assault on the largest unknown; the international...

Assault on the largest unknown The Ifitevnutional Indian Ocean Expedition 1959-65

ISTEItSATIOSdl.

E SI'E I) I T I O S

Assault on the largest unknown

The International Indian Ocean Expedition 1 9 5 9-6 5 Daniel Behrman

The Unesco Press

Published in 198 1 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 7 place de Fontenoy. 75700 Paris Printed by Imprimerie Darantiere. Quetigny-Dijon

0 Unesco 1981 ISBN 92-3-101 91 7- I

Pulilishrd terls may be free02 reproduced and iratislaied fe.rcept d i e n reproduction or trunsluiiori rights ure resrned). provided tliai rnenfiori is made of the author und source.

Pririted in France

Preface

The International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE) was an international co-operative multi-ship scientific expedition which took place during 1 959-65. The scientific purposes o f the expedition were to explore the Indian Ocean and to test specific scientific hypotheses. At that time the Indian Ocean was the least known o f the non-polar oceans. The scientific impact o f the expedition was significant. For example certain discoveries contributed to a major revolution o f geologic theory.

Equally the expedition had a major social impact on the region. Oceanographers in countries such as Thailand, India and Pakistan note that their countries’ present strength in marine science infrastructure stems directly from their participation in the expedition.

The expedition was conceived and started by the international scientific community through the Scientific Committee on Ocean Research. The first task o f the Intergovern- mental Oceanographic Commission o f Unesco after i ts establishment in 1960 was to assume the co-ordination role of the expedition.

This book presents to the interested layman the human dimension o f the International Indian Ocean Expedition. Here are found the personal comments o f the people involved, the successes and failures, the controversies. and the personal excitement o f scientific research. The reader will find here a perception of the human experiment of I IOE which involved new approaches in co-operative ocean exploration and in scientific development, as well as the impact of that experiment on the region and on the global scientific community.

The author i s responsible for the choice and the presentation o f the facts contained in this book and for the opinions expressed therein, which are not necessarily those o f Unesco and do not commit the Organization.

Some of the cruises o f the International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE), 1959-65 (from ‘Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission(five years of work)’. IOC Tech. Ser.. No. 7. 1966).

Contents

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

A forlorn ocean 9 .

The Indian Ocean bubble 1 3

The state o f the art 23

Drifting continents 3 7

Transient currents 52

Tracking the monsoon 64

Life in the ocean 70

Finding fish i s not enough

Hot holes in the Red Sea

A new scientific seapower 92

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A forlorn ocean

As spacecraft penetrate the far reaches of the solar system, it boggles the mind that oceanographers regarded the depths and seabed of the Indian Ocean as unknown territory hardly more than two decades ago. Nor was th is a trivial proportion o f the planet. The Indian Ocean ranks third in size behind the Pacific and the Atlantic, yet i t i s certainly of oceanic dimensions. Though this i s the only major ocean that does not extend from pole to pole, there i s a clear run of more than 10,000 kilometres from the cusped arch of the Indian subcontinent south to Antarctica. Along the equator from Africa to Indonesia, the distance i s not as great, but it st i l l amounts to 7,000 kilometres. Here we have a 'small' ocean that covers 73.426,500 square kilometres, one-seventh of the surface of the earth. Below the equator, it opens on to the watery void of the Southern Hemisphere, but some of the world's oldest and most densely populated countries fringe i t s northern rim.

These northern waters of the Indian Ocean were a highway for international trade almost at the start of recorded history. The ancient Egyptians were their first navigators, then came the Phoenicians, the Indians. the Chinese and the medieval Arabs. The walls of the temple o f Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt chronicle the expedition she sent to the land of Punt, now Somalia, almost 3,500 years ago. Across the Arabian Sea and equally remote in time from our day, the Harappans o f the early Indus Valley civilization used the wind to drive their ships and, so it i s thought, took advantage of the changing direction of prevailing winds during the winter and summer monsoons. The very word 'monsoon' comes from the Arabic niausini meaning 'season' and it was certainly the Arabs who came closest to mastery of the science of navigation in these waters. Anwar A. Aleem, an Egyptian researcher. quotes the Book of Routes and Kingdoms written about A.D. 846 by the geographer Ibn Khordazbeh. While the seamen of the day may have confhed tides and currents (there was no Arabic word for tide, which they described as 'flux and reflux') and some thought that tides were caused either by an angel who dipped his finger into the sea to lift it or by the breathing of whales, the Arab and Persian pilots o f the Arabian Sea knew that the currents there reversed twice a year. A hundred years later, another writer, El Mas'udi in h is encyclopedia Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems. described the movements of the ocean farther south: 'The Abyssinian Sea runs from east to west along the equator.' H e stated that over most of the sea the current changed when the monsoon winds changed.

Europeans had hardly ventured over the horizon when these marvels of the Indian Ocean were being discovered. In A.D. 85 I, so Aleem tells us, Solayman the Merchant saw a waterspout in the Bay of Bengal:

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And each o f these seas has a wind that disturbs it enormously, so that the water boils as if in a pot. The sea rejects whatsoever inside to the shores o f islands: the ships are smashed and the shores are covered with enormous dead fish.

During the twelfth century, another Arab writer told of water the colour of blood in a gulf of the Indian Ocean, no doubt the Red Sea. Aleem has related the l i fe of Ahmad Ibn Magid, believed by some to have served as pilot to Vasco de Gama from Malindi in Africa to Calicut in India. Ibn Magid put h is Arabian Sea lore into some forty books of sailing directions, written as poetry so they would be easier to memorize. H e knew the cycle of the winds north and south o f the equator, he adapted the compass needle to a box comprising the wind rose, and he spoke o f favourable and unfavourable seasons for navigating the Indian Ocean, the periods when it was 'open' or 'closed'.

The Arabian Sea had truly been an Arabian lake, but now the Europeans appeared, f irst the Portuguese, then the English, the Dutch and the French. It was a time for adventurers and explorers with but l i t t le penchant for poetic reflection on the nature of the world they were conquering, a world that did not lend itself to such a gentle pursuit. A marine biologist, A. Alcock, who served as a 'surgeon-naturalist' on a British survey ship, Irzvestigator, in Indian waters at the end of the nineteenth century, wrote o f the conditions that these seamen endured. When Juan Sebastian del Cano, Magellan's lieutenant, brought the Victoria through the Indian Ocean to complete the f i rs t circumnavigation of the earth, the crew was reduced to rations of 'oxhides, sawdust, rats, old biscuit full of grubs and stinking'. Life was not much easier for men under John Davis, the Elizabethan navigator who left his name on the strait between Greenland and North America before he sailed to India. Down to a quarter pint of water a day, they took sugar so they could sweeten and drink the water used to wash the ship, so Alcock tells us.

By the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shipboard l i fe in the Indian Ocean had improved but European scientific curiosity had turned to seas more important as theatres of naval warfare or avenues of commerce. A gap in knowledge o f Indian Ocean waters was already felt in I 8 4 5 when George Buist, formerly editor of the Boinbajl Times. proposed to the Admiralty in London that ten tidal and meterological observatories be set up between Suez and Ceylon. H i s suggestion i s mentioned by Margaret Deacon in Scientists and the Sea 1650-1900 where she quotes Buist's statement that the observatories could be run by the Bombay Geographical Society, which

has o f late resolved to direct i t s energies to several branches of research in Physical Geography (greatly in need o f elucidation), referring particularly to the direction and velocity of tidal currents: to the epochs and amount o f high water; the state o f the aqueous and aerial currents along the coasts o f Western India, Scinde and Baloochistan. Persia and Arabia, from Bombay to the mouth, or if possible, to the upper end o f the Red Sea.

Oceanography as a modern science was to have i t s beginnings elsewhere. When the British Challenger undertook her round-the-world cruise from 1 8 72 to 1876, she omitted the northern half of the Indian Ocean and, instead, sailed from Cape Town to Melbourne with an incursion into Antarctic waters. Noteworthy expeditions were few: cruises by the Austrians aboard Novara in the 1850s; the Germans aboard Valdivia in 1898-99, Gauss in 190 1-03 and Planet in 1906-07: the Dutch with Suzellius in the late 1920s and early 1930s, along with measurements of gravity by F. A. Vening Meinesz from the mid-I 920s to the Second World War aboard submarines running to the East Indies; biological and physical oceanographic work by the British Discovery II en route to and from the Antarctic in the 1930s and 1940s; the John Murray Expedition mounted by the British aboard an Egyptian vessel, Mabahiss, in 1933 and led by Robert Beresford Seymour Sewell; hydrographic surveys by the British Royal Navy: the Swedish Deep-sea Expedition in Albatross in 1947-48; and work done by the Danes with Dana in 1928-30

I O

A forlorn ocean

and Galatlieu in 1950-52. None o f th is was systematic and twenty or thirty years might elapse between two observations in the same region. Scientists l ike Seymour Sewell, a zoologist who had spent most o f his career in India and had an understandable interest in the Indian Ocean, were uncommon. Most had turned their efforts elsewhere, mostly to waters nearer their laboratories. There were no major fishing grounds in the Indian Ocean and merchant vessels avoided i t s southern half. The opening of the Suez Canal and the introduction of steam had led to the abandonment o f the old route taken by sailing ships around the Cape o f Good Hope.

Such was the situation that confronted Paul Tchernia from the Physical Oceanography Laboratory of the Museum of Natural History in Paris as he worked on the observations that he had made in the Indian Ocean in 1948-49 and 1949-50 on Conirnandarit Charcot, a French ship bound for Antarctica to set up a base there. H e had not been able to take many stations. hardly more than a dozen. for time was short and the ship had to sl ip into and out o f the Antarctic during the short summer before the ice pack closed in. Tchernia once said that he blushed when he thought o f those stations. yet there were no others and he had become for a time somewhat o f an authority on what he called the 'forlorn ocean'. In that bible of oceanography, The Oceum, published in 1942 and written by H. U . Sverdrup, M. W. Johnson and R. H. Fleming, only eight pages were devoted to it.

Tchernia had this in mind in January 1 9 5 7, when he attended a meeting at Göteborg in Sweden of the working group on oceanography o f the Special Committee for the International Geophysical Year (which actually lasted eighteen months in I957 and 1958). He suggested an international synoptic study o f the physical oceanography of the Indian Ocean with emphasis on the seasonal reversal of currents with the monsoons. a phenomenon nowhere else so fully developed. H i s proposal came too late to be considered for the International Geophysical Year.

It was about this time that Lloyd Berkner, the American geophysicist generally credited as the 'inventor' o f the International Geophysical Year, approached Roger Revelle, then director o f the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at L a Jolla. California, who had already sent several long expeditions to the Pacific. Oceanographic research had grown to the point where it was overflowing national boundaries and Revelle was a member o f an International Advisory Committee on Marine Sciences that Unesco had set up in 1955. Berkner now wanted to see the oceanographers play a larger role in the International Council o f Scientific Unions of which he was president and he asked Revelle to organize a Special Committee on Oceanic Research. In those days, oceanography was a small club and Revelle had l i t t le trouble in founding SCOR (it has kept this acronym although it i s now a Scientific rather than a Special Committee). Revelle recalled that he started it with G. E. R. Deacon who was director o f what i s now the Institute o f Oceanographic Sciences at Wormley in the United Kingdom (and father o f Margaret Deacon, the historian quoted here); Columbus O'D. Iselin, director o f the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the United States; and Günter Boehnecke, head o f the German Hydrographic Office in Hamburg, who became SCORs first secretary. There were fifteen members in all, among them Lev Zenkevich, the Soviet marine biologist, and Maurice Hill, the leader o f the British marine geophysics group at Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Revelle was the f irst president o f SCOR; he served four years and was succeeded by George Humphrey, an Australian marine biochemist. Of the members, six were nominated by the International Council of Scientific Unions and the others by ICSU member unions in geology, geophysics, biology, physics, chemistry and geography. From 28 to 30 August 1957, SCOR met for the f i rs t time at Woods Hole on Cape Cod in the United States.

Committee members saw three long-range problems that could be o f critical


importance to the future of mankind: the ocean as a dump for the waste products of industrial civilization, particularly with the use of atomic power; the sea as a source of protein, which implied a clear understanding of how nutrients needed by marine plant l i fe are brought up from the deep: and the role of the ocean in climatic change, especially in absorbing the carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned. All three problems demanded more knowledge of the exchange between the ocean's deep and surface waters, as well as between surface water and the atmosphere. SCOR decided that it should first 'encourage and co-ordinate' an international programme o f measurements in the waters of the deep ocean, using international co-operation to cut the cost of large ships and other facilities. For the first two or three years, the programme would concentrate on the exchange and standardization of techniques in ail branches of marine science. Many new techniques were just coming to the fore to 'tag' and follow water masses at great depths: radioactive tracers, deep-current meters. and precise measurement o f the salt content o f seawater.

Then SCOR recommended that, during the third and fourth years, as many as sixteen ships from different countries should make 'a combined assault on the largest unknown area on earth, the deep waters and seabed of the Indian Ocean'. A study of the seasonal wind reversals there could provide a better understanding of how wind-driven currents are built up and how these changes affect the biological productivity of the sea. 'Few scientific people have ever visited this area and almost none of the new techniques have been applied here'. SCOR said. Not only did it select research problems that are far from solved today, but it was equally prescient when it came to the evolution of oceanography as a discipline. Besides people from well-established marine laboratories, it anticipated that scientists and students from countries bordering the Indian Ocean would take part in a series o f simultaneous expeditions that 'would not only serve the purpose of exploration but would have a lasting effect in encouraging and developing the marine sciences and fisheries in those countries'.

Revelle remembers that it was Ise l in who urged that SCOR should look to the Indian Ocean. Here we have a confluence o f two sources: Iselin's suggestion and Tchernia's concerns. To look further for the origins of what was to become the International Indian Ocean Expedition, w e must discard reports and l isten to an anecdote. It i s told by Henry Stommel. perhaps the most innovative figure in physical oceanography, who was working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at the time of the f i rs t SCOR meeting and s t i l l works there today.

When Carl Rossby, the Swedish theoretical meteorologist, visited Woods Hole in 1955, he suggested that I make a global map of the properties of the deep ocean. E. Dixon Stroup and I spent a couple o f summers putting together an atlas of water properties at depths of 4,000 and 5.000 meters. That was before the International Geophysical Year in 1957. During the IGY. new data came in and we stopped.

Stommel had h is map in Frederick Fuglister's office in the Smith building at Woods Hole. One morning-while SCOR was holding i t s f i rs t meeting. Stommel was talking to Fuglister who shared h is interest in the Gulf Stream.

Isel in had this ability to drift into your room l ike a ghost, no matter what you were talking about. During a coffee break at the SCOR meeting, Fuglister and I suddenly found him standing beside us. I guess we had been discussing some personalities. I wanted to change the subject. 'Mr Iselin,' I said, 'Look at this chart of the distribution of deep data.' H e looked at it, and said: 'There have been many more observations during IGY, but there's not much in the Indian Ocean.'

Stommel has kept a copy of the chart. It i s quite striking: a sea of figures of f the west coast of Africa, a literal blank on the other side. 'Iselin had a cup of coffee and he went back to the SCOR meeting. I have a suspicion that's how it all started.'

The Indian Ocean bubble 2

Whether Stommel’s suspicion i s correct or not, a beginning had been made, but that was all. ‘It was easy for u s elder statesmen to talk about the Indian Ocean,’ Revelle has remarked, ‘but it was hard to find young oceanographers to work there. They were turned off by IGY because it was an organized effort that violated the individualism o f scientists.’

From the outset. conceptions diverged. Tchernia was among those plumping for an Indian Ocean International Oceanographical Year, perhaps in 196 1-62. This, he thought, would mean observations executed simultaneously in a compact network over a large area with identical instruments and methods. They would concentrate on ‘how non- permanent phenomena vary in time and space, particularly on the changes in the circulation o f the northern Indian Ocean with the transition from the winter to the summer monsoon’. On this last point, there was little disagreement. Many physical oceanographers wanted to investigate the influence o f the wind on the ocean’s motion from the surface to the bottom. In the Arabian Sea, they had a natural laboratory where the prevailing winds were regularly switched off, then switched on again in reverse. Marine biologists wanted to see how this affected the distribution o f plankton, the small plants and animals that drift with the moving waters. There was the possibility that the Arabian Sea was one o f those rare fertile areas in the tropical ocean. Reports had come in from merchant ships o f dead fish in huge amounts there.

