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FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN OCEAN SCIENCES 51 



in the past, ocean circulation was unlike today's and that it could 

 switch rapidly from its present state to a radically different one. 

 When the ocean was in this alternate state, Earth's climate was 

 not at all like today's. This idea dates back to a paper written by 

 Henry Stommel (1961), an academic scientist driven primarily by 

 his own curiosity and supported by ONR and NSF. The paper had 

 little impact for more than 20 years. Now regarded as seminal, it 

 illustrates the need to sustain basic science so that future genera- 

 tions will have a knowledge base from which to develop their 

 policy decisions. 



The authors of the following sections were asked to discuss 

 the dominant issues of their disciplines and to lay out the grand 

 themes, providing a scientific underpinning to discussion of the 

 new partnerships. Ten years is probably the outer limit of an 

 attempt to suggest what the major science themes will be. A 

 decadal report written in 1960 would almost surely have missed 

 the revolution in plate tectonics and thus would have been hope- 

 lessly wrong in its discussion of some dominant scientific themes 

 in 1970. On the other hand, such a report could have captured 

 accurately the methodologies of work at sea and the human re- 

 source requirements. Of course, the central questions of the field 

 did not change either — although an intellectual revolution in the 

 way they could be discussed occurred. 



The decision to organize this chapter according to traditional 

 oceanographic disciplines was not arbitrary (the coastal ocean is a 

 special case, discussed below). Anyone who reads each section 

 will perceive exciting and important scientific problems that cut 

 across many or even all disciplines. Examples are the growing 

 importance of paleoceanographic studies that involve geology, geo- 

 physics, chemistry, biology, and physical oceanography because of 

 their climate implications. Likewise, the study of ridge crests 

 cuts across geology and geophysics, biology and chemistry, and 

 even slightly, physical oceanography. Nonetheless, the board be- 

 lieves that there is a danger in declaring such interdisciplinary 

 studies as the likely focus of future marine science efforts. With- 

 out denigrating the science done on such problems, interdiscipli- 

 nary studies clearly build on the foundations of chemistry, phys- 

 ics, geology, geophysics, and biology. These, in turn, depend directly 

 on their nonmarine counterparts of physics, mathematics, numerical 

 methods, and other fields that provide the intellectual fertiliza- 

 tion of marine studies. The history of ocean sciences suggests 

 that one cannot have good interdisciplinary science without good 

 disciplinary foundations, and it is essential that the traditional 



