216 SEA GRANT COLLEGES 



Lakes of "Wisconsin have served and will continue to serve as sites 

 for conducting experimental oceanography. One can identify prob- 

 lems and develop hypotheses at sea, but it is only in the smaller lakes 

 that one can conduct experiments to test them. 



The economic, social, and political aspects of major water problems 

 are becoming increasingly critical. In the oceans and the Great Lakes 

 the development of management techniques and plans for multiple 

 use of water resources is already seriously lagging because of non- 

 scientific problems. In the water resources center at our university 

 we are making a special effort to bring the talents of economists, rural 

 and urban planners and lawyers, as well as sanitary engineers and 

 natural scientists to bear on water problems. This subject should re- 

 ceive special emphasis in a sea grant college. 



Sea grant colleges will be expected to assume leadership in develop- 

 ing and applying new techniques for the study of the marine environ- 

 ment. Conventional research ships with improved equipment will 

 continue to be needed in increasing numbers. However, modern tech- 

 niques of remote sensing from aircraft or satellites have exciting 

 potential for augmenting the ship recorded data and for rapid survey 

 of inaccessible regions such as Hudson Bay or the Antarctic Ocean. 

 These techniques are especially useful for measuring heat exchange 

 and evaporation from the sea surface. These processes are the pri- 

 mary energy sources for our weather. 



Automatic buoy systems can also obtain on a continuous basis ocean- 

 ographic data which can then be transmitted by radio to overflying- 

 aircraft or satellites and then relayed to shore stations. These systems, 

 remote sensing and automatic buoys, are already within the state 

 of the art. However, they have not yet been applied to anywhere near 

 their full potential. Furthermore, they will attain their maximum 

 power and usefulness only when they have been married into a single' 

 unified system of buoys, ships, and overflying vehicles. To accomplish 

 this combination of subsystems would be a major challenge for the 

 sea grant colleges — one which would require all the talents of several 

 first-class, broadly based universities. 



The Great Lakes : The Great Lakes of North America have been 

 called the largest single resource of fresh surface water in the world. 

 Despite their misuse by man their water is still of high quality ; no 

 desalting is necessary. They support a fisliery wliich could be further 

 improved by careful management. They are important for commerce 

 and with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway they provide a cheap 

 marine highway from the center of our country to anywhere in the 

 world. Valuable mineral resources in their bottoms no doubt exist 

 but have been largely ignored. The Great Lakes represent a recrea- 

 tional asset which has almost certainly been underestimated up to 

 now, but with the high rate of growth in the size and mobility of our 

 population, this asset will surely be tapped heavily in the future. 



Yet despite their immense value to man, less is known about some of" 

 the Great Lakes, especially Lakes Superior and Huron, than about 

 many areas of the ocean, and Lakes Michigan, Erie, and Ontario are 

 becoming polluted at a frightening rate even before the natural 

 processes in them are understood. 



In addition to being well worth studying and developing as a major 

 resource, these inland seas are excellent models of oceanographic and 



