iV PREFACE 



defining it by pointing out that oceanographers are at heart just 

 sailors who use big words. This is rapidly becoming an obsolete 

 definition, because increasing numbers of young people who know 

 a great deal about physics or biochemistry or quantum mechanics 

 or microbial genetics or applied mathematics are becoming inter- 

 ested in one or another problem of the oceans. But for this very 

 reason, oceanography is now, more than ever, a meeting place for 

 all the sciences. Much of the fun of it, the sheer excitement of 

 oceanography, arises when people of different backgrounds talk 

 together about common problems, problems in which the ideas 

 and knowledge of biologists, geologists, chemists, physicists, 

 mathematicians, and engineers must be combined if a solution is 

 to be found. 



The Committee on Arrangements had this excitement in mind 

 when they planned the Congress. On each day, in the morning 

 lectures, published in this volume, and in the afternoon seminars, 

 an attempt was made to emphasize the interrelationships between 

 the scientific disciplines underlying oceanography, and thus to 

 insure that biologists and chemists, geologists, and hydrodynami- 

 cists, would talk to each other. The results were not all we had 

 hoped; there was in fact a certain amount of confusion. We should 

 have expected this, if we had remembered the first rule of scientific 

 progress, which is that the best research is accomplished by people 

 who do not know very much about what they are doing. 



The papers in this volume are not a summary of all existing 

 knowledge about the oceans. Instead they are focused on certain 

 broad problems that have recently been attacked with a new 

 impetus. Nothing under the sun is completely new, and each of 

 these problems has been written and talked about for many years. 

 But during the last few years, new instruments, new techniques, 

 and, above all, new people have combined in a vigorous new 

 approach to these old problems. This new approach is charac- 

 terized by the coordinated application of recent advances in basic 

 sciences and by the careful formulation of questions. 



The most striking common characteristic of the twelve hundred 

 people who attended the Congress was youthfulness. Their average 

 age was certainly under forty. This of course, reflected the fact 