From here on, the voices in the marine scientific community became more discordant. Not all physical oceanographers liked the idea o f occupying stations simultaneously over a fixed network. They wanted to be able to investigate processes or follow unusual events. Marine geologists and geophysicists preferred to move over the sea so that they could study i t s floor with their instruments. One o f the greatest o f their number, the late Maurice Ewing, head o f what i s now the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory attached to Columbia University in New York, i s said to have remarked that he would prefer to see the ocean dry so that he could drive a car over the bottom. Geologists had already started to map a mid-ocean ridge system. by far the largest feature on the face o f the earth, in the Atlantic and the Pacific. They were anxious to learn if it continued in the Indian Ocean and, if so, what happened where the Atlantic and the Pacific ridge systems met.

Some physical oceanographers soon had an opportunity to express themselves in an anonymously published journal appearing at irregular intervals, The Indian Ocean Bubble. I t s f i rs t issue announced i t s purpose in these terms:

Many many years ago there was a grand enterprise that came to be known as the South Sea Bubble. A vast speculative venture, i t s Directors would outbid the Bank of England for exclusive


monopolies in trade with the Pacific Islands and South America, in return for which their company assumed the whole o f the National Debt. In the ruin which eventually and inevitably overtook this preposterous scheme, many thousands o f small investors lost their savings. . . .

The Special Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) has endorsed an international cooperative programme of oceanographic research and survey work in the Indian Ocean. . . . Although a number o f features o f the plans must necessarily be made on a high international executive level, it also seems desirable that oceanographers on a working level-who actually think they might be interested or involved in the work at sea-should exchange ideas and suggestions, and make tentative plans o f just what they would like to try to do in the Indian Ocean. For th is purpose, The Iizdiarz Oceari Bubble has been established as an informal journal for exchanging views and ideas. Brief communications are herewith invited.

The f i rs t issue o f the Bubble published a rather lengthy communication from Stommel discussing the various types of reversing currents found in the Indian Ocean. H e thought the Arabian Sea would be a good starting-point for investigation, certainly better than the Bay o f Bengal where it was difficult to sort out density changes by reversing currents from the immense variations in salinity due to fresh water feeding in from big rivers.

The question which we would l ike to resolve is how much does the internal density structure o f one o f these semi-enclosed basins respond to the variations in wind stress. A clear-cut observational answer would be an interesting test o f theoretical ideas about the oceanic circulation. Not a conclusive test, to be sure, but suggestive.

Stommel brought up the Somali Current, a reversing current off the coast o f Somalia and similar to the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic and the Kuroshio in the Pacific in that it flows along the western boundary of an ocean.

According to ship observations, th is current flows toward the south during the Northeast monsoon, and toward the north during the Southwest monsoon. It appears to be strong, intense and narrow-ideal for repeated hydrographic sections season by season. Welander’s computations indicate that th is ought to be the world’s most strongly oscillating current system-the difference in South and Nor th flows amounting to about 6 1 mil l ion cubic meters per second.

Currents along the equator are much less massive. In h i s letter to the Bubble, Stommel observed that while the Cromwell Current, an equatorial undercurrent, exists in the Pacific, ‘elementary dynamical reasoning’ on the basis o f existing hydrographic data indicated that there was no such current in the Indian Ocean. ‘But i s the elementary reasoning correct?’ That f i rs t issue o f the Bubble ended with a very brief letter from Ignatius Donnelly:

Do you think it would be possible for some o f those interested in surveying the Indian Ocean to meet in a Bar, or other relaxing place, during one o f the less enthralling sessions o f the Oceanographic Congress in New York next September [1959]?

It must have been this letter that gave rise to the misconception that the International Indian Ocean Expedition itself was conceived in such circumstances.

In February of 1959, the second issue of the Bubble appeared with a letter from a ‘Secret Agent’ who named the members of SCOR’s working group on the Indian Ocean, but explained: ‘I am not sure that I know what all the files and papers secretly examined really mean.’

The issue also ran a letter from R. B. Montgomery who expressed the hope that the Indian Ocean programme would be designed so as to aid directly the development o f one or more oceanographic centers in the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The present oceanographic activity bordering the Indian Ocean i s undeveloped in comparison with that bordering the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

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The Indian Ocean bubble

One gets an idea o f the state o f Indian Ocean data at the time from Mongomery's postscript: 'In case anyone should think o f a use for them, I have a set o f noon temperatures o f water, air and wet bulb made from a passenger vessel from Singapore to Suez in December, 1958.'

Issue No. 3 o f the Bubble, which appeared on 'May 1 O, 1959 A.D.', published a letter in the same vein from Martin J. Pollak, Comisión Interamericana del Atún Tropical, La Jolla, California, who said: Probably the primary need i s to fill in some o f the large gaps in the geographical distribution of hydrographic stations. If you look at the station chart in my paper (published in Deep-sea Research) you will find those blank areas staring you in the face. In addition to such obvious 'holidays' some of the stations o n the chart are completely inadequate due to insufficient number o f sampling depths. . . . It seems to me that it should be possible to combine some o f the required reconnaissance surveys with special studies o f the circulation patterns. For instance, a seasonal study o f the monsoon regimes in the Arabian Sea and Bay o f Bengal would serve a dual purpose: these two areas are virtually untouched by sub-surface thermometers.

Pollak went on to advocate a 'quasi-synoptic' study in the area between 1 Oo N. and 20' S. to catch seasonal shif ts o f the equatorial current system. 'As a final remark, I would like to suggest that the overall program be planned by the people who will take the ships to sea and use the data.' In this issue, the editor wrote that he had received a note from Messrs Fuglister and Stommel announcing that they had looked at bathythermograph (an instrument that measures sea temperature as a function o f depth) data obtained across the equator in the Atlantic in 1952 and that they thought they saw features similar to those reported in the Cromwell Current in the Pacific. 'If such a current exists in the Atlantic, as this evidence suggests, there will be even more interest in trying to find out whether the Indian Ocean i s an exception.'

Then Georg Wüst, former head o f the Institute for Marine Sciences at the University o f Kiel in the Federal Republic o f Germany, proposed to SCOR a plan for a survey o f the Indian Ocean. Wüst's name, renowned in oceanography, was linked to the classical Meteor expedition to the Atlantic in 1925-27. Fourteen cross-sections of that ocean had been made from 20° N . to the Antarctic ice edge. N o w Wüst was suggesting systematic survey o f the Indian Ocean between 30° N. and the Antarctic. H e placed a grid over the ocean, with lines o f latitude and longitude eight degrees apart and more intensive coverage in the Somali current and regions where the monsoon affects circulation. In a letter to Deep-sea Research in January 1 960, he described h is plan and commented on the changes oceanography had witnessed since h i s days at the University o f Berlin between 1910 and 1914 when students learned how to handle water bottles, reversing thermometers and current meters in a lake 37 metres deep near Potsdam.

The plan had i t s fervent foes and partisans, some o f whom have stuck to their guns to this day. Tchernia once said that 'because o f the Indian Ocean's particularities, th is operation could have been a model in the history o f oceanography'. Many years later, he took some of the blame for i t s rejection: 'I st i l l think a task force would have given magnificent results but no one would submit to discipline. I realized too late that I should have explained how l i t t le we actually knew.' At first, the Wüst proposal made some headway. At SCORs third meeting held in August 1959 at the Lamont Geological Observatory prior to the International Oceanographic Congress in New York, it was agreed that half the time of ships working in the Indian Ocean should be devoted to systematic physical and biological investigations along a network o f lines to 40' S. Isel in already saw some difficulties:

Ideally, all the ships should follow the track chart proposed by Dr. Wüst and in addition should secure a somewhat less complete description of the intermediate seasons in the northern half of the

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area. . . . In practice, we must give way to the needs o f submarine geology and geophysics, and to the somewhat lesser requirements o f the recommended biological and chemical programs. . . . About half the number o f complete profiles recommended by Dr . Wüst would constitute a very considerable advance.

Some did not take the controversy too seriously, l ike John Knauss at Scripps who wrote a note to his director:

Last night, I dreamed I was making hydrographic stations in a dhow in July in the Arabian Sea. There was jus t me. Professor WÜst and a sacred cow. Professor Wüst kept saying: ‘On the Meteor. we did it this way.’ The sacred cow didn‘t say anything. It was seasick.

There was not too much enthusiasm for the plan in SCOR, as Revelle remembers: We thought it was not good scientifically because we preferred to deal with problems rather than conduct a survey. It was also not good because we couldn’t get people to do it. They wanted to do what they wanted.

Revelle’s view i s realistic. Tchernia has recognized the difficulty o f organizing simultaneous investigations even in the Mediterranean, a sea in the backyard of the scientists involved. The Indian Ocean was much farther off and costs were much higher. Since SCOR, with no budget to speak of, could only make suggestions, the last word was on the side of the oceanographers who had to get money from their institutions or their governments. Revelle said:

We had two problems. We had to convince the oceanographers it was a good idea to do the research and we had to convince governments that it was a good idea to support it. But the government people wanted a grid at first. They had to have a plan.

To help win support for the Indian Ocean study from scientists and governments, SCOR appointed a co-ordinator. H e was Robert G. Snider whom Revelle has described as ‘a born expediter’. During the Second World War, Snider had served as an officer in the United States Navy, co-ordinating tests of equipment used in anti-submarine warfare. He did not have a degree in oceanography, but the people with whom he had dealt during the war had become leaders of the oceanographic community in the United States. After the war, Snider f i rs t worked for the Conservation Foundation in New York and then became president of International Population Research. H e maintained h is interest in the sea and served as chairman of a panel on ocean resources set up by the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Oceanography. In August 1959, the academy named him as co- ordinator for the United States effort in the Indian Ocean and he became international co- ordinator for SCOR at the end of that year, a job that he was to do until the end of 1962.

Twenty years later at his home in Tucson, Arizona. where he was living in retirement, Snider brought back to l i fe these early days of what had already become known as the International Indian Ocean Expedition. First, he wrote a preliminary prospectus which appeared in January 1960. It began by emphasizing how l i t t le was known: ‘More than three hundred t imes as many bathythermograph observations have been taken in the North Atlantic as in the Indian Ocean; almost half the area has had no biological sampling. . . .’ H e hinted at i t s apparent productivity:

In June 1957 a Russian ship not far from the main trade route between Colombo and the Gulf of Aden reported millions of tons o f dead fish floating in an area some one thousand kilometers long and two hundred kilometers wide extending across the middle of the Ocean. Similar reports came simultaneously from British ships in the region. During the same year smaller fish k i l ls were reported in nearby parts of the Arabian Sea. It i s not known how the fish were killed, but the very size o f this catastrophe gives some idea of the potential mid-ocean resources which are currently untapped.

The prospectus spoke of protein deficiencies in Asia and East Africa, and hinted that expansion of fisheries might alleviate them.

I 6


Snider did h is best to make the expedition attractive to all branches of marine science. Chemical oceanographers would have an opportunity to look at a large basin closed off from exchange with other seas to the north, an ideal place to see how river runoff affects seawater. The reversal in currents during the monsoons was expected to have dramatic effects on the distribution and abundance of marine l i fe and to give biologists a chance to study 'the interaction of atmosphere and biosphere'. Geologists and geophysicists had equally enticing questions, for theirs were the disciplines in which the least had been done in this ocean.

The prospectus presented the U ' ï i s t plan for a systematic survey as a tentative cruise pattern requiring about ler i ship-years and 1 80,000 mi les of tracks. Half the ship time was to be spent on this survey, the other half o i i what individuals chose to do. There was an element of wishful thinking here on Snider's part. In September 1959, i se l in had reported to SCOR that the 'scientific cream' to be skimmed by expeditions to the Indian Ocean was so tempting that several countries had already made firm plans to send research ships there. aniong them Australia. France. South Africa, the United States and the USSR. In the prospectus, Snider estimated the total cost of the expedition at $13 million, another piece of wishful thinking. Later he found that it came closer to $60 million.

The appearance of the prospectus coincided with the disappearance of Tlze Indian Ocean Bubble. Its fifth and final issue came out in March I 960 with, as in the f irst issue, a long letter from Stoinmel in which he was somewhat critical of plans already made: Just how individual scientists and institutions are going to participate in this expedition without being swindled i s difficult for m e to see. The publicly avowed policy o f United States private institutions i s that the individual scientist has complete 'academic' freedom. But an individual who participates in this expedition i s going to be responsible for a great deal o f routine(a1beit important) work that i s bound to conflict with h i s freedom. . . .

Finally, I think I want to say something about certain moral issues raised by implications under the heading 'Socio-economic characteristics' in the prospectus. I think that there i s only a very remote chance that the expedition wi l l help improve fisheries aiid alleviate the poverty o f the people i n many Indian Ocean counlries. It i s disheartening to see oceanography join the long line o f pressure groups acting--under the guise o f humanitarianism-to advance their o w n interests: in themselves legitimate, but essentiallv unrelated to the moral and 'socio-economic' issues which they pretend to serve. Were the expedition really motivated to help feed starving populations. it would have been planned quite differently-specifically to subserve these noble ends. But as these end5 are palpably not the main goal would it not be more ethical to refer to them in a place less prominent than the f i rst page o f the prospectus?

Perhaps it was the receipt of th is letter that influenced the editor's decision to cease publication. In h is final editorial. he said: The editor has maintained a gently pejorative tone throughout the brief lifetime o f this journal-it would have become a clergyman. But when one criticizes too often. i t tends to take on a petulant ring. Since your editor has essentially a sunny disposition. he has elected to retire from the field-secure in his cloak o f anonymity--some day. perhaps. to appear again in a dramatic way (as a Black Knight?) to do battle wi th Sin.

Deacon, in any case, was ready to do polite battle with Stommel. Writing in Nature, he referred to the latter's criticism of the prospectus 'which probably has promised too much' and then he made a strong case for the forthcoming expedition: The effort devoted to marine science is, however, in no way commensurate wi th the magnitude. variety and difficulty of the problems it has to solve. and after a hundred years work, much of it devoted to fishery problems, we have l i t t le idea about the distribution of current with depth in any ocean. . . . Extensive investigation of the South Atlantic by the German Meteor Expedition in 1925-27 did much to advance marine science. and there i s l i tt le doubt that concerted effort wi th our new techniques in the Indian Ocean wi l l meet wi th similar success provided we give ourselves as much t ime to learn from it, and avoid too much organization as a pattern o f things to come.

17


Perhaps the new venture follows too closely on the International Geophysical Year surveys, but the organization and the problems are being approached very carefully by the research-minded scientists as well as those w h o see the need for some campaigning.

Shortly after the prospectus came out, Snider lef t on the first o f the five round-the-world trips that he was to make in his three years as co-ordinator. Through SCOR members in various countries, he learned the names o f 'potiential activators' and made a point to meet with them on these trips. Snider remembered that he often was able to help scientists deal with members o f their parliaments or Governments because he was 'outside the system' and uninhibited by bureaucratic considerations (ironically, such considerations were the bane o f the last five years o f h is own career which he spent working for the United States Government in Washington). In Japan he took Japanese scientists to the Diet to talk to government ministers. 'Some o f them were shaking. As a foreigner whose job was not at stake, I could go out o f usual channels for this unusual venture.' In India, the path o f the expedition was smoothed when Snider talked to an acquaintance, Homi J. Bhabha, the physicist, who in turn talked to Pandit Nehru. This was not the f i rs t t ime that the International Indian Ocean Expedition reached the highest levels o f government. In the United States, American participation had been endorsed in the White House by President D. Eisenhower and later by President J. Kennedy.

Snider expedited the expedition with enthusiasm. At one point, he noted that he had travelled at least 1,000 miles a day for thirty-five days running and he had stayed in eighteen different places. While on those long flights in the pre-jet era, he dictated h is notes and mailed them back to Janet Smith, h is secretary who ran the co-ordinator's office in New York. It was never more than a two-person operation except on the occasion when Smith enlisted the aid o f her mother to mail out 1 O0 brass plates, stencils bearing the emblem o f the International Indian Ocean Expedition. The emblem, a pair o f arrows aimed at the sea surface from above and below, was intended to be affixed to shipments destined for vessels working in the Indian Ocean so that customs clearance would be speeded up. Snider asked an advertising agency to come up with several alternatives, then took their drawings to a SCOR meeting in Paris where the final choice was made. A handsome version o f the emblem hangs in h is home, the brass stencil mounted on a background o f dark blue for the sea and, above it, light blue for the atmosphere.

