overall program and in- 

 tegrated into the other projects going on aboard. The really exciting thing 

 about the Pioneer operation insofar as the Ocean Surveys Panel is concerned 

 was that it represented a start on the oceanwide surveys program. For the first 



