SEA GRANT COLLEGES 33 



A way to get there and back, shelter, power, water, and food- -to these five 

 basics that we need for the occupation of land on earth must be added a sixth 

 shared by the environments of space and the sea. We can live quite a while without 

 food and water, but you could not have heard my last few sentences without breath- 

 ing. The most fundamental ocean engineering that is going on today is the medical 

 engineering on breathing at high pressures supported by the physiological science 

 related to mammals breathing with their lungs full of water. The latter science 

 may point to engineering developments way in the future, but at the present time 

 men are spending weeks below hundreds of feet of water breathing mixtures mostly 

 of inert helium, with just the right small percentage of oxygen so that at those 

 depths it's compressed to about the oxygen pressure in the normal temperature. 



Ocean medicine has found that helium does not give the narcotic effects 

 "rapture of the deep"that comes from the great solubility of nitrogen in fatty 

 nerve cells. Ocean medicine, by studying decompression, is beginning to over- 

 come the dangers when the aquanaut comes up and reduces his pressure too 

 quickly. If he does, the gases expand in bubbles, blocking arteries, attacking 

 joints, and giving him the fatal "bends." 



Of the other five basics, three deal mainly with physical engineering- -the 

 provision of new surface and submarine vehicles, structures under the sea, and 

 power generators. But ocean engineering also includes food and water- -fishing, 

 fish farming, hybridizing marine plants, and even water divining in the sea, the 

 search for undersea fresh water springs. In the meantime, we can, of course, 

 desalt sea water, but this is a clumsy interim method. Ocean engineers must 

 face problems quite different from usual engineering experience on land. Elec- 

 trolysis dictates a different choice of metals. The mechanical stresses of cur- 

 rent, waves, and undersea earthquakes are quite different from their counter- 

 parts on land. Biological activity can bore, excavate, and undermine undersea 

 structures, and other organisms can create unwanted noise. Thus, biological 

 engineering is a necessary adjunct even to the physical engineering in the oceans. 

 Biological engineering will play a far greater part in the oceans than it has in 

 the physical engineering of the land. I do not mean to imply that the ocean en- 

 gineer must be any more competent than the most competent land engineers. He 

 must have a different mix of the basic sciences and. even more important, a 

 different focus. The focus of the land engineer is to prevent the encroachment 

 of the sea, to concrete up coastlines, to fill estuaries for land habitations. The 

 ocean engineer will consider it more important that beaches and estuaries be 

 retained or that even new ones be built, because they are the habitat of many 

 valuable shellfish and the nursery of many fishes of the deep sea. 



For many years while being engrossed in oceanography and marine science, 

 and while being active in contributing engineering devices in support of this sci- 

 ence, I recognized the gap that exists between the scientists and oceanographers 

 who have made such great strides in describing and understanding the ocean 

 environment- -its shores, its bottom, its physical and living contents- -between 

 these scientists and the fishermen, navigators, sea captains and sailors who use 

 the sea. The missing link is ocean engineering which will pull out many useful 

 scientific findings and translate them into better ways of using the sea. 



Up to now, the mainuses of the sea were for surface ships and fishing. Sur- 

 face ships operate at the worst possible level- -on the surface of the sea. At 

 this interface they are plagued by wind, waves, and ice. If they go a little way 

 up or a little way down, they're better off. The harvesting and husbandry of 

 the food we take from the sea is utterly primitive and has not in any sense kept 

 pace with the magnificent progress in fertilizers, farm machinery, cross-breed- 

 ing and hybridizing that has developed on the land. 



It is worthwhile to catalog some more immediate and some more distant 

 exciting and potentially useful things we can do in and with the oceans. If some 

 seem like irresponsible dreaming, remember we live in days where purposeful 