Early in h is travels, Snider encountered strong resistance on the part of scientists against the plan for a systematic survey. 'They thought that th is was the kind o f work that could be done by technicians, not scientists,' he said, 'it prevented them from doing what they wanted to do'. Snider listened and returned to SCOR with what he had learned.

The ability to l isten is an essential attribute o f the co-ordinator, a figure who often goes unappreciated in international scientific affairs. H e must be able to get others to give their best without appearing to advance his own career. In Snider's case, this was no problem because he was not a scientist.

I never claimed to be a professional oceanographer nor was I ever accepted as one. I got so that l could listen, ask questions with some degree o f intelligence and then, when people gave answers. I got them into circulation. I did not want to get conformance to a plan, I wanted to get convergence o n a plan that would recognize the special demands o f the different branches o f oceanography.

Snider always considered that h is first task was to learn how to speak the language o f others so that he could interpret for them just as he had brought naval officers and scientists together during the First World War. Looking back at h is career, he commented:

It i s important for a scientist to do science and not get involved in management or else he will lose out on science. This means that there i s a role for a manager-but that's the wrong word. I prefer 'coordinator', a good unloaded word in most societies. What is needed i s an outsider who can facilitate things, who i s wil l ing to take initiatives because he i s not involved.


On h is f irst trip, Snider visited fourteen nations and talked to nearly 200 scientists, policy- makers and possible sources of fiiiids. In some countries, national committees for the expedition had not yet been formed; in others, committees had not met. Now, however, the pace was quickening. Snider learned of national plans by ten countries prepared to send out twenty ships. H e reported to SCOR that a considerable amount of work would be done in the Indian Ocean before I 962-63 and this led SCOR to decide that 'it seemed more appropriate to plan intensive research work for special problems and selected areas instead of a general survey of th is ocean, as it was suggested some years ago.'

The decision that gave the International Indian Ocean Expedition i t s final and somewhat blurred outline was taken at a SCOR meeting in Hels ink i in August I 960 on the basis of the work done in July in Copenhagen by SCORs Indian Ocean working group comprised of forty scientists. July 1 960 was something of an 'international oceanographic month'. After a preparatory Paris meeting in March, Unesco had held from 1 1 to 16 July an Intergovernmental Conference on Oceanographic Research in Copenhagen that recommended the establishment of an Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission within the framework of Unesco 'to promote the scientific investigation of the oceans with a view to learning more about their nature and their resources through the concerted action of the member states of the Commission'. The commission, subsequently approved by Üiiesco's General Conference, was a mechanism to enable governments as well as individual scientists to co-operate in marine research. A t the end of 1962, it took over co- ordination of the International Indian Ocean Expedition from Snider and SCOR.

When SCOR's Indian Ocean working group met, it sought to lay down ground rules for what would be, by general agreement, a loosely planned effort. It was divided into sub-committees on geology. geophysics and bathymetry: physical and chemical oceanography and meteorology: and marine biology. Revelle remembers those meetings.

July and August o f 1960 were two o f the most difficult months in my scientific life. After the sub- committees met in July, George Deacon. Anton Bruun and I had to put their reports together. synthesising them into a coherent document. That took the month o f August.

Bruun, who had led the Danish Galatlzea expedition and later became the f i rs t chairman of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission before h i s death 196 1, was their host. They got together at the headquarters of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea at Charlottenlund, a royal castle outside Copenhagen. Out of the discussions of the sub-committees had come not a rigid schedule but a set of priorities and suggestions. Revelle said:

Nobody has studied the Indian Ocean. This was to be exploration in the old-fashioned sense. There were so many scientific problems and the Indian Ocean was so far away from all our institutions that no one felt that his territory was being usurped.

Bruun, Deacon and Revelle worked day after day. at times feeling almost l ike prisoners in the castle. Revelle said:

Anton and I were enthusiastic, but George was worried about spending too much British money. H e and Stommel had insisted that we should not have a coordinated grid study. In the end, we did have a plan, but it delineated problems rather than a systematic survey. It sometimes seemed that we would never be able to finish. I st i l l have bad dreams about those weeks in the castle. George had intended to go to the Tercentenary o f the Royal Society in August, but our work went on so long that he had to stay in Copenhagen. The Indian Ocean expedition was a pioneering effort in international oceanographic planning. the first operation o f i t s kind in oceanography. It was like the International Geophysical Year but w i th a much bigger effort at sea. W e learned how difficult the task was. We had to accommodate conflicting interests for this was a political operation in which people had to be persuaded. Coercion could not be used because all efforts were voluntary.

I 9

.Assault on the largest unknown

Yet we could not compromise as one does in politics. To get everything done. we had to get different people to do different things.

It was important to involve developing countries so that the expedition would not appear to be what Revelle called 'a club of rich countries that wanted to do oceanography'. Here, help came from the late N. K. Panikkar, an Indian scientist on SCOR whom Revelle remembers as 'very sensible and very enthusiastic'.

In the report that emerged from Charlottenlund. the Indian Ocean working group agreed that cruises before the middle o f 1962 would serve as a reconnaissance for more detailed investigations later. This was part o f the evolution o f the entire exercise from an 'Indian Ocean Year' to an expedition that was finally considered by SCOR, Unesco and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission its co-sponsors, to have lasted from I959 through 1965. I t was a vast, amorphous affair to which a beginning and an end had to be put almost arbitrarily. As Humphrey from Australia put it: 'SCOR working groups decided all sorts o f things, but many lab directors and scientists didn't take much notice. They did what they wanted and SCOR went along in a post-activity type o f coordination.' This does not make for easy narration but the flexibility and informal nature of the operation gave full scope to the imagination o f the scientists who joined it. Today, with the hindsight o f two decades, many oceanographers look upon the entire expedition as a reconnaissance for the intensive studies that have followed it. When the expedition was being planned, the group suggested that British, American and German ships might form a nucleus in the Arabian Sea with Japanese and Australian vessels to the east. Additional coverage could be provided by other ships, particularly from the USSR which had been working in the region even before 1959.

Many aspects had to be covered. The SCOR group recommended a laboratory meeting so that chemists could standardize their procedures. This was a perennial question: how could such a large area be investigated by a number o f ships i f their results were not comparable? Snider even toyed with the idea o f 'calibration ships' stationed at the eastern and western entrances to the Indian Oceans to enable research vessels to check their techniques but abandoned it. In the end. four series of SCOR-Unesco Intercalibration Tests were held and later described by Edward Highley. The first series of chemical tests was run at Honolulu in September 1960 aboard an Australian ship, Gascoyne, and a Soviet research vessel, Vityaz. and in the shore laboratories o f the University o f Hawaii. Scientists from eight countries participated in these tests which, Highley said, showed much larger differences than expected in their analyses of phosphate and oxygen in seawater. The following year in August, a second series o f tests was held at sea off Fremantle. Australia, aboard Vityaz with another Australian, David J. Rochford, in charge and scientists from Australia, Japan, the United States and the USSR working together. These trials indicated that oxygen values differed greatly depending upon the type of bottle used to collect water samples, a problem that chemical oceanographers had already encountered elsewhere in deep-water casts. At the same time, zooplankton intercalibration tests were run to compare the catching rates o f three different types o f nets. Finally. a third series o f chemical tests was held in May and June I964 aboard the British research ship, Discovery, in which British and Australian methods of analysis were compared during a long sea voyage. Highley, in h is history o f Australia's contribution to the expedition, mentions that fifteen SCOR-Unesco Reference Stations were designated to supplement the findings of these tests and to monitor long-term changes in the deep ocean. The f i rs t station, off Fremantle in 5,000 metres of water was sampled twenty-nine times to the bottom and the second in about 6,000 metres o f water south of Java was sampled eighteen times. These and several other reference stations did not serve their purpose because the salinity of the water was found to change more

The Indian Occan bubble

quickly than had been expected. They could not be relied upon to remain stable long enough to detect discrepancies in the methods used to sample and analyse them.

Navigation was another sore point. Early in 1960, Ise l i i i had emphasized that both physical and geological work would be limited by iiavigational techniques. 'The pessimistic view i s that the entire operation must be conducted with nothing better than a chronometer and a sextant. At the present writing, this would appear to be realistic.' Ocean-wide navigational aids in the Indian Ocean were non-existent, at least for civilian purposes. Snider relates that he tried to get the United States Navy's Omega system de- classified for the expedition but without success. As Robert L. Fisher from Scripps put it.

Standard IIOE vertical plankton net shown here in use on the Meteor (Photot Institut fur bleereskunde, Iciel. Federal Republic o f Germany).


the Indian Ocean expedition navigated the way Captain Cook did two centuries earlier. The working group nevertheless suggested that portable systems could be set up for

special coastal work i f they were available. Reading i t s report, one can sense how it sought precise baselines in this ocean so long shut off from science. It asked neighbouring countries to operate tide gauges during the expedition to record changes in mean sea level, an important help in tracing currents. The group wanted laboratories in contributing nations to start training oceanographers from these neighbouring countries. And ships from all countries were asked to circulate their cruise reports and data to interested laboratories. Data would also be sent to the two World Data Centres for Oceanography set up in Washington and Moscow during the International Geophysical Year. The group thought that someone at a later date should produce atlases and issue collected reprints from journals in which scientists had reported on their Indian Ocean findings, a task subsequently taken on by Unesco and other institutions.

Like every seafarer, the oceanographer must cope with all sorts of details during his stays in port. One panel in the SCOR group took up the matter of facilities for ships and gave birth to the idea of the emblem that could be stamped on equipment or flown from a masthead. Unesco was asked to give scientists and crewmen a document to indicate they were on an international venture and that courtesies should be extended to them. It was suggested that countries should waive harbour dues for research ships and provide them with tax-free fuel and special customs treatment so that delicate scientific gear could be handled quickly and safely. One of Snider's later tasks was to firm up these arrangements and he met with comprehension and co-operation virtually wherever he went.

Then the SCOR working group gave some direction to the scientific programme. In physical oceanography, chemistry and meteorology, its panel recommended two areas for intensive study: the Arabian Sea in summer and winter, and the waters north-west of Australia. It asked for work in the Red Sea and the Gulf to get at the water and heat budgets o f the northern Indian Ocean and hoped that more interest would be shown in i t s southern half and in the Bay of Bengal. Ships were requested to make observations for weather maps which could then be correlated with the state of the sea, and meteorologists were urged to 'join more actively in what should be the geophysical study of an ocean' (which they subsequently did). In chemistry, the group recommended a minimum programme so that each ship would sample for oxygen and nutrients; including the phosphates. silicates and nitrates which fertilize the ocean.

The panel on geology and geophysics wanted basic data from al l ships which were asked to keep their echo sounders running continuously and to distribute their sounding records to other participants. Specialized ships had much more to do, whether in precision depth-recording, the measurement of variations in the earth's magnetic and gravitational fields, dredging rocks, taking bottom photographs, probing the sediments of the sea floor with coring devices, or seismic refraction work. The panel suggested what might be done: it did not say where it should be done.

In biology, too, there was a basic and a specialized programme. A l l ships were asked to log evidence of life: discoloured water, plankton accumulations, f ish mortalities, shoals o f fish seen on the surface or on echo-sounders. marine mammals. birds. insects, turtles, squid, even driftwood and floating land plants. When stopped on station, they were to measure how far light was penetrating the waters and to sample for chlorophyll. Every night at 22.00 h. each ship was to take a vertical net haul from 200 metres to the surface. Ships with a biological mission had much more detailed programmes. The group hoped that these could be carried out on three N.3. sections along 6 2 O , 7X0 and 95' E. Some kind o f sorting centre would be needed to handle samples collected in net tows and the group thought that Unesco should help set one up in India as soon as possible.

The state of the art 3

Arthur R. Mi l ler , who was chief scientist in 1963 on the f i rs t Indian Ocean cruise by Atlrintis II. then the newest research vessel operated by Woods Hole, once said that the International Indian Ocean Expedition witnessed the evolution of 'old-time oceanography into new-time oceanography'. From a historical perspective, one does see a quantum leap between the techniques used to study the sea at the start o f the expedition and at i t s end. During those six years, three entirely new research ships began their careers in the Indian Ocean: the American Atlantis II, the British Discovery and the German Meteor. A number of other ships were refitted for the expedition, among them Argo (a naval vessel converted for Scripps), two Australian frigates, an Indian frigate and a yacht once used by the President o f the United States. In 1960, SCOR could see l i t t le chance o f any improvement over the sextant and the chronometer as navigational aids in the Indian Ocean. By 1963, Aflaritis II had satellite navigation accurate to a few hundred metres. although she was an exception.

Many vessels in the expedition used as their main investigative tool the bronze Nansen bottle lowered on a wire to a predetermined depth where it i s flipped by a messenger weight, taking a water sample for salinity analysis and reversing a thermometer so as to break i t s mercury column and record water temperature to a hundredth of a degree. During the early days o f oceanography (pre- 1950), this was the only way scientists could get the temperature and salinity data they needed to determine the density structure of the ocean. It enabled them to trace water masses and currents: the cold Antarctic surface water that s inks and spreads northward across the equator can thus be detected at great depths; Nansen bottle casts into the warm Gulf Stream can give i t s depth and transport. These bottles are found today in every oceanographic ship but much o f their work i s now done by automatic devices, such as the electronic salinity temperature-depth recorders (they measure the electrical conductivity o f seawater to determine i t s salinity) that were already being used by the newest ships in the expedition. A simple quick-acting instrument lowered overside is the Second World War's bathythermograph which registers a curve on a glass slide showing how temperature falls with depth in the top few hundred metres and in particular locating the sharp break at the thermocline layer where the drop i s sharpest. Expendable bathythermographs (or XBTs) had been recently developed to save time and money. They record their information, transmit it by wire to the ship under way, and are then cut loose-because the cost of the instrument i s less than that o f stopping the ship. Atlantis II was the f irst oceanographic ship to take a computer to sea and she was able to use it to process all XBT data immediately.


Nansen bottle being removed from hydrographic wire by A . Pease and S. Buehr on board the Antoti Bruwi. íPIzoto: E. C. LaFond).

Bathythermograph in the hands of C. Poornachandra Rao meteorologist on board the Ailton Brzmn. (P/ioto: E. C. LaFond)

Echo sounders are used to trace the topography of the ocean floor. Recording unit shown here in use by Anthony S. Laughton (United Kingdom) on board the Discoïecï (Phoro: Institute of Oceanographic Sciences. United Kingdom).

1 4

The slate of the art

I t would seem that the easiest way to measure a current would be to drop a meter into it in the way the meteorologist measures wind strength with an anemometer. Yet. at the time o f the expedition and with only a few exceptions, th is was just at the limit o f the oceanographer’s capabilities. Hanging a meter from a drifting ship was tricky because o f uncertain navigation: it was hard to tell how far the ship itself had drifted while the observations were being made. Anchoring a current meter at sea was jus t as hard because the mooring was not l ikely to survive and the device itself was prone to failure. Only in the 1970s did it become possible to instrument the ocean in this way. At the time o f the expedition, however, the physical oceanographer did have a new and ingenious technique to measure deep currents. This was the Swallow float. developed in 1 95 5 and named after i t s inventor. John C. Swallow of the Inst i tute o f Oceanographic Sciences at Wormley in the United Kingdom. I1 i s a neutrally buoyant tube that can be set to float at any given depth down to 4,000 metres. There it drifts with the slow currents o f the deep ocean and pings out an acoustic signal so that it can be heard and tracked by a ship on the surface.

