625 



The red shaded area illuslrales 

 the global scope of the Navy's 

 oceano^raphk sur\'ey and 

 measuremeni program. As the 

 tapered shading suggests, there 

 has been a greater concen- 

 tration of resources in the 

 Northern Hemisphere than 

 the Southern Hemisphere. 

 Also shown schematically 

 are inset illustrations of how 

 different the densities of ship 

 trucks might be in different 

 ocean areas- Tracks of naval 

 oceanographic surx'cys (blue) 

 from just the unclassified 

 cruises covering the years 

 from 1986 to 1995 show 

 the worldwide nature of 

 s of data. 



Examination of all sur\'ey 

 ship tracks from the entire 

 cold war history of naval 

 survey operations would 

 show both a global breadth 

 ofcoveragt and a scientifically 

 well founded spatial sampling 

 of ocean processes. 



SCIENTIFIC UTILITY 

 Discussion 



During the past 30 years, the Navy's ocean surveys have 

 systematically collected bathymetry, gravity, magnetics, 

 and salinity/temperature data on a global basis. In particular, 

 these surveys encompass almost all of the Northern Hemisphere 

 (Figure 2). Altogether more than 100 ship-years of data 

 acquisition have been devoted to this effort, making this the 

 most comprehensive ocean sun'eying activity ever undertaken. 

 It is highly unlikely that such an effort will ever be repeated, 

 and it is certain that civilian environmental scientinc 

 resources could not aspire to an ocean survey program of 

 this magnitude during the next 20 years. 



The scientific value of this data set and other data examined, 

 such as acoustic ice thickness data collected froni submarine 

 upward-looking sonars (ULS ), is exU'aordinary . The unclassified 

 release of these data would almost certainly result in significant 



advances in many fields of ocean and geophysical science. 

 Release of curtently classified data and improved access to 

 classified data by researchers would stimulate the civil/academic 

 scientific community to produce new knowledge and data 

 products that would, in turn, be useful to the Navy. Such a 

 process would be highly cost-effective, gaining leverage from 

 the large public investment already made by the Navy in 

 collecting the data sets. 



A past example of scientific benefit from the declassification of 

 oceanographic data involved Geosat. Geosat Altimetry data 

 south of 30^ S were declassified, which resulted in a sigmficant 

 advance in our understanding of the tectonics of the southern 

 ocean and the identification of previously unknown seamounts. 

 (Results from a limited analysis of these data have been 

 published by scientists having access to the classified data.) 

 Another historical example, diough remote from oceanography, 

 involves data from the VELA satellites, originally flown to 



