MARINE SCIENCE 15 



can pay attention to the manpower requirements. We have in our 

 committee paid great attention and laid stress on the importance of 

 the educational manpower requirements and on the importance of 

 sharing this vast task internationally. 



International cooperation will help us get the job done and will 

 provide yet another way for us to strengthen ties of friendship with 

 other nations. 



We are also prepared to tell you a little of the history of ocean- 

 ography which is but a prelude to what will come and sets it in its 

 proper perspective. Or, as the taxidriver explained the inscription 

 on the Archives Building here in Washington, in oceanography, like in 

 anything else, "you ain't seen nothing yet." 



For observation, we must have survey ships to give us an overall 

 picture of what the oceans are like. They are so vast that our igno- 

 Tance about them is abysmal. 



In recommending increased emphasis for oceanography, I think it is 

 well to point out that the fruits of this work will aid in the under- 

 standing and exploration of space. Just as we know that byproducts 

 from the space program will help us to understand the oceans. For 

 instance, the exploration of Antarctic waters with days of cloud cover 

 is made extremely difficult by lack of navigational facilities. It is 

 no use measuring precisely what is there in the oceans if we don't 

 know where we are. If we don't know where "there" is. 



The great achievement in the last few weeks of launching the first 

 navigational satellite is the first step to lick this problem. Now, ships 

 in all waters of the world will have a true lighthouse in the sky that 

 clouds and storm cannot obscure. But in oceanography, our vessels 

 will need the receivers and computers to interpret the radio signals, 

 to understand the language of the satellite lighthouse. 



For research observations too, we must also have surface ships. 

 These differ from survey vessels in that the observations they make are 

 designed to answer a specific question that some scientist proposes to 

 ask the sea. 



For oceanographic observations in the past, because the effort was so 

 small, oceanographers have of necessity had to employ instruments 

 built with their own stubby fingers. These have been imaginative and 

 useful, but we now come to the time when the task is too great and 

 when we should lean on the tremendous strength of our American 

 engineering and productive capability to provide our newer instru- 

 ments, to provide entirely new devices like bathyscaphs, floating and 

 ■submerged buoys, sonor, and the like. 



For "understanding" all these observations, there must be built up 

 in proper balance sufficiently trained minds (this is education and 

 manpower) with adequate shore-based laboratories in conjunction 

 with our great universities and other institutions, so that the strength 

 ■of scientists in the basic fields, like physics, chemistry, biology and 

 mathematics, can be brought to bear on the problems of the oceans. 



Understanding will lead in turn to prediction of happenings in the 

 seas. We already predict tides. We predict the breakup and for- 

 mation of ice, the drift of dangerous icebergs. Already a day can 

 be saved in crossing the Atlantic by predictions of wind, waves, and 

 currents. We must learn to predict conditions both biological and 

 physical which hamper or assist our communications deep in the sea 