Only sound offers a window o f any consequence into the sea. Light and radio waves are quickly absorbed but. with sound, the physical ocenographer can communicate with h i s instruments and learn certain properties o f seawater. The marine geologist. too, measures with sound. At the start o f the expedition. he had the precision depth-recorder at h is disposal, a perfected echo sounder accurate enough to map the features o f the deep seabed, even the flat, featureless abyssal plains. On a much grander scale, the geophysicist uses sound in seismic refraction studies. One ship shoots, firing explosives into the sea and another ship listens with a string o f hydrophones. From the time that it takes the sound of the explosion to travel through the seafloor, the geophysicist can learn the structure o f the bottom (the speed of sound varies. depending on density o f the medium iii which it i s moving). and the thicltness o f the earth‘s crust beneath the sea. In seismic reflection work, much smaller explosive charges are fired (these are now usually replaced by an airgun or an electric sparker as a sound source) and only one ship i s needed. but the sound waves do not penetrate as deeply into the seabed. At sea in the Indian Ocean. the geophysicist and the geologist had instruments that once could only be used on land. Ships could tow a ‘fish’ containing a magnetometer that continuously recorded variations in the strength o f the earth’s magnetic field. Changes in the force of gravity and hence in underlying structures could be sensed with a shipboard gravimeter, a great improvement over the pioneering days when only submersed submarines provided a platform steady enough for such measurements. While on stations, ships could lower spear-like probes into the bottom to record heat flow through the ocean floor. They were able to take pictures o f the sea floor with underwater cameras and collect rock specimens with grabs and dredges. They also dropped piston and gravity corers, devices that punch a long tube into the sediments and remove a sample core from which the history o f that particular bit o f seafloor can be read by the geologist. At the time o f the International Indian Ocean Expedition, the geologist could penetrate no more than ten metres into the sediments with such a corer. Gloiizar Challenger, the deepsea drillship that has extended this capability to hundreds o f metres. was not in commission at the time o f the expedition. Since then. she has given the marine geologist entirely new vision. This i s often the case in oceanography where the scientist i s so infinitesimal compared to what he i s studying. As his instruments improve, h is view o f the ocean changes. Now, with the artificial satellite, he can see it at a glance although only the very surface and. for most properties, only when there are no clouds.

Accuracy was hardest to achieve for the marine biologist. While he could measure chlorophyll in seawater to get an idea o f how much plant l i fe was present. he could sample for animals only by casting a net. Echo sounder readings might indicate shoals of fish in midwater but l i t t le more. On the expedition, biologists had a wide range o f instruments.

A new net that sampled the f irst ten centimetres o f the sea surface was tested by the

Assault on lhe largest unknown

Washing sample from bottom dredge to separate out animals and coarse material. K. C. LaFond on board the Amon Bruwz.

British as a way to collect f ish eggs and larvae from a ship under way. Another net used from a moving ship was the Isaacs-Kidd Midwater Trawl towed on a slant at depths down to 500 metres. I t s mouth, 2-3 metres wide, captures fast-swimming small organisms l ike shrimp.

Without limiting investigators' freedom. a degree of standardization was sought so that some conclusions could be drawn about the distribution of zooplankton caught by identical methods in the Indian Ocean. After SCOR made i t s recommendation in Copenhagen, the Indian Government agreed to set up a biological centre at Cochin with Unesco's help. In August I 9 6 I , zooplankton researchers from countries in the expedition went to a meeting at Cochin and New Delhi called by SCOR and Unesco. There. they

The slate of thc ar'i

recommended an Indian Ocean Standard Net to be used to collect specimens for the centre. This was an adaptation of a British net with i t s mouth enlarged to 1 square metre. Each ship would use the Indian Ocean Standard Ne t in a standard way: a vertical haul from 200 metres to the surface at a winch speed of 1 metre per second.

Certainly the least standardized devices in the expedition were i t s ships, forty in all from thirteen countries: Australia. France. Federal Republic of Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan. Portugal. Republic of South Africa, Thailand, USSR, United Kingdom and United States of America, (the ten other participating countries in the expedition were Burma. China, Ethiopia, Israel, Italy, kladagascar, Malaysia, Mauritius. Sri Lanka and Sudan). The biggest ship was the 6.500-to11 VitJwz, 109.4 metres in length with seventy-three scientists on board while the smallest was the 15-metre Co/zcli. an Indian vessel. Ships are costly to buy and run; they make oceanography the most expensive of the environmental sciences. This was why the International Indian Ocean Expedition was welcomed in several countries where it enabled institutions to speed the funding of ships so they could join it. Initial reluctance in the marine science community gave way to an atmosphere of excitement and a sense of participating in a new adventure. Paul Fye. director from 1958 to I 9 7 7 al Woods Hole where he now serves as president, remarked that the expedition represented his institution's f irst major involvement outside the Atlantic Ocean. 'We were rather provincial in outlook until the International Indian Ocean Expedition broadened our horizons,' Fye said. 'The expedition and i t s follow-up got us really involved in the Law of the Sea exercise. Our concern with international marine policy management evolved in the international arena which we entered in the 1960s.' M'hile Atlurztis II was not planned specifically for the expedition. she received some of her equipment with the help of a National Science Foundation grant so that she could participate.

Smaller countries could not afford large research ships and took a different approach to get vessels suitable for long cruises. Australia released two naval frigates, Dimzantitia and Gucowze. from i t s reserve fleet and refitted them for oceanographic studies. These were big 2 I 00-ton ships with a crew of 140 for a scientific party of only six, a ratio often found when naval vessels are used for short periods of scientific work. A specialized ship l ike the British Discoverjiis much more cost-effective over a long career. While not much bigger, she has ten t imes the laboratory space of a converted frigate and carries twenty- one scientists for a crew of forty-five. Discoi,erj, and Meteor from the Federal Republic of Germany, l ike Atlantis II. started a new generation of ships conceived for research rather than converted from naval or merchant marine service. Oceanographic vessels have tended to become more and more specialized in their design. Discovery was built with a bow propeller housed in a thwartships tunnel so that she can manœuvre at low speed or hold station. She also has an open well with a detachable bottom plate that can be hoisted on deck; instruments can thus be attached to the ship's hull without her going into dry dock.

The last new ship to take part in the expedition was Meteor. She had no more than a short shakedown cruise in the Bay of Biscay to test equipment before she sailed from Hamburg on 29 October 1964 bound for the Red Sea, the Gulf and the Arabian Sea on a voyage that would end only in mid-May of 1 965. Meteor has been called the child of the International Indian Ocean Expedition and she was a large infant: 82 metres long, 2.740 tons. More than jus t a new ship, she symbolized the renaissance of German oceanography in the tradition of the f irst Meteor whose name she bore. When she was commissioned. she embodied the most advanced technology of the day. Like Discoverj>, she was equipped with a bow propeller for holding station. For the geologist, she had a narrow-beam echo sounder that could look into the utmost depths of undersea canyons; for the biologist, she provided a temperature-controlled aquarium. She and Gusto-vne, the


Australian frigate, were the only ships in the expedition to each carry a helicopter complete with hangar and landing pad. In all, there were twelve laboratories on board. Unlike most research vessels which perform a specific mission in geology, physics or biology on a single cruise, Meteor went to the Indian Ocean as a floating institute capable of working in ail disciplines. There was a programme of lectures on board to familiarize the fifty-five crew members and twenty-four scientists with the work in progress. That was how Meteor had been envisioned by Günter Dietrich who took over as director of the Institute for Marine Sciences at the University of K i e l in 1959 . Dietrich, who died in 1972, was one of those broad-gauge oceanographers; he had earned his doctorate in physics and mathematics, then started to work as a geographer before he decided to join the first Meteor on a North Atlantic cruise in I 9 3 1 Before coming to Kiel. he had been with the German Hydrographic Institute i n Hamburg and it had sent him out in the Atlantic aboard G~rziss during the International Geophysical Year. That gave Dietrich h is f irst taste of international co-operative research at sea. Also on Gauss was Johannes b e y , head of plankton studies at Kiel. Dietrich, who did not suffer from the specialist’s occupational blindness, was interested in biology. As for Krey, he had always insisted on the close ties between physical oceanography and planktonology. Krey. l i ke Dietrich. turned into an enthusiastic internationalist and he later became co-ordinator of plankton studies for the expedition.

w

Professor Gunter Dietrich with the Mereor cruise track (Deutsches Hydrographisches Institut).

Landing o f the helicopter on the Meteor after niaking geophysical measurements (PIIoro: W. Duing).

The slalc of the ar l

Gerold Siedler, now head of the marine physics department at Kiel, remembers the atmosphere when Dietrich took charge. The institute was small with only forty persons working there. Dietrich started to build it up and it now has a staff of 350. H e wanted to add new groups using up-to-date technology to what had been a classical oceanographic laboratory. Since there was a shortage of German Oceanographers and no t ime to train them, Dietrich looked to other disciplines and institutions. Siedler, who joined him in 1960, had been an applied physicist; Klaus Grasshoff, in 198 1 in charge of marine chemistry at Kiel, had been trained as a chemist: others were mathematicians or meteorologists before Dietrich convinced them to come to l<iel and go to sea. H e could be very convincing. In 1960, he and Gunter Boehnecke started to think about a new Meteor and told the oceanography department of the German Research Society of h is idea while SCOR was making i t s plans for the Indian Ocean. ‘The deadline of the Indian Ocean expedition became a deadline for the ship,’ Siedler said. ‘It forced different disciplines together: it was a strong binding agent.’ Eugeii Seibold. now president of the German Research Society and former head of the Inst i tute of Geology and Palaeontology at the University of Kiel. thinks that the expedition enabled German marine scientists to get Meteor at least five years sooner. As Siedler recollected. all groups at K ie l were geared to the Indian Ocean expedition from 1962 to 1964. ‘1 wanted to do turbulence studies,’ he said. ‘Dietrich talked to m e and I ended up working in the Red Sea.’ The interdisciplinary approach had its disadvantages: ’Dietrich wanted all the different disciplines on board to see the ocean as a unit. It does not always work out that way. The geophysicist wants long tows of h is instruments. but the physical and chemical oceanographers want to stop for a station every ten miles.’ Biologists, too, had their own requirements Hans Flügel. a zoologist, was aboard Meteor as a post-doctoral fellow under the supervision of Carl Schlieper. H e was investigating how tropical invertebrates responded to such factors as salinity, temperature and hydrostatic pressure.

It was an entirely new experience. working in a floating zoology laboratory. Previously, I had been on fishery research vessels where you could only pickle your specimens and forget them. Unfortunately. if you saw something interesting in the lab on Meteor, you couldn’t get the ship to turn back for another look.

Meteor brought to the Indian Ocean a number of new techniques, developed at K ie l and elsewhere, which were described in a report by Victor K. McElheny in Science. With Dietrich, Siedler had published a paper on a current meter that could be anchored in the open sea. H e and Gunther Krause used a ‘bathysonde’ to record temperature and salinity continuously down to 2,000 metres. Salinity could also be measured instantaneously with a meter that Peter Koslte had built at Kiel. Using another instrument with a conductor cable I O kilometres long, Koslte had been able to learn the optical properties of seawater at great depths, thereby getting values on how particles in the water scatter light and an indication of the presence of small organisms, living and dead. I<;rey and his planktonologists were working on ways to analyse water samples for minute matter and trying to detect very faint traces of dissolved organic carbon, chlorophyll and particulate phosphorus. Grasshoff. the chemist, had come up in 1962 with an ‘oxygensonde’ to measure distribution of oxygen down to 600 metres. German oceanography was quickly coming out of the age of the Nansen bottle.

Grasshoff reminisced readily about h is experiences in the Indian Ocean. H e had started to write a history of Meteor and the development of German oceanography, but gave it up because of lack of time. It was s t i l l fresh in h is mind. the enormous boom that was engendered by four years of efforts to get both ship and people ready at the same t ime with full funding support from the German Research Society which provided more than money. A commission was set up with Dietrich as chairman to prepare for Meteor’s


participation in the expedition. I t s secretary was Arwed H. Meyl from the German Research Society who handled organizational matters. Grasshoff told of the result.

The atmosphere on the ship was fascinating. Most o f the scientists on board were young and the crew were young, too. They were attracted because this was not routine. German oceanography had been confined to the Nor th Atlantic from the Faroe Islands to Iceland and the Irminger Sea. This was our f i rs t exploration since the old Meteor went to the South Atlantic.

Everything was new. Grasshoff even had to produce a water sampling bottle for the expedition. as other laboratories had done. H e had calculated that all the disciplines on board would need 3.5 l i tres of water from each bottle for their investigations, but the Nansen bottle held only 1.2 litres and there was no t ime to make several casts at each station. Grasshoff designed a sampling bottle in 3.5- and 5-litre sizes which h is institute st i l l uses. It i s plastic-lined, thereby free of the metal contamination that bothers biologists.

The trip through the Mediterranean was uneventfd except for the loss of a bottom grab while it was being tested on the N i l e delta in only thirty metres of water. Dietrich, who was chief scientist on this leg, was not idle. H e and the institute's geologist, Johannes Ulrich, used the lull in shipboard activity between Naples and Suez to outline the atlas of oceanography that they later published. They had not been able to do this on shore, what with planning a new building for the institute, a new ship and a new expedition. 'The only quiet place we had to work together was in the chief scientist's cabin on Meteor in the Mediterranean,' Ulrich said. 'Dietrich always filled his time with new ideas. H e never wasted it. he was so vital and alive.' Ulrich was one of the men on Meteor who swam ashore to play a game of football against a team from a Soviet freighter while the ships were waiting to go through the Suez Canal.

Once in the Red Sea, Grasshoff related, Meteor tried to investigate a spot where Atlantis II has detected a deep pool of hot salty water. They located the site with their echo sounder on which the dense layer of brine registered, but then drifted away and could not find it again. There were no radio aids to navigation, no terrestrial landmarks on the horizon and the ship's schedule was tight. They had to move on. In the southern Red Sea, they were scheduled to land a party of biologists led by Sebastian Gerlach on the Farasan Islands to investigate coral reefs. First. they had to find the islands: their British Admiralty charts had them ten to twelve miles out of position. Then the ship came through the entrance in a barrier reef with only 1.5 metres of water under her keel. She was able to do this thanks to her forward-looking sonar. a device that uses sound as radar uses radio waves to 'see' obstacles. Flügel, the zoologist. was anxious for a look at a coral reef even though he was not on the shore party. H e did manage to get out with a small boat for a few hours.

I saw some molliiscs glued to a rock above water. With a scraping net. I knocked of f about thirty or forty o f these rock oysters. They belonged to CIICIIIIU corriucopiii. a species that lives in extreme conditioiis exposed to the sun o f the Red Sea at low tide for four or five hours. These were ideal scientific specimens and we were able to keep them alive in the aquarium on the ship.

Flügel also managed to get some specimens of Modiolus aziriculatza which lives in shallow water and i s related to the blue mussel of temperate seas. For Flügel and his fellow zoologist, Schlieper, a whole new line of research was launched with that short stay on the Farasan Islands.

After leaving the shore party, Mefeor steamed south. At the Strait of Bab al Mandab, she stopped to measure the water exchange between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Current meters were moored in the strait and the oxygerisoiide lowered. That was an exciting find of which we became aware only later, Grasshoff said: We found a blip o f peculiar water with a high nutrient and a low oxygen content that seemed to be coming across the si l l o f the strait from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. This was deep water below the thermocline and i t was affecting the fertilization o f the southern part of the Red Sea.

3 o

The siaie of the art

Siedler worked on the current measurements in the Strait of Bab al klandab and h e s t i l l hopes to duplicate thein in summer when conditions should be different.

The ship moved on to Aden where the political climate had reached an extreme. Grasshoff related how a bomb exploded on the dock as Mefeor tied up and how the ship gave medical aid to the wounded. Then they had to go back to the Red Sea to pick up the people they had lef t on the Farasan Islands two weeks earlier. Grasshoff said:

We couldn't find a local dhow master l o get them: our captain did not want to go back: even the local seamen were not willing. So we stood off fifteen miles from the islands and put over our motor lifeboat. The weather was rough and the whole party was seasick by the time they got back on board.

Poor Flugel made that trip, too. After h is f irst visit to the islands, he realized only too late the value of those blue mussels. H e radioed to the shore party to collect more and he made the boat trip to the islands to bring back h i s specimens in a small bucket he held between his knees while shivering in gale-force winds.

On her next leg, Meteor spent thirty-six days at sea, running sections off the Somali coast in the north-east winter monsoon to complement studies previously done there by Discoivrj) during the summer monsoon. While Wust's idea for a survey of the Indian Ocean in all seasons was never adopted, it was never completely rejected. Co-ordination was not rigid. but it did have i t s effect. This voyage from Aden to Mombasa lef t Grasshoff with other memories. There was a German Christmas Eve party in a tropical sea that began when the chemists ended their station at midnight so that all hands could feast on nuts and Chianti wine that had been taken aboard in Naples.

