NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM—1965 687 
has conquered Everest, and has penetrated to the remotest portions of the 
land. Only the oceans are left as the last great unexplored part of the earth. 
The fact that knowledge of the seas will be of great value to mankind is probably 
secondary in the minds of most oceanographers. To them the challenge is the 
challenge of the unknown, the lure of new discoveries, the chance to glimpse pre- 
viously unseen things, to learn and through learning to understand things pre- 
viously unknown. It is the same challenge that caused men to want to reach 
the poles or find a Northwest Passage, and it is the same challenge that caused 
their governments to support their endeavors. Bare unrationalized curiosity is 
indeed a valid motive for an increased program of marine exploration. 
But as President Kennedy said in his message to Congress in March of 1961, 
“Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity.” And indeed it is. 
The United States is seriously deficient in reserves of such strategic resources 
as manganese, cobalt, nickel, and copper. Yet we know that these very minerals 
are to be found in profusion as potato-shaped concretions littering parts of the 
ocean floor. These so-called manganese nodules have been dredged up from 
depths generally on the order of 1 to 2 miles, and assays of their mineral con- 
tent show them to be high in just these metals. The questions now are how 
extensive are these deposits and how do we get them up and recover the min- 
erals. But these are only a few of the minerals found on the ocean floom 
Diamonds are now being dredged from the sea floor off South Africa, a lease for 
the recovery of phosphorite has recently been granted off the coast of Cali- 
fornia, and one for the recovery of gold has been let off the mouth of an Alaskan 
river known to contain gold-bearing gravels. These, however, are merely ex- 
ploitation of minerals on or in the sea floor. Sea water itself has been described 
as a dilute solution of almost everything, and the definition is not too far from 
the truth. The salts of the sea have been recovered through evaporation since 
before the Christian era. More recently magnesium and bromine have been 
commercially extracted from sea water. More minerals are there, it is pri- 
marily a question of determining how they can be concentrated and recovered 
cheaper than they can be obtained on land. The living resources of the sea have 
been used since man first tasted fish and found that it was- good. But when 
people are dying of malnutrition anywhere on earth, the marine food resources 
are obviously not being adequately utilized. Man is still a hunter in the seas. 
It is not until he is able to pass out of the hunting stage and into the farming 
stage that he will be utilizing the marine food resources to the utmost. The 
word “aguaculture” is new to our vocabulary now, but with sufficient knowl- 
edge of the interrelationships between oceanic food stocks and their environ- 
ment, it may indeed be possible to raise fish as we now raise livestock on land. 
Seventy-one percent of the incoming solar radiation falls on the surface of 
the sea. Because we as yet know so little of the heat budget of the oceans, we 
know little of the quantitative role of the sea in the generation of our weather 
and climate. Currently weather forecasts for 2 or 3 days in advance are possible, 
but if the total role of the air-sea interaction in the generation of our weather 
were known, it is highly probable that the weather could be predicted far in 
advance. Perhaps we could even cause Mark Twain’s famous statement to be 
changed to read: “Everybody talks about the weather, and at last somebody is 
doing something about it.” This is not so farfetched as it at first might seem. 
It has been proposed, for example, that large barges carrying nuclear powered 
heat generators be anchored awash off the coast of California near Los Angeles. 
The rising moist warm air would move eastward with the prevailing westerlies, 
would be forced upward over the California mountains, be cooled below the dew 
point, and drop much needed rain on parched southern California. At the same 
time, the circulation generated by the rising air over the barges would pull the 
smog-filled air out of the Los Angeles basin leaving that city with the constant 
view of the Santa Ynez, San Gabriel and San Bernadino Mountains it once had. 
Sea bottom atomic generators could be utilized to create rising ocean currents in 
coastal areas. Not only would this affect the local climate, but also it would 
eause an upwelling of the nutrient-rich bottom waters to act as a fertilizer for 
the local fishing industry. Such schemes obviously cannot even be considered 
until we know a great deal more about the oceans than we now do. Such hot 
air generators or upwelling machines might do much more harm than good. The 
point to be made is that if we ever expect to utilize advanced ideas such as these, 
we must first have the basic oceanographic knowledge to predict accurately what 
will happen once they are put into operation. Such knowledge does not yet exist. 
