260 NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM LEGISLATION 



monitored on a continuous basis. Provisions for such obseryations are also made 

 in the ocean survey program. 



Before any resource can be exploited, it must first be m'apped, and this is as 

 true at sea as it is on the land. Man has been at the task of maisiijins; his land 

 areas for hundreds of years, and accurate maps for many varied purposes are 

 now available. Of the ocean, however, maps of even moderate accuracy are 

 available for only its shallow edges. We know only the grossest features of the 

 better than 90 percent of the sea that lies seaward of our Continental Shelves. 

 These areas, as well as the Continental Shelf, must be mapped not only for 

 bottom topography but for gravity and magnetics, for the distribution of sedi- 

 ments, and for the subbottom structures. These measurements and others such 

 as meteorological measurements and measurements of the characteristics of the 

 surface waters can be made from a ship underway without necessitating steps. 

 The costs of the ship time could be justified for most of these measurements even 

 if only one of these characteristics were being measured. Gravity measure- 

 ments at sea, for example, have indeed done .iust that on the historic work of 

 the Dutch submarine K-XIII in the East Indies, Vening Melnesz' later work in 

 the same area, and the U.S. submarines 8-21 and »?-.'/8 in the Caribbean Sea. 

 Similarly the magnetic work of the nonmagnetic ship Carnegie is well known. 

 Today's technology enables the modern oceanographer to do both gravity and 

 magnetic observations on a continuous basis while steaming at 14 to 16 knots 

 and providing a detfiiled topographic section of the sea bottom at the same 

 time. It is these advances in instrumentation that makes it possible to do 

 so much at one time on each ship and make the running of a full-scale ocean 

 survey program considerably more feasible than would have been possible 

 as little as 15 years ago. The maps that such a survey program will produce 

 will be the base maps for all future exploration and exploitation of our global 

 sea. They will also pinpoint those areas where research vessels can return 

 to get the detailed data that will be needed to answer specific research questions 

 which the basic surveys will raise. 



Marine mineral resources will need surveys for their discovery and maps for 

 their exploitation. Manganese nodules are known to exist in parts of the sea 

 and probably exist in those many areas which have never been traversed by a 

 reseaiTh or survey ship. These nodules run 25 to 30 percent manganese and as 

 much as 1 percent cobalt, copper, or nickel. Actually, these deposits are forming 

 now at a rate faster than the present rate of world consumption of these metals, 

 and within a few years as our supplies on land diminish, these may be economi- 

 cally recoverable. Present knowledge of the distribution of these nodxiles is 

 not sufficient as yet to justify large industrial investment, since the known 

 samples have been isolated grab samples or were seen in deei>sea photographs. 

 Their distribution! must be determined by a systematic survey. Phosphorite 

 nodules are found in shollower waters, and these low-grade ores have been esti- 

 mated to bring $12 per ton delivered on the dock. Oil, gas. and svilfur are al- 

 ready produced from the Continental Shelves, and recent surveys in the Sigsbee 

 Deep in the Gulf of Mexico sugge.st that salt domes favorable as traps for oil 

 exist there. Diamond-bearing gravels off Africa are being exploited at the rate 

 of about $15,000 per day. Gold-bearing sands have recently been discovered off 

 Nome and Juneau, tin is being dredged from the sea fiooi- off the Malay Penin- 

 sula, magnetite sands are being mined from the sea floor off Japan for their iron 

 content, and even plain sand is now required for U.S. beaches to such a degree 

 that surveys of the offshore areas have been carried out just to try to locate 

 sands for beach replenishment. It has been estimated in a report prepared 

 for UNESCO that several million dollars a year in geological and minerological 

 research and siirveys directed specifically toward the location of mineral de- 

 posits on the Continental Shelves could generate new industry of gross product 

 of at least $50 million a year within a decade. 



Studies of the shai>e of the earth and the tieing of remote islands into the major 

 geodetic nets require gravity data at sea. The world magnetic charts for navi- 

 gation require magnetic data at sea. Charts of the sea for the marine navigator 

 require hydrographic surveys at sea. Resource exploitation — as well as dis- 

 covery — ^requires maps of the seas. Long-range weather prediction needs synop- 

 tic meterological data at sea as well as oceanographic data for a better under- 

 standing of the air-sea interaction mechanism. Commerce requires maps. 

 National defense requires all of these data. Pollution control needs to know of 

 the currents and rates of dispersion of pollutants. Basic research which pro- 

 vides the pool of basic knowledge on which we must draw for our future ap- 