After more than a month at sea, the ship's company was looking forward to a port call in Mombasa. Only two hours outside the Kenyan port. they lowered a meter on a wire to take current measurements. 'The wire became tangled in the screw,' Grasshoff said. 'There was no possibility of getting a tug. We were adrift. W e had no SCUBA diving gear aboard.' Equipped only with masks and knives, five of the Meteor's men, Grasshoff among them, took turns going down to untangle the wire from the propeller. While they worked, their shipmates stood by the rail with r i f les to keep a watch for sharks. The propeller was cleared and Meteor did get to Monibasa for a five-day break of safaris and receptions.

From Mombasa. she crossed the ocean to Cochin in India on a long open sea leg during which physical oceanographers tried to track the equatorial undercurrent whose existence had been discussed since the earliest days of the expedition. In this case, Grasshoff said. no pronounced undercurrent was found. From Cochin up to Bombay. Meteor ran two lines of stations perpendicular to the coast from the continental shelf out to deep water. Here, an oxygen-deficient layer was detected between 200 and 500 metres deep and Johannes Kinzer investigated it with a high-speed plankton sampler. To h is surprise he found it inhabited by shrimp-like copepods living there despite the low oxygen content. This was the f i rs t time that such a sampling had been carried out in the oxygen- deficient layer found in tropical oceans. Later. an investigator in a deep-diving submersible reported concentrations o f f ish drifting passively in such a layer.

Cochin was an introduction to india for Grasshoff and the other scientists aboard Meteor and it led to a lasting association between German and Indian oceanographers. Co-operation began on a trip between Bombay and Karachi where a team of geologists and geophysicists came on board Meteor. They started seismic refraction work. Meteor listening with her hydrophones while Kistna. the frigate that India had converted for research, did the shooting. Or Mereor fired explosives as scientists in her helicopter streamed hydrophones in the water to record the sound waves that arrived through the seabed. Kistrza and Meteor exchanged scientists during the two-ship seismic survey which

3 1

Assaull on the largest utiltnowii

finished with an appropriate display of fireworks at sea that Grasshoff never forgot. H i s part in the expedition ended at Karachi where he lef t the ship and returned to Kiel to work up h is data on water exchange between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean for h i s second doctor’s thesis. According to earlier textbooks. the water from the Red Sea flowing into the Indian Ocean i s low in oxygen and high in nutrients. As we have seen, he had already found a contrary flow in the strait of Bab al Mandab. When he went over the results of his investigations with a salinity-temperature-depth recorder, he concluded that there was no continuous flow o f water through the strait but rather a structure of sheets and layers of water moving in different directions at different depths. As new instruments enable observers of the ocean to fine down their measurements, the pictures of the ocean changes from one of massive flows to such a micro-structure. As this book went to press, Grasshoff died aged 48.

A t Karachi on I 7 March 1 965, the geologist Seibold took over as chief scientist of the Meteor. H e had been in the forefront of the campaign to get Meteor in time for the expedition and he knew precisely what he intended to do with her. Some fifteen years later, he said: ‘I wanted to study the Gulf. We planned to cross back and forth to get a model of Gulf sedimentation.’ In Kiel, the Germans have the Baltic Sea, an adjacent sea in a humid climate where rainfall exceeds evaporation. A layer of fresh water on the surface flows out to the North Sea while heavier salt water flows in on the bottom. Because of this stratification. there i s l i t t le exchange between the surface and the bottom. Oxygen levels in deep water are low with l i t t le or no l i fe on the bottom. In the Gulf. Seibold continued, evaporation i s greater than precipitation, as in the Mediterranean. The inflow of oceanic water i s on the surface, the outflow on the bottom where there i s more oxygen. Both the Gulf and Baltic Sea are landlocked, with similar water depths.

Seibold and his fellow geologists worked out their strategy. Because of the effect of the earth’s rotation, the water coming into the Gulf would flow over to the Iranian side and that was where they particularly wanted to take bottom samples with grabs and corers. Soon they were caught in a political tangle. Just as the ship entered the Gulf, they received a radio message from the president of the German Hydrographic Institute telling them to take only current measurements outside territorial waters and return to Hamburg. Seibold was asked if he obeyed. ‘Not I! I replied that I would not go back without orders from the President of the German Research Society. We already had approval to work on the Iranian side.’ A return message ordered them out of the Gulf and into the Gulf of Oman. Meteor obeyed and Seibold had an inspiration. Several years before, he had gone to Unesco Headquarters in Paris for a meeting to prepare the International Indian Ocean Expedition. It lasted from nine to twelve and it was all bureaucracy. They were defining the southern boundaries of the Indian Ocean for the expedition. I asked as a joke: ‘What about the northern boundaries?’ Everyone laughed but they agreed to include the Red Sea and the Gulf in the expedition. I phoned my wife in Kiel at two in the morning and told her to get in touch with Konstantin Fedorov who was head of Unesco’s office of oceanography. Fedorov phoned back and confirmed that the Red Sea and the Gulf were included in the expedition. My wife arranged to have the message forwarded to the German Foreign Office. For a week, the discussions went on. It was not a lost week; Seibold, l ike Dietrich, never wasted time at sea. While Meteor awaited instructions outside territorial waters, he ran a special study of the sediments ofthe Gulf of Oman. Then the message came from Bonn. recognizing that the Gulf was part ofthe expedition. Seibold was authorized to carry out a curtailed survey with no seismic shooting and without proceeding ail the way to the north. H e did his study, concentrating on the waters from the Iranian side to the middle of the Gulf. ‘Just because I made a joke one morning at a Unesco meeting, our expedition was saved. That was a good morning for science.’ In I 9 7 1 . Seibold and h is co-workers

T h e state of thc ar’L

published works on sedimentation in the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, based on the data they gathered with bottom cameras, corers and grab samplers. ‘It was a model of an adjacent sea in an arid climate, in contrast to the Baltic model.’ he said. ‘With our samples, we could tel l from which river the terrigeneous sediments had come and from where the organic particles were derived. The dynamic story was there.’

Some results of the work in the Gulf were quite unexpected. G. F. Lutze, a micropalaeontologist aboard Meteor, had found the minute one-celled animals known as foraminifera in bottom samples. H e placed them in the ship‘s aquarium and they survived the trip back to Hamburg. They even survived and reproduced in Kiel. To keep the experiment going. Seibold worked out an arrangement with tanker captains bound for the Gulf so that they would bring him Gulf water for the l i t t le animals which were identified as Heterostegirzcr depressa. ‘These forams feed l ike cosmonauts,’ Seibold said. ‘They manufacture their own food. feeding on algae inside their plasma. This proves they need light to keep the algae alive.’ H e went on with h is story, obviously savouring it. These are the foraminifera that are found in limestone nummulites, the stones that were used to build the pyramids of Egypt. From the feeding behaviour of their descendants. the IGel group of palaeontologists has deduced that the old forams must have been shallow-water forms that needed light. ‘We learned this by chance. It was only because the animals were stupid enough to survive months of handling by geologists.‘

Another surprising turn came after Michael Sarnthein and Lieselotte Diester published a history of the sediments of the Gulf based on Meteor’s investigations. Seibold explained that the sea level 15,000 years ago was about 1 O0 metres lower than at present and it was st i l l some 40 metres lower 10.000 years ago before the Ice Ages came to an end. ‘If we assume that the land i s stable, we can reconstruct the landscape of 1 5.000 years ago. With the sea level 100 metres lower. then the Gulf would be only a river valley. something like modern Iraq.’ The papers by Sarnthein and Diester on the history of the sediments were read by a South German construction engineer who spent his holidays i n Iran and Iraq as an amateur archaeologist. H e was interested in the origins of the people of Sumer, the oldest of urban cultures, whose traces have been found in Iraq. After seeing the Kiel papers he came up with a theory that the Sumerians first lived in what is now the Gulf, then moved to Iraq when the sea level rose. This i s the kind o f idea that appeals to Seibold. ‘I would l i ke to go back to the Gulf and look at it in detail with new methods. perhaps do underwater archaeology there. We now have side-scan sonar with which we can see details down to ten centimetres. It would be fantastic to find an old palace. . . .’

The International Indian Ocean Expedition lef t Seibold a lifelong enthusiast for cooperation at sea. H e related how he was able to get copies of detailed bathymetric surveys of parts of the Gulf prior to i t s publication from Desmond Scott (who later served as Secretary of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission) at the British Admiralty in the form of copies of the original survey. Or how Atlarztis II radioed other ships in the expedition when her scientists found abnormally hot water in the Red Sea instead of waiting for results to be published. Or how Meteor. changed her course over the Murray Ridge to look for magnetic anomalies of interest to two British geologists, Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews. Meteor also provided A t h i t i s II with sediment samples from the Red Sea and the Gulf. taking aboard a Woods Hole man to operate the boomerang corer device used to do the work. That was done at a rendezvous in mid-Indian Ocean where the two ships spent five hours together. Seibold saw the satellite navigation system and the shipboard computer on Atlantis II and, to reciprocate, took h i s American friends up in Mereor’s helicopter for a look at their ship.

‘The expedition was the fantastic beginning of a career in the open ocean for me,’ said Seibold. ‘And it has lasted.’ There are plans to go back to the Indian Ocean with Meteor. In November 1978. Kiel’s Institute for Marine Sciences organized a course in

3 3

.-lscault on the largest unknown

Karachi in modern approaches to marine biology for twenty-five junior scientists from the Indian Ocean region. Gotthilf Hempel, former head of fishery biology at the inst i tute and present director of the new Insti tute for Polar Research, sees this as the start of an international programme aimed at training local scientists in relevant aspects of oceanography: studies of near-shore productivity, sedimentation processes. coastal currents related to pollution, and food-chain research leading to new fisheries. Hempel thinks training i s an essential step so that discussions can begin with local scientists on research projects that are both useful to countries in the region and scientifically attractive to industrialized countries.

Seibold would agree, but he would probably go further. In h is own geological institute, he always had six to eight students from developing countries. H e has sacrificed h is time to serve on the Scientific Advisory Board o f the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

This i s very hard. Progress i s made millimetre by millimetre, but you have to do it. When God asks you at heaven’s gate what you did on earth and what you did not do. you cannot answer: ‘I didn’t help developing countries because I didn’t have time.’ You must sacrifice part of your time. They have a human right to develop.

Seibold has worked with modest means in India himself. In January of 1965, he and h is wife did a survey of bottom foraminifera in the Cochin lagoon, part of it from a small motorboat. They published jointly on their results which showed that the small tests or shells of the forams had been transported inside the lagoon from a depth of 30 metres and a distance of 30 kilometres out on the continental shelf.

While the Seibolds’ boat was surely the most modest facility that a scientist ever used in the Indian Ocean, not all the ships in the expedition were as big and powerful as Meteor, Discovery or Atlantis II. One of them, Te Vega, did much of her work under sail. She was a converted yacht, a two-masted schooner operated by Stanford University in California to train students and carry out biological investigations in the shallow waters where ships l i ke Meteor- hesitated to venture. Perhaps because of her small size and her educational mission, Te Vega does not appear very often in the scientific literature. On the other hand. she i s the subject of many a sea story. Oceanographers, it has been said, are jus t sailors who use big words. L i ke sailors, they enjoy a good yarn and few are more adept at spinning one than a former chief scientist on Te Vega, Dixy Lee Ray. who started as a marine biologist and later went into public life, f i rst as chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and then as Governor of the state of Washington on the Pacific coast from I 977 to 1 98 1 . It was in her office in Olympia, an astonishingly rural state capital, that Ray took a few moments from her executive schedule to go back to the days of the expedition and her involvement in it. Like Grasshoff in Kiel, she had intended to write her Indian Ocean memoirs and, again l ike Grasshoff and no doubt other scientists who had sailed there, she never found the time.

In 1960, she took leave from the zoology department of the University o f Washington in Seattle to go to the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C.. as a special consultant in biological oceanography. She had previously served on the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Oceanography when the f i rs t proposals were being made for an expedition to the Indian Ocean. With the National Science Foundation, she took up the cause of the marine biologists who often found it hard to get time and space aboard big research ships principally engaged in physical oceanography. She l ikes to think that she had a hand in the decision by the National Science Foundation to fiind a biological ship. the yacht Williamsbur-g which had been used by President Truman and was then converted for scientific work and renamed Anton Bruun in honour of the Danish oceanographer. This was a big ship, but another vessel was needed for collecting in

The state of the art

shallow waters. The role was given to Te Vega and she was refitted with accommodation for ten students and five scientists. L i ke Discovery and Meteor. she sailed for the Indian Ocean without a proper shakedown cruise. Unlike the two new vessels, she did not get off so easily.

By the middle of 1963, Ray had returned to the University of Washington from the National Science Foundation but she was s t i l l linked to the Indian Ocean expedition. She was appointed chief scientist for Bravo, the second cruise of Te Vega. which was lo take the ship from Colombo to Mauritius. In January 1964, Ray flew to Colombo to take over. She said:

The main purpose of the cruise was to look at coral atolls in the Maldive Islands. These are classical coral atolls. They had been studied by Charles Darwin and gave rise to h is theory o f the formulation of atolls as islands subside. They were restudied in the 1 890s by an expedition sent out by the Royal Society. Sailing vessels used to call there, too. Then the Maldives were isolated for decades. On some o f the atolls. I think I was the first white woman that the people ever saw.

Getting to the Maldives was not simple. 'Everything happened on Cruise Bravo,' said Ray. 'Al l things went wrong.' When she arrived in Colombo, she found Te Vega anchored in the harbour, dead in the water with a broken propeller shaft that rendered her auxiliary engine useless. 'Those were unsettled times and a general strike had been called,' Ray continued, 'but we had a good ship's agent and we got her into drydock for repairs.' Advantage was taken of this opportunity to set a few other matters to rights. The refitting of the ship had not been supervised, Ray remarked, and Te Vega had got as far as Colombo with her scuppers and toilets clogged with wood shavings. She had also been painted black and Ray had her repainted white, a more appropriate and cooler shade for the tropics. While this was going on, Ray set up a laboratory at the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo. 'We had a good coral reef there. It w-as our f i rs t survey and it kept the students busy.'

Ray was kept busy after the ship sailed for the Maldives. As chief scientist, she took the responsibility of relieving the captain at sea and putting the f i rs t officer in charge. Looking back, she said:

Everything one could imagine happened, both mutiny and barratry. It was a mistake to take a large number o f students on their first cruise so far from home. When they realized they were stuck, they responded in different ways. They were not accustomed to hardship, pain. inconvenience. They expected everything to be done for them. But I did get a letter later from one student who thanked me.

There were good days, too. The sailing master knew h is trade and Te Vega responded. 'For dredging or towing nets or working over the side, a sailing ship i s very good. On a tack, you are really close to the water and that i s important on a biological cruise.' Te Vega did midwater trawling at sea and dredged in the lagoons of atolls where her scientists collected specimens that led to later publications on the snail and crab populations o f coral heads. SCUBA diving gear was put to good use.

The last port where Te Vega called before reaching Mauritius was Gan Island. then a Royal Air Force base, where she was to take on fresh water. Ray related:

As we turned to enter the channel leading into the lagoon, smoke started to pour from the engine room. W e had a fire on board. The skipper was in the after cabin. directing the helmsman. I yelled 'Fire!' and he saw smoke coming from the portholes. He ordered u s into lifejackets. Then the engineer panicked. He pushed a button and flooded the engine room with carbon dioxide. That doused the fire: the electrical panel went out, too. On that ship, everything was electrical and we had no backup. Everything was dead: we had no control from the bridge. The engineer passed out and fell onto the manual engine throttle, jamming it at 'full speed astern'.

3 5


Just then, the luck of Te Vega changed. A SCUBA set, charged and ready for use. happened to be on hand. One o f the sailors put on the breathing apparatus, went into the engine room and hauled the engineer out.

We got her anchored in the harbour. It was a Sunday in April. W e had been trying to signal that we had a fire o n board and an injured man. Finally, a boat came out. W e were all in lifejackets. And a fellow in the boat called out: ‘Did you bring our mail?’

The near-tragedy had turned into farce. The engineer was taken ashore and the ship awaited repair at Gan.

W e were stuck without our electrical systems. When the ship had been refitted, someone installed diesel generators w i th a lubrication system meant to work upright. It certainly did not work in a schooner o n a tack and w e had trouble all the time. People o n land often do not realize that, when you’re at sea, you’re o n your own.

Ray glanced at the clock in her office. It was time for the governor to return and for the Indian Ocean biologist to slip away.

When we were working o n the outer atolls. I would go ashore to pay my respects to the chief. Then we would hold open house on board the ship. The people had trouble on board because they were not used to steps. They had none in their coral houses. And they were a closed society, they were not used to seeing a woman in charge. It was another life.

