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FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN OCEAN SCIENCES 49 



immediate societal application and in which the financial stakes 

 are potentially immense, for example, the economic impact of a 

 reliable forecast of a sea-level rise. Because the societal implica- 

 tions of the science are readily apparent to policy makers, they 

 may demand answers to purely practical questions in the short 

 term. This pressure can distort the investment in basic science, 

 undermining the quest for basic understanding that remains key 

 to the long-term solution of practical problems. Thus the func- 

 tioning of oceanography in the United States should focus both on 

 sustenance of the underlying basic science and on specific an- 

 swers to practical questions of short-term urgency. 



This chapter summarizes the concerns of basic scientists, with 

 some focus on the interaction of basic science with more practi- 

 cal problems. Several themes are common throughout the discus- 

 sion, which is divided by classical disciplines. First is the grow- 

 ing sense that the basic science now encompasses the global ocean 

 scale. This capability and the need to conduct global-scale stud- 

 ies have led to the planning of large-scale, long-term cooperative 

 experiments. Primarily planned and executed with National Sci- 

 ence Foundation (NSF) support, they focus the work of many sci- 

 entists on global ocean research. These large programs are usu- 

 ally managed through national or international consortia that involve 

 many scientists, agencies, and often countries. Such programs 

 will explore new questions and test new mechanisms for working 

 together in the next decade. Global uncertainties are rapidly moving 

 much of oceanography from the capabilities and interests of single 

 or small groups of investigators for a limited time to the involve- 

 ment of many individuals, institutions, and governments for de- 

 cades. Mechanisms must be developed for these new large-scale 

 efforts to be sustained in a scientifically and technically sound 

 manner, by coordinating the plans of other nations, federal agen- 

 cies, academic institutions, and individual scientists. 



Second, all sections of this chapter emphasize the dependence 

 of the subject as a whole continued technical developments. The 

 ocean is remarkably difficult to study, given its size, opacity to 

 electromagnetic waves, and general hostility (e.g., its corrosive- 

 ness, high pressures, and turbulence). The health of all disci- 

 plines depends directly on the continued development of new tools 

 designed to solve their fundamental sampling problems. In the 

 past decade, oceanographic sampling improved through incorpora- 

 tion of new technologies from other fields, such as remote sens- 

 ing, material science, electronics, and computer science. A fun- 

 damental change arising from the use of these new technologies is 



