and necessary exploitation and the critical requirement of environ- 

 mental protection. (See Chapter on Energy and the Oceans.) 



• Complications in sponsorship resulted in lack of action in funding the 

 Coastal Zone Management Act. A section of the Report examines 

 what NACOA finds to be the high price of delay. (See Chapter on 

 Managing the Coastal Zone.) 



• Divided sponsorship has had a deleterious effect in some important at- 

 mospheric matters. There has been little progress toward the insti- 

 tution of controls of weather modification and investigation of its 

 indirect societal effects. The experimentation in weather modification 

 has itself had its leadership fragmented rather than consolidated. (See 

 Chapter on Atmospheric Activities.) 



• Disappearing sponsorship for the vessels, instrumentation, central fa- 

 cilities, and networks which brought physical oceanography to its 

 present healthy state and marine geology and geophysics to a new 

 epoch in exploring earth movement and change, means that the 

 national preeminence in these areas will fade unless the trend is re- 

 versed. (We will enlarge on this point briefly below.) 



We prepared, and will issue shortly, fairly lengthy discussions on marine 

 geology and geophysics, and on physical oceanography. In both of these 

 fields strong research programs are underway but there is reason to question 

 whether this situation will last. In geophysics the status of the World Wide 

 Standard Seismograph Network and its accompanying data services has 

 not been completely settled at this writing; in oceanography, the oceano- 

 graphic fleet has been cut by 25 percent. 



Into this climate of arrested momentum comes a special research op- 

 portunity with implications in regard to natural disasters, energy resources, 

 and the location of economic concentrations of mineral resources — the In- 

 ternational Geodynamics Project. This project is an international prograjn 

 designed to gain better understanding of the dynamics and dynamic his- 

 tory of the earth in the light of the new concepts that have recently been 

 developed concerning the origin of the earth's surface features. Over 

 fifty countries are now participating. NACOA considers it in the national 

 interest that there be a commitment by the government for U.S. participa- 

 tion both in assigned function and in specific support. The Geodynamics 

 Project has a finite life — six years — and many other countries are looking 

 to the U.S. for leadership. We have provided this in the past and should 

 continue to do so in the future. 



The reduction of the oceanographic fleet will have pervasive and long- 

 felt effects. The oceans are a very poorly imderstood part of the world, 

 remote and hard to get at. Men must go to sea to study them. While some 

 observations can be made by remote sensing, as from satellites, there is no 

 complete substitute for a platform from which one can read not only what 