36

Drifting continents 4

Geologists and geophysicists were in the front ranks of the movement against the proposai to conduct the International Indian Ocean Expedition as a systematic survey with ships occupying assigned positions on a grid. One o f the geologists. Anthony S. Laughton, now director o f the Inst i tute o f Oceanographic Sciences in the United Kingdom, summed up their general attitude when he remarked:

It was conceived of as a grand scheme in which everyone had to conform to a master plan, but it did not allow for bright scientists who wanted to do their o w n things. Oceanography i s seldom the kind o f neat science that the BBC shows on i l s programmes or that customers like to see. Sometimes one must do not what i s most productive so that one can chase things that had never been thought o f at the start.

Another geologist who was thinking along the same l ine was Robert L. Fisher at Scripps who served with P. L. Bezrukov of the Soviet Union as co-chairman of the panel on marine geology, geophysics and bathymetry in SCOR's Indian Ocean working group: The cost of a grid i s very high. If you cover everything. you may get a 95 per cent resul t for a 95 per cent effort. I f you find a critical spot and concentrate time and resources o n it. you w i l l get an 85 per cent result for a 35 per cent effort. You have to go out w i th a question, then you come back with an answer and. I know this sounds trite. a lot more questions. That was how w e went to the Indian Ocean. It was a t i m e o f adventure, but w e were not irresponsible.

It was also aiime o f revolutionary ideas in marine geology. In 1959. Ewing and two other scientists from Lamont, Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp. had published a paper identifying a mid-ocean ridge 60,000 kilometres long. several hundred kilometres wide, 3,000-5.000 metres high and continuous under the world ocean. This was the sort of hypothesis that immediately set geologists to filling in the blanks on their charts. One o f the biggest was the point where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge looping around the tip of Africa was later found to join in a triple junction both the central Indian ridge running south from the Arabian Sea and another branch heading south-east below Australia and into the Pacific. Litt le was known o f th is area at the time o f the expedition. As Laughton, Fisher and Matthews wrote in The Sea: 'The Indian Oceaii i s the last o f three major oceans to be studied geophysically, and it has turned out to be the most complex.' They were able to identify only six major geological and geophysical cruises there prior to 1959, o f which the most recent had been carried out by a Soviet vessel. Ob. from 1 95 5 to I 9 5 7 . 'We knew what the Dutch had done off Indonesia. we knew o f British work between Kenya and the Seychelles. we knew of the Mascarene Ridge. a mid-depth plateau, we knew o f the sediments coming out of the Indian subcontinent, and that was about all we knew.' Fisher has commented.

t

37

Drifting continents

In 1 960, the working group on geology and geophysics of the United States National Committee on the Internatioiial Indian Ocean Expedition stated that, while research vessels had sailed in the Indian Ocean for 200 years, the geological and geophysical characteristics of th is vast area are barely known. Only the grossest topographical features have been examined and they have not yet been delineated or explored by modern methods. Precise sounding data over the southern and central portions o f the Indian Ocean are sparse to non-existent. Most o f the islands have not yet been adequately mapped by geologists.

What the geologists were seeking in the Indian Ocean was the knowledge they needed to support-or to sink-the theory of continental drift. This idea had been expressed as early as I 9 15 by Alfred Wegener, a German geophysicist, but it had fallen into disfavour because he was unable to suggest a plausible force that could actually drive the continents l ike rafts through the sea floor. Then. during the 1950s, marine geologists began to deal devastating blows at the old concept of the ocean basins as sunken continents. They found that geological formations on land seemed to have been chopped off at the steep slope where the continental shelf dives into the deep sea and the true ocean begins. Seismic studies showed that the earth’s crust was much thinner beneath the ocean than under the continents. This technique also revealed that the sediments, both of terrestrial, and biogeneous origin, on the ocean floor were thin. They simply could not have been around as long as the continents: hence, the ocean floor must have been younger. As for the mid- ocean ridges, they were drawing heightened attention. Plotting of earthquake epicentres indicated that these ridges were the site of great seismic activity. Heat probes dropped into the flanks of the ridges showed that heat-flow up from the earth’s mantle was several times higher than normal for the ocean floor, another indication that something unusual could be going on.

During the expedition, the geological and geophysical exploration of the Indian Ocean took on two aspects. There was a necessary reconnaissance to map the ‘largest unknown’, followed by detailed studies of important features. This i s reflected in the Geologiccil-Geoyli~sicul Atlas uf the Iuzdiuiz Oceuri. published in Russian and English by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and edited by Gleb Udintsev. The introduction to the atlas l ists the most important work done: The f i rs t major cruises concerned w i th geology/geophysics were those of R /V Vityaz in 1960. I96 1 and 1962 that covered a large part o f the Indian Ocean and were followed by another in 1964-65. In the northwest Indian Ocean, HMS Owen and Dalrymple made both reconnaissance and detailed surveys between I96 1 and 1963; these were followed by more detailed work by RRS Discovery in 1963. Between 1960 and 1964, R /V Argo and R/V Horizon made three major expeditions largely concerned with the entire tropical and temperate Indian Ocean, and the Sunda arc. R /V Vema made four cruises between 1959 and 1964 covering the whole of the Indian Ocean. Cruises o f R/V Chain, Conrad, Pioneer and Meteor made substantial contributions to the geological/geophysical data. Many other ships participated in the geological/geophysical studies. . , , Many more ships took echo-soundings on passage which have contributed to the new bathymetric charts necessary for so many oceanographic studies.

Not all were scientific vessels. A British freighter captain kept h is echo sounder going for the expedition all the way from the Gulf of Aden to Australia. So did the captain of Her Majesty’s Yacht Britui?iiiu when she crossed the Ninetyeast Ridge on the way to Australia for the Queen’s visit.

This Ninetyeast Ridge i s the major new topographic feature discovered by the expedition. It f i rs t appeared on isolated soundings during the 1920s when it was believed to be about 700 kilometres long. Subsequently, in 1952. a later Cliulleiiger- made seismic investigations there on what was thought to be an isolated seamount near the equator. Only after the expedition’s results were processed did the Ninetyeast Ridge take on i t s fantastic shape and dimensions. It has been called the straightest feature on the face of the

3 9

Assault on thc largest unknown

earth and almost a mirror of the Ural Mountains. It emerges in the sediments o f the Bay of Bengal a thousand kilometres north of the equator and runs in a l ine 4,800 kilometres long near the meridian for which it was named by Heezen and Tharp. I t s crest lies from 1,800 to 3,000 metres below the ocean’s surface. From the time of i t s discovery, the Ninetyeast Ridge raised a number of questions. It displays relatively l i t t le seismic activity and it i s not part o f the mid-ocean ridge system. Well after the end o f the expedition, geologists came up with several satisfactory explanations of i t s origin. Their interest had been focused on to it by the expedition‘s explorers.

The implications of this early exploration may be grasped by reading Fisher’s narrative of the first two Scripps expeditions to the Indian Ocean, Monsoon and Lusiad. The latter, Fisher explains. drew i ts name from Os Lusiaúas, an epic sixteenth-century poem by Luis Camões relating the first Portuguese explorations of the Indian Ocean. For Scripps. too. this was something of an epic. Revelle, who once likened himself to Prince Henry the Navigator because he sent explorers everywhere. had taken the institution out of coastal waters and into the deep Pacific but no Scripps ship had ever sailed the Indian Ocean. Argo on Monsoon was the first, casting off from her home port of San Diego on 26 August 1960. She was a converted 2.1 00-ton navy rescue and salvage tug and she, too. sailed with only a short shakedown cruise in her new incarnation as a research vessel. In her history of Scripps. SI0 Probing the Oceans I936 to 1976, Elizabeth Noble Shor writes how on one night seven days out. the steering gear cables started to unravel at 03.00 h, the big winch stripped a gear at 05.00, the smaller winch overheated a bearing at 06.00, the compressor in the meat freezer blew out at 07.00 and, at 09.00 h, an engineer found saltwater leaking into a fue l tank. A rgo put into Honolulu for repairs. This did not prevent her from doing seismic studies west of Hawaii and she continued her scientific programme across the Pacific to Australia where she joined forces with a small Australian vessel. Mulitci, destined to serve as a shooting ship for seismic refraction investigations in the Timor Trough and the deep narrow basins north of the island chain. Once in the Indian Ocean, the two vessels worked to the south of Bali, studying the transition between an ocean basin and a deep trench to bring up to date the work done by their Dutch predecessors. As a memento of her passing. Argo left an undersea camera and 6,620 metres of wire in the Sunda Trench, but the ship’s bottom photographer was able to improvise another unit. Even when Ma/ita and Argo took shelter off ßali so that.Argo could replenish the small ship’s supply of explosives, Scripps’ biologists were busy and netted three species of sea-snake, ‘the largest over four feet long and as thick- bodied as a rattlesnake’. After working together for more than three weeks, the ships separated and Argo headed for Jakarta. taking on more scientists who had flown out from Scripps, particularly chemists who would analyse for trace elements, radiocarbon and carbon dioxide in 50-gallon (about 200 litres) samples of seawater taken in vertical series from 5,000 metres deep up to the surface. The very day that Argo l e f t Jakarta and traversed Sunda Strait, she was able to observe an eruption of Anak Krakatau, the ‘daughter’ craterlet of the Krakatau volcano that had erupted with such catastrophic force in 1883. ‘Fire bursts and periodic ejection of large blocks made for a spectacular display; meanwhiie hydrophones were streamed and water-borne sounds of the eruption recorded’, wrote Fisher.

En route to Mauritius, Argo made her f i rs t crossing of the Ninetyeast Ridge, tried to core into it but gave up because the bottom was too hard. Then she worked over the triple junction, shaped like an inverted Y. of the mid-ocean ridge system south-east of Mauritius. This was the start o f Scripps’ long involvement in these waters using Mauritius as a shore base. Appropriately enough, as Fisher points out, Mauritius is almost exactly antipodal to Scripps in San Diego. The geologists’ main finding here was a failure to locate and identify the central rift valley customarily present on the seismically active mid-ocean ridges. Argo then spent three days at Port Louis in Mauritius and another day exploring

40

the eastern slope o f the island before heading for Fremantle. 'During this run,' Fisher wrote. 'a large and soon-to-be-chastened shark, striking from behind, le f t deep scratches and several teeth embedded in the towed 8-inch diameter cylindrical fibreglass magnetometer case.' A coring attempt was made at the base o f the ridge in what seemed to be a hole 3,600 metres deep between two peaks each rising 1,200 metres above it. The corer. instead of taking soft sediment. came up with pieces o f black and green volcanic glass; 'dark glass l ike a beer bottle', Fisher called it. They came from what was later mapped as a fracture zone, a great gash in the ridge 50 kilometres wide and four t imes as deep as the Grand Canyon in the United States.

When Argo's researchers were over the south-east branch o f the Indian Ocean ridge system, seas were heavy and the bucking ship put the gravity meter out of operation. 'The southernmost station ofthe run was occupied at 42" S., 7 I O40'E. where I 5-20 foot seas o f 52 O F water, breaking at the stern, ripped up plates from Argo's sternbasket and made lifejackets compulsory attire'. Fisher wrote in h is dry style. As usual, it hid the most heroic aspect o f the oceanographer's calling. Not only must he fight off seasickness in such circumstances, but he must also do work that i s physically and mentally demanding. H i s stoicism was rewarded on Argo that trip. As she followed the ridge, the soundings indicated shoal water and. two days before Christmas, the tiny uninhabited island o f Saint Paul came into view and Argo was able to anchor. A six-man party was put ashore to measure gravity and make biological and geological collections on what i s really a piece o f mid-ocean ridge sticking out above the water. The Scripps scientists must have shared the emotions of the early navigators o f the Indian Ocean here. Fisher noted: Saint Paul Island, a French possession equidistant froin Madagascar and .4ustralia and well outside modern shipping lanes. has been visited but rarely since the days o f wind-powered whaling ships. tinowledge of i l s geology rests on the work of Ferdinand von Hochstetter, a noted petrographer who spent 1 8 days there in I 8 5 7 wi th the Austrian expedition aboard the frigate No iwn . . . . Saint Paul i s a geologically young island, nearly entirely basaltic. . . hot springs and warin ground are st i l i present. and the central crater i s spectacularly developed.

Argo added information to the nautical chart o f the island. that dated back to 1874, but was the version s t i l l being used by navigators. She made a seventeen-hour magnetic. gravity and bathymetric survey a few hundred feet from the breached crater to about five miles offshore. Fisher reported. In this. she was aided by a French lobstering vessel, Supmer. from St Denis, Réunion, which happened to be working of f the island. Sapmer S captain explained that the island had been uninhabited since a lobster cannery there had been abandoned in 1928. Then he used one o f h i s boats to pilot Argo's utility boat through the channel into the crater and thus avoid a wrecked vessel that had sunk there forty years earlier leaving only two feet o f water over her boiler at low tide. The French captain was invited aboard for lunch and repaid Argo's hospitality largely by leaving the ingredients of bisque and a lobster-tail entrée for Christmas Eve. As for New Year's Eve, Argo celebrated with a sixteen-hour survey over what Diamantirra, the Australian vessel, had reported as a 9,000-metre depth but Argo could find none greater than 6,000 metres. The Indian Ocean phase of the Monsoon Expedition was coming to an end and Argo continued with a 12,400-mile exploration o f the south-west Pacific that comprised a traverse o f the East Pacific Rise, the name o f the mid-ocean ridge system in those waters. She returned home after a 38.600-mile voyage that has lasted 235 days.

The Lusiad Expedition was even longer. On 15 May 1962, Argo cast off from her dock at San Diego and she was not to see it again until 15 August I 963, fifteen months and 83,000 miles later, having gone around the world in a westerly direction. This was the longest cruise that any Scripps ship has ever made. As Fisher comments, Argo covered a greater distance, although in a much shorter time, than the f irst Challenger did on her 1872-76 expedition.


This time, Argo had her sealegs and she crossed the Pacific to Manila without mishap. There. James Faughn took over as chief scientist for the two-week leg to Borneo and Singapore so that he could chart a passage through the South China Sea. There were few chief scientists l ike Faughn on the Indian Ocean expedition. H e had gone to sea when he was 16. joining the United States Navy in 1927, and worked h is way up in the merchant marine until he had his master’s papers. In 1947, he was taken on by Scripps and he served as skipper of Horizon, a 505-ton ex-navy tug, on Midpac. Scripps’ first long expedition. Henry W. Menard, the Scripps geologist who became head of the United States Geological Survey, wrote a short history of Horiíon in which he spoke of Faughn and Midpac: He and Roger Revelle, the chief scientist, gave her some o f that ease and style o f cooperation between crew and scientists that the ship never lost. Everyone lived together and ate together, and the communications gaps and other hangups regrettably common o n some research ships did not occur.

Faughn’s talents in this respect were put to use by Scripps when he was transferred to the front office to serve as liaison between seamen and scientists. ‘I didn‘t mind as long as they let me go to sea from time to time’, Faughn said at h is home in the small community north o f Scripps where he retired. linked only by h is amateur radio station to the world he once roamed. On the Lusiad Expedition, Faughn found what was later known as Argo Passage from North Borneo to the deep waters of the South China Sea, taking core and dredge samples, making hydrographic casts and net hauls on the way. When Argo left Singapore bound for Cochin, he stayed behind. First, he cleaned up after the ship, paying bills, shipping gear and samples back to San Diego. Then, for the next six months, he worked as Argo’s advance agent in the Indian Ocean, flying ahead to her ports of call. It was up to Faughn to inform local scientists of Argo’s impending arrival. to find a safe place in Cochin harbour where she could transfer explosives to Horizon for a two-ship seismic shooting survey, to help set up seminars and to see that supplies arrived on time. H e said:

Not every port could handle a research vessel. When I told our shipping agent that this ship was only 2,000 tons. h e thought there would be no problem. Usually. a shipping agent only has to deal with the captain. With Argo. he had a stream o f scientists coming in and out w i th all sorts of needs and questions. They wanted visas. they needed air tickets for trips around the country.

Co-operation by Indian authorities went far beyond the l ine of duty. Argo had to sail from Cochin for Mombasa without coring equipment that had been shipped out from the United States. Faughn went to Bombay to get the core inserts and arranged with the Indian Navy for a minesweeper to take them out of Cochin to Argo at sea, but the equipment did not arrive in time. When it finally got to Bombay by truck, Faughn and the local Air India manager had to repackage it so that it could be flown to Nairobi. Faughn also met the three young geologists who were to go on Horizon or Argo as Unesco Shipboard Fellows. One was Israeli, another Pakistani and the third Indian. H e may have had to reassure them after the letter they had received froin Fisher about what was in store for them: Our ships are small vessels that work a 24-hour day. Quarters and meals are adequate. not fancy. Bed linen i s furnished, but each man does his o w n laundry. In rather rough weather, even Argo can move about in a disconcerting manner. All members o f the scientific party (eighteen to twenty o n Argo, seven to twelve on Horizon) stand instrument watches and help when and where needed. Geologists, for example, may be primarily interested in and concerned with the sounding and bottom-sampling programmes; however, o n occasion, they may be assisting the seismologists, hydrographers and geochemists. There i s no firm l ine drawn between ‘scientists’ and ‘technicians’; everyone gets his hands dirty. Crew members run the winches, but members o f the scientific party assemble and manipulate the corers, probes, hydrophone cables. water bottles and other specialized gear. . . . Perhaps I paint too gr im a picture. Actually, all o f us are anticipating an exciting. productive and adventurous cruise.

41

Drifting continents

The fellows withstood the regime. One o f them, Gideon Almagor from Israel, wrote some sixteen years later:

As I joined the expedition as a student, this event changed the course o f m y career. On m y return. I joined the newly-founded Marine Geology Division o f the Geological Survey o f Israel. Having gained experience in practical oceanography, I participated in designing and operating a coring program and in research o f the physical properties o f recent marine sediments in the continental margin o f Israel.

Everywhere, Faughn smoothed the way for Argo and h is comments were appreciated as much as h is efforts. After a visit to pre-independance Aden. he wrote to Fisher: They claim to have Cain's tomb here and the boat works that built the Ark. In the bay, 30,000-ton tankers make way for the 60-foot dhows built long before the Romans 'discovered' the Red Sea.

At Nairobi. Faughn arranged a passage home for one of A r'go's oilers who was left behind in a hospital there. H e had to cope with every detail. In a letter to Scripps, he asked that scientists mark their equipment parcels legibly and eschew the use of glued stickers that come loose in a humid climate. Fisher wrote to him later: 'You seemed discouraged: think of our fix had you not been there.' Faughn got some compensation for h is pains when he went back to the Indian Ocean again in 197 1 aboard Melville on Expedition Antipode. There he served as research navigator on a leg from Mombasa to Mombasa in which the fate John Isaacs, a highly inventive Scripps oceanographer. took the ship on a hunt for the coelecanth, the 'fossil fish' that had been caught in the Indian Ocean in the 1930s confhing scientists who were convinced that it had become extinct many millions of years ago. Isaacs recalls that he was unable to attempt the capture of a coelecaiith on film with his bajted undersea camera because permission was not forthcoming to work of f the Comoro Islands in waters where the animal had previously been seen. Isaacs did manage to take pictures of a large number of fish north of Madagascar and he also studied one phenomenon that might have been described by Solayman the Merchant. Geyser Reef, a mid-ocean waterfall. It i s actually a submerged atoll about thirty kilometres across and resembles a waterfall when the tide runs out.

Lusiad was another multipurpose cruise. From the end of June until the end of September 1962, Argo was taken over by a team of physical oceanographers looking for the equatorial undercurrent. Early in October, she went back to her studies of the sea floor after transferring twenty-four tons of explosives for seismic shooting to Hor-izorz in the middle of Cochin Harbour, the only place that Faughn could find for the operation. The two ships sailed more or less in company from Cochin to Mauritius, shooting seismic refraction l ines west from the Chagos-Maldive region to get a picture of the ocean crust leading to the Seychelles Bank, that incongruous 'microcontinent' in the Indian Ocean, 700 miles from the nearest continent yet having a granite foundation utterly unlike the volcanic islands usually found in mid-ocean. At Port Louis iii Mauritius, Fisher took over as chief scientist and expedition leader from George Shor, a Scripps seismologist, and the work went on after another of those incidents that break the oceanographer's routine. Menard, who had sailed on Horizorz in the Pacific, found that, at times, she would be 'irresistibly drawn to an island'. The rule held for the Indian Ocean. as Fisher related:

Shortly after 15 .15 on October 29, Horizorz sailed from the fuel dock at Port Louis, bound for Fremantle: even more shortly thereafter she had, at dead slow speed. gone aground on the southeast edge of the harbor channel. H e r hull stayed sound, but it required twelve hours o f efforts by all hands, principally to lighten her by offloading onto barges all fuel, water. removable gear and explosives.

She sailed two days late and rendezvoused with A r-go for a thorough seismic exploration o f that triple junction of the mid-oceanic ridge off Mauritius. Fisher wrote a description of how the work was done:

1 3

.-\ssauli on the largest utikiiowii

Ideally on such operations daylight would find Argo on station. hydrophones streamed and quiet, 50 or so miles ahead of Horizori along the planned line of advance. Horizon would run toward Argo. commencing her firing run when 40-55 mi les distant and firing smaller charges and more frequently as the range decreased. On passing Argo. Hor izon continued shooting out a similar distance in some chosen direction of advance. This technique permits a concentration of seismic and other data processing on the receiving ship, which also has a period o f eight to twelve hours on station to carry out not only core probes but also large-volume water sampling. hydrographic casts, bottom photography. dredging or other station measurements without the r isks and inconveniences o f a shooting program tooling up on the fantail.

Then the ships separated for ten days with Argo running to the southernmost limits of the Indian Ocean to collect water samples for carbon dioxide analysis and to chart the bottom west o f the island o f Kerguelen. There she paid an unexpected visit to the French scientific base, the f irst ship to put in for eleven months. Next, she headed north to rejoin Horizon which had called at uninhabited Saint Paul, for a seismic exploration of the mid-ocean ridge off Amsterdam. an island 80 kilometres north o f Saint Paul. One of Horizon's crewmen fell ill; in very rough seas and in the lee of the island, three blood donors from Argo were transferred aboard. H i s condition became worse and both ships made for Australia at the quickest speed the storm-whipped seas would allow. Some 2,000 kilometres out at sea, the crewman was moved in a small boat to a rendezvousing British destroyer that took him at high speed to a Fremantle hospital. Work continued; the two Scripps' ships stayed together doing seismic refraction work on Ninetyeast Ridge until two days before Christmas 1962 in Darwin. From there. Horiro~z steered for San Diego while Argo did detailed bathymetric-gravity-magnetic profiling throughout the Indonesian Archipelago before returning to Colombo to change scientific personnel for another investigation of the equatorial undercurrent.

Looking back at Argo's cruises in the international Indian Ocean Expedition, Fisher was impressed nearly twenty years later by the quality of the work that Scripps' seismologists had done. 'There was no computer on board Argo. Data reduction was done on shore by girls . . . and by people thinking about it.' Scripps f i rs t used a computer at sea on i t s Circe Expedition in 1968 when Fisher was also able to benefit from satellite navitation for the first time.

Until then, I would spend much of my time at sea at a chart table working out the ship's position. I f we were surveying a seamount or a trench, this could last for hours. Satellite navigation came as a complete liberation.

Certain features were never completely charted during the expedition because of this inability to determine position precisely. On of the most important i s the great fan or cone of sediments that extends south in the Bay of Bengal from the delta of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers. Two ships worked there and provided data, but the full dimensions of the fan became apparent only later on. Joseph Curray and David Moore of Scripps were first there in I968 on Circe Expedition and returned four times after that. Their investigations have shown that this vast wedge of sediments, representing erosion from the Himalayas, i s no less than sixteen kilometres thick at i t s northern end and blankets the sea floor for 3.000 kilometres to the south.

Approximate navigation could hinder seismic exploration. Working over the Seychelles Bank, Argo and Horizon were unable to use the travel time of sound through seawater to determine how far apart they were. The water was too shallow and too stratified to transmit an acoustic signal. A year later, two British ships, Owerz and Discoverji, solved the problem by using a classical marine survey technique. Owen steamed away from the anchored Discovery with taut wire measuring gear on her stern and went on in this manner for I 55 kilometres. unreeling the wire as if it had been a tape measure. Owen, a survey ship rather than a research vessel (the distinction can be

44

Drifting continents

arbitrary for Darwin's Beagle was also a survey ship), did considerable work iii the Arabian Sea. Snider. the expedition's f i rs t co-ordinator, rode with the ship in the spring of 1 962, using her navigator's cabin as a quiet and appropriate place to put together charts of past and future Indian Ocean cruises which were later published by the United States Navy Hydrographic Office for the expedition, indicating what was being done by seasons of the year and by disciplines. H e had flown to Bombay with h i s cruise reports and cruise plans in a satchel. then boarded Owen for a survey run to Gan Island. Snider said:

It was fascinating. The ship maintained a constant course and a constant speed of ten knots. I would watch the fathometer and I could see the bottom rising from 2,000 fathoms up to six fathoms while the ship stayed on that straight l ine. The captain was ready to swing the helm over but it s t i l l took courage to hold course. The area had not been surveyed since 1837.

That was routine for a hydrographic survey vessel. The British also gave ûwerz a scientific mission in the Arabian Sea over the mid-oceanic Carlsberg Ridge that starts from the Gulf of Aden and joins the world-wide rift system. In November 1962. Owen carried out a detailed magnetic survey over the central part of i he Carlsberg Ridge, concentrating on an area 50 by 40 nautical miles. She found a pattern of anomalies; that is. deviations from the present direction of the earths magnetic field. Data from the survey were studied at Cambridge by Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews at the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics.

This was a time when magnetic anomalies on the sea floor were attracting attention. Investigation of land formations had raised the possibility that the direction of the magnetic field had not always been the same as it i s now; evidence indicated that it reversed every 500,000 years or so. This gave marine geophysicists a unique opportunity. They knew that lava i s magnetized when it cools below the Curie point of 500 "C. If new ocean floor in the form of iron-rich basaltic lava were really arising from the crests of mid-

Rober appoii IIOE.

.tG. Snider. SCOR- nted co-ordinator of i 1959-62.(í'/ioro:Sin

.he éty).


ocean ridges. then it would be magnetized as it flowed out. It would remain magnetized in the same direction as it solidified and moved away from the ridge. When the earth's magnetic field reversed. th is would be imprinted on the fresh lava functioning as a natural tape recorder when it came up along the ridge. The newly formed basaltic rocks would be the magnetic tape, lying on the sea floor and waiting to be played back as a magnetometer i s towed over it. Geophysicists reasoned that, if the sea floor had really been spreading from the mid-ocean ridge, a magnetometer should register a striped polarity pattern o f crust, reversed and normal magnetic directions alternating. This would prove the existence of a mechanism that could move continents by opening ocean basins. Such a hypothesis based on field data from the Eastern Pacific had been outlined early in I 963 by L. W. Morley, a Canadian geologist, in a letter which he submitted to two scientific journals. but which they did not publish.

From their study of Oi.cierz s survey, Vine and Matthews concluded independently in Nature. in 1 963, that 'some 50 per cent of the oceanic crust might be reversely magnetized and this in turn has suggested a new model to account for the pattern of magnetic anomalies over the ridges'. Then they continued with what i s nothing less than an explanation of how an ocean i s made:

The theory i s consistent with, in fact virtually a corollary of. current ideas on ocean floor spreading and periodic reversals in the Earth's magnetic field. I f the main crustal layer . . . ofthe oceanic crust i s formed over a convective up-current in the mantle at the centre of an oceanic ridge. it will be magnetized in the current direction of the Earth's field. Assuming impermanence o f the ocean floor. the whole o f the oceanic crust i s comparatively young. probably not older than 150 mill ion years, and the thermo-remanent component o f i t s magnetization i s therefore either essentially normal or reversed with respect to the present field of the Earth. Thus. if spreading of the ocean floor occurs, blocks of alternately normal and reversely magnetized material would drift away from the centre o f the ridge and parallel to the crest o f it.

At the time of the expedition, Vine was a graduate student working at Cambridge under Matthews. When he finally published h is thesis in 1965, he had found more evidence elsewhere to confirm the theory that they had advanced. In the summary o f h is Ph.D. dissertation, Vine mentioned anomalies observed over the Juan de Fuca Ridge in the Pacific Ocean south-west of Vancouver Island and in the Red Sea. H e wrote that the hypothesis he had f i rs t elaborated on the basis of h is work in the Indian Ocean had 'particularly attractive implications as regards deducing the history of the ocean basins and the movements of the continents over the past 200 to 300 million years'. In later publications, he was able to use a time scale for magnetic reversals over the past 4 million years which, in effect. allowed him to clock the speed of the spreading sea floor and account for the movement of continents.

It i s hard to say whether or not the expedition to the Indian Ocean hastened Vine's discovery. but it did provide convincing evidence to support it. Laughton, who followed Owerz to the Arabian Sea in D i s c o i q ~ , recalls that geologists had previously looked at a small patch of ridge i n the Atlantic to try to correlate magnetic anomalies with bottom topography, but the track lines o f the survey were too far apart. Matthews had come up with the idea of taking Owen on a long section from Bombay to the Seychelles and then, the following year, using her to make a detailed survey of a typical region in the Carlsberg Ridge, concentrating on three areas: the centre of the ridge, halfway down the flanks and the foothills below. There was no sediment in the region he had selected. This meant that basaltic rock from the mantle was exposed on the ridge, giving a clear magnetic reading.

Measurements of depth and of the magnetic field could be taken simultaneously on an exposed mid-ocean ridge. According to Matthews: They were opportunely examined by Fred Vine who sought to associate the shape o f the sea floor with the magnetic anomalies. He found that he could not explain the anomalies if he assumed

Drifting continents

.50 *Y-

- N C . l i

.>O" ,:~,Lri^-.----~-'L- , I" 1

- n A v - *-, ~A~~f%+-fvw-G-̂AP.Ori-n LA J wn-hÎv-wA1-+J-- --I b

Profiles o f bathymetry. gravity and magnetics obtained by HICIS ûiven 1 96 1-63 across the north-west Indian Ocean ( A S. Laughton. D. H. Illatthews and R. L. Fisher. in: Maxwell (ed.). The Sea. Vol. 4. Pt. II. John W'iley K! Sons. 197 I ).

reversely magnetized. This led to the concept of sea floor spreading wi th magnetic striping as the uniform magnetization. but he could model them on the assumption that certain features were

result of reversals in the earth's magnetic field. Vine wrote his paper with Matthews. then the idea took off. It was fortuitous in that it arose from the study in detail o f a small patch o f mid-ocean ridge with dredging and a magnetic survey.

With Laughton in Discoiwy, Vine did further work in the Indian Ocean south of the Seychelles over Fred Mount bearing h is name and added these data to his thesis. This was on a geological and geophysical leg of Discovery's first Indian Ocean cruise that had begun on 1 June 1963 when she sailed from her home port of Plymouth. She spent two months off the Arabian coast on basic problems of biology and physical oceanography until the geologists and geophysicists took over at Aden under the leadership of Maurice Hill from Cambridge with Laughton as second in command. A report of the cruise was published by the Royal Society in 1964 and. l ike Fisher's narrative, it hints at the difficulties of exploring the seabed at the time. Marker buoys dragged their anchors or disappeared, a dredge was lost when its chain parted but, as on all oceanographic ships, replacements were made at sea and investigations continued. Discovery made a particular effort to get bottom photographs over the Carlsberg Ridge, taking about 360 at eight stations. Little l i fe was to be seen but the photos showed manganese nodules and boulders encrusted with manganese. apparently not accessible enough for commercial exploitation.

After leaving the Carlsberg Ridge. Discovery headed for the Seychelles to join Owen and, on the way, encountered another research vessel. The Royal Society report said:

The weather was generally calm, but on the day when we met 'Atlantis II', it was blowing hard enough to prevent the lowering o f boats. However, a saluting charge was fired at an appropriate range. and two empty wooden cable drums which were required aboard 'Atlantis' were floated across together with various other objects and devices to indicate friendliness and esteem.

Although this was a geological cruise, Discoverj' did some ornithology (sea birds are at the

00 F

47

.L\ssa~iIl on the largest üt i l inü\~n

top of the marine food chain and tell the marine biologist something about the productivity o f the waters). Disroijerjiput a party ashore on Bird Island in the Seychelles to look for the sooty tern, locallv known as the goelette. Their report stated:

The whole o f the interior o f the island, I .600 metres by 800 metres, i s planted with coconuts interspersed w i th a few small maize plantations. Most o f the thatched huts were centred around the manager’s house on either side o f a wide avenue o f coconut palms. Here and there chickens (and a donkey) foraged together with turnstones, wading birds from the Arctic which are normally associated wi th rocky and desolate shores. Small ground doves and the bright scarlet fody. both introduced from Mahé. were observed in the bushes. but the most obvious bird was the white tern. Soon the avenue of ta l l Casuarina trees broadened near the shore and. after passing through the tall dense bushes fringing the beach. the party came to the sooty tern colony situated in a tiny corner o f the island just east o f the north point. The whole colony, estimated to comprise between twenty and fifty thousand birds, covered an area o f only a few acres and, while impressive, must be a mere fraction o f the numbers that were present at the beginning o f the century. Almost all the birds were juveniles which were nearly ready to fly.

From the Seychelles. Discoi1er.j) ran north to look at an area on the Carlsberg Ridge known as Mount Error and then steamed to Aden. In the Gulf of Aden, cores were taken and heat flow measured. Laughton had an idea that the Gulf of Aden i s really an ocean in the making. H e had noted that it i s one of the few places on earth where the mid-ocean ridges are linked to a continental ridge system. The Great Rift Valley of Africa, starting in Mozambique 2,000 kilometres south of the equator, gouges i t s way north to Ethiopia where it splits, one branch striking north through the Red Sea and the other bending east into the Gulf of Aden. Researchers on Owen and Discoiwy were able to connect it to the Carlsberg Ridge after they found the link between land and sea ridges lying on the sea floor in three separate sections displaced by great lateral fractures in the earth’s crust. Laughton started to speculate that the Gulf of Aden was not a dropped continental block, as classical geologists had believed, but a horizontal spl i t with Arabia moving away from Africa at the rate of two centimetres a year. Since the gulf lay on the route of research ships going through the Suez Canal to work in the Indian Ocean, it soon became one of the sea’s best-charted regions, covered by sounding tracks less than ten miles apart. A detailed cross-section of i t s topography could be drawn to show that it resembles a true ocean in profile: a steep continental margin, a flat trough and a rough central zone from Africa out to mid-gulf: then the same picture in reverse from the centre to the Arabian coast.

To establish whether or not the Gulf of Aden i s an embryonic ocean, seismic studies had to determine the thickness o f the crust beneath it. In 1 967, Laughton went back to the Arabian Sea to investigate the manganese nodules on the Carlsberg Ridge and to carry out a seismic survey of the Gulf of Aden. This showed that its crust was oceanic, only 1 O kilometres thick, and heat flow probes indicated that the gulfs rough central zone was behaving actively l ike a mid-oceanic ridge.

This was but one of many follow-ups by geologists to the International Indian Ocean Expedition which appears in retrospect mainly as a preliminary look. Far more has been done since it ended. There was a pause to consolidate data, to think about implications, then cruises were organized to take another look. Laughton was back in I967 before the closure of the Suez Canal temporarily cooled British interest. I t has since been reawakened to the point where British research ships. in the late 1970s, made many major expeditions in the Indian Ocean. going back with more and more sophisticated instrumentation. In 1979, GLORIA visited the Indian Ocean, GLORIA being the acronym for a powerful British side-looking sonar device that, in effect, uses sound beams to take an ‘aerial photograph’ of the sea bottom up to 30 kilometres on either side as it i s towed 100 metres below the surface. Scientists were seeking fine details of the structure of the Mascarene Ridge between the Seychelles and Mauritius. and they were

Drifting Continents

also intrigued by the Amirantes Trench in this area, 5,000 metres deep but not seismically active l ike the trenches in the Pacific. Geologists think the Pacific-type trenches are subduction zones associated with deep-focus earthquakes. Crust welling up at the mid- ocean ridges forms great plates that can underlie both continents and oceans (it i s thought that the earth i s composed o f six major plates and a number o f smaller ones). Material comprising these plates might return to the mantle on the downward side o f a convection cell and it i s believed to do so in the trenches. Yet nothing of the sort seems to be happening in the quiet Amirantes Trench.

As for Fisher, he returned to the Western Indian Ocean with Argo in 1968, with Melville in 1 9 70-7 1 and 1 9 7 8. and as a Co-chief scientist on Glornar Chullenger, the ship carrying out the Deep Sea Dril l ing Project. From a base in Mauritius, these investigations aimed to take detailed looks at the various ridge structures and the triple junction. and to dredge the chasms marking the fracture zones in order to sample the mantle o f the earth itself. These clefts offered as much as 4,500 metres o f relief. a section through the earth's crust to expose the plutonic igneous rocks lying far below the basaltic sea floor. These and many other cruises served as a necessary prelude and epilogue to work in the Indian Ocean in 1972 by Clomar Challenger. All these investigations have sought to determine how aiid when the Indian Ocean took on i ts present shape.

This i s not easy. A French worker, Roland Schlich o f the Marine Geophysics Laboratory at the Institute of Physics of the Globe at Saint Maur outside Paris, has defined the task: Geologists believe that sometime in the remote past the four continents bounding the Indian Ocean--Africa, India, Australia. and Antarctica. were part o f one continent which has been named Gondwana or Gondwanaland. . . . The search for th is primitive continent, which i s linked so closely with the history o f the formation o f the Indian Ocean, i s very difficult. Unl ike the Atlantic, where t w o distinct blocks are separated by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Indian Ocean covers a large number o f continental fragments separated by a complex system o f mid-ocean ridges. Furthermore, any attempt o f reconstruction i s made even more difficult by the existence o f many submarine plateaus, sometimes capped by islands and often quite extensive.

Schlich started to work in the Indian Ocean as Tchernia did in 1948 on a ship o f opportunity bound for a French polar base in Antarctica. In 1966, he began with a magnetic survey on Gallieni and he has returned since then on two other vessels, Marion Difiesne and L e Suroit. In I 972, he was Co-chief scientist on one cruise leg o f the drillship Glomar C1zallenger there, focusing h is attention as usual on the western Indian Ocean. He, too, has tried to sif t and systematize the wealth o f findings that has been brought back over nearly two decades.

At the end of the International Indian Ocean Expedition, he remarks, most o f the submarine plateaux that had been examined were considered micro-continents with only three exceptions, the largest being the Ninetyeast Ridge identified as uplifted ocean crust. Since then, further work has shown that only one o f those 'micro-continents', the Seychelles Plateau, i s truly a continental fragment while the others are oceanic in origin. This has been essential to the history o f the sea floor. Schlich has been able to show that India with the Seychelles Bank separated from Madagascar 80 million years ago. Then India broke off from the Seychelles 20 million years later on a northward flight that ended 40 to 50 million years ago in the collision with Asia that gave birth to the Himalayas. Other geologists, notably Fisher, John Sclater and D. P. Mackenzie, have chronicled the original breakup of Gondwanaland I 3 0 million years ago when India broke off from Antarctica-Australia, followed by the split between the latter 50 million years ago. Accounting for these movements has meant a long quest which went far beyond the data that the ships o f the International Indian Ocean Expedition were able to gather from the seabed. The wave o f scientific curiosity that they stirred has only now begun to crest.

49

.4ssault on the largest unknown

Indonesia Kri Jukriiidhi

(Indonesian Institute of Sciences).

India Kisrim (National Institute of Oceanography. Goa).

Federal Republic of Germany Meteor (Institute fur Meereskunde. Kiel).

Pakistan PNS Zulfiqirirr

(Hydrographic Department. Pakistan Navy).

50

Drifting continents

Thailand OV-1 (Hydrographic Department. Royal Thai Navy).

P ~1

* *

Inited Kingdom ~i.scovery (Institute f Oceanographic ciences)

I

Llnited States of america Amon Bnr~r i i

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution).

USSR Viíycrr (USSR of Sciences).

Academy

51

Transient currents 5

It has been easier to plot the movement o f continents around the periphery o f the Indian Ocean over 1 50 million years than to follow i t s currents from one season to the next. The marine geologist works from a hard foundation: the topographic features o f the sea floor, the record left by magnetic anomalies, the pages o f history laid down in the bottom sediments. The rate of change he seeks to describe i s centimetres per year. If h i s findings are questioned, he can always go back to the same place and look again.

This i s not the lot o f the physical oceanographer, dealing as he must with the waters of the ocean that constantly change in periods that run from minutes to years. He can only describe i ts physical and chemical properties, measure the motion of all depths and then work up his data so as to get a picture o f oceanic circulation, f irst o f 'average' conditions and then o f the fluctuations that are related to dynamic processes. In the Indian Ocean, h is work was all the more arduous because the wind, one of the main driving forces of this circulation, changes direction twice a year with the summer and winter monsoons, as SCOR emphasized at the meeting where the idea of the expedition f irst surfaced. To get at this particular phenomenon and to describe the Indian Ocean as a whole, different approaches were taken during the expedition. Some researchers looked at specific aspects l ike the Somali Current or the equatorial undercurrent; others followed the l ine suggested by Wust and ran long straight sections. As a consequence, more observations were made during the six years of the expedition than during the previous sixty years. They were the main contribution to the Oceanogruplzic Atlas of the Ititenzational Indian Ocean Expedition, published in 1 97 1 by the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. The atlas was compiled by Klaus Wyrtki of the University of Hawaii with the assistance of Edward B. Bennett from the same university and David Rochford from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia. Wyrtki said in h is introduction that the atlas was originally intended to display the expedition's results but he had to go beyond this brief: 'The activities of this expedition were concentrated almost exclusively in the Indian Ocean north of 40° S. Limiting an atlas to an arbitrarily delineated part of an ocean seemed absurd to an oceanographer looking at an ocean as an entity.' Wyrtki therefore decided to chart the entire Indian Ocean from Asia to Antarctica and to include all data collected there from the mid- 1 920s to 1966. He arranged the atlas on the basis o f observations of six selected physical and chemical properties of the ocean: temperature. salinity, oxygen, phosphate, nitrate and silicate. These were mapped in a number o f ways including distributions at standard depths, vertical distributions for geographic areas, features of the thermal structure, and the presentation of certain properties to show trends. For his primary data base, Wyrtki had data from 12,000 hydrographic stations stored on about 200,000 computer cards. To give an idea

52

Transient currents

of the advance that this atlas represented at the time, one might note that, in 194 I , Albert Defant used 629 stations in h is charts o f the Atlantic Ocean and Joseph Reid had 1,729 stations for the whole of the Pacific in a study published in 196 I. Wyrtki also had 24,800 bathythermograph recordings and, for a single year, 1963, 70,000 observations of sea- surface temperature. Coverage, however. left something to be desired in h is view which he expressed in no uncertain terms in a preface to the atlas:

During the planning o f the expedition, opinions differed between scientists advocating a systematic documentation o f the entire ocean with equal emphasis on all o f i t s parts and those who wished to devote their efforts to the more dramatic features of this ocean. Since this difference could not be reconciled. a five-year-long series o f more or less unco-ordinated expeditions resulted. This. unfortunately. left many gaps in the data coverage and prevented a systematic observation o f the sequence o f events during one full monsoon cycle. Even if the difficulties in ship scheduling and logistics are allowed for. i t i s obvious that more cooperation would have resulted in a more useful distribution o f the observations in time and space and in improved possibilities o f their interpretation.

The controversy that had arisen during the early planning o f the expedition had not yet died away by the time Wyrtki's atlas came out. Two years later, in 1973. an article by Dietrich was published posthumously in which he said:

Both the general survey o f the Indian Ocean and the investigation o f the monsoon circulation were to be carried out in the same program. N o w . 6 years after the expedition in which 20 nations with 40 research vessels participated. we can say it was successful. I t i s true that not all expectations were fulfilled. mainly because the observations in large areas were not extensive. Perhaps there would be no criticism i f the expedition had followed the plan made by Wust. which i s based on a schematic grid system of sections with repeated observations in different seasons. Such a plan i s ideal but unrealistic. The IIOE had to be worked out by scientists from many different countries w h o took part voluntarily and were interested in a variety o f scientific programs. Some regions are extremely rich in problems, e.g. the monsoon effect which can be studied only in certain areas o f the Indian Ocean. and some regions lack specific problems, like the Southern Westerlies in the Circumpolar Current. The ocean was not investigated in a manner resembling a military manœuvre. but according to the demands o f scientific problems in selected regions. As a result the observations are unevenly distributed.

Warren Wooster, who served on leave from Scripps as the first secretary o f the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at Unesco when it took over the expedition from Snider, put it this way:

I think the International Indian Ocean Expedition was the greatest uncoordinated expedition in the history o f oceanography. I ought to know, I was i ts coordinator part of the time. It was the only way to explore such a region. Scientists with curiosity would not have come in if it had been done in any other way.

The Wyrtki atlas carries photographs o f most of the vessels that contributed data. among them Kistna from India and Zzilfiqziar from Pakistan, their sleek lines betraying their naval origins; Japanese seagoing workhorses l ike Kagoshima Marti or l imitaka Maru; the theii-new Jalanidlzi from Indonesia; OV-1 from Thailand, dwarfed by Ob and Vityaz. two Soviet giants. Some o f these ships are only memories, gone to the scrapyard or, l ike Vit juz, retired as a floating museum. Others, new at the time of the expedition, pursue careers which have taken them back to the Indian Ocean.

Atlantis II from Woods Hole was among these, returning there in 1976 after two long cruises in 1963 and 1965 during the expedition. Miller was chief scientist for most o f the first cruise which saw Atlantis I lsai l from home on a hot day in July to return sheathed in ice late in December, having carried out 227 hydrographic stations and 2,454 bathythermograph casts. Miller was able to work in both camps: the general surveyors and the

53


investigators of processes. In 1963. he concentrated on the Somali Current during the summer. H e wrote in Oceanus, the quarterly published by Woods Hole:

We found a well-developed current system apparently traceable from Mauritius in the south, past Madagascar across the equator. extending north and northeastward along the coast o f Somalia. well into the Arabian Sea. . . . The system i s deep, wi th i t s more definable properties appearing at depths from 600 to 1.000 meters.

This led M i l l e r to question the simple assumption of a current starting and stopping in obedience to the seasonal winds. H e had found the Somali Current to be sweeping up the eastern coast of Africa at more than four knots with a total transport one-fifth that of the Gulf Stream but, unlike the Gulf Stream. crossing the equator, the only major ocean current to do so, as Stommel once pointed out. H e commented:

Forces must be tremendous indeed to break up this continuity. if it i s broken, and to turn the current in the opposite direction. So, I wonder, does it turn? Does the northeast monsoon affect the water movement down deep, or does the component o f wind from the north skim the surface. reversing the current superficially?

It was such questions that sent investigators back to look at the transient currents of the Indian Ocean long after the expedition proper had ended. In h is report in Oceanus. Miller had praise for co-operation among research vessels despite the lack of formal co- ordination:

Planning and timing o f the Expedition were beneficial in many ways. While Discovery was working the stormy area of the coast of Arabia during the height o f the southwest monsoon, we were able to skirt that blustery region and bang our way southwards to Somalia. at the same time filling in a much-needed data for the Discovery s purposes. Off the Seychelles. the Discovery came to our aid when we had difficulties with wire. We, in turn, were able to give radioed assistance to the Awton Bruun. Exchanges o f information were valuable to all.

Many years later, M i l l e r indicated that nearly one-third of the scientists aboard Aflaizfis II on this f i rs t Indian Ocean cruise were foreign, coming from Canada, Egypt, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Sweden and Taiwan. 'When Dietrich came to Atlantis I/, we would hold seminars in the library,' Miller said. 'I remember how he told our younger scientists: In doing oceanography, do not lose your sense of wonder. I think we are in trouble when we do lose it.' Miller also had praise for Snider's work in smoothing the path for research ships l ike h is own when they entered port H e thought big and h e had to. It was a place in turmoil: arms smuggling in Kenya. bombs in Aden, a revolution in Zanzibar. Snider paved the way for us. Practical matters l ike letting customs pass you through may not appeal to scientists, but h is advance work enabled them to get the equipment they needed and local people to appreciate what the expedition was doing.

In 1965, Atlutztis II was back in the Indian Ocean. This time, Mil ler ran a leg from Africa to Australia, a section to fix off the Indian Ocean from the Antarctic, as he called it. On both cruises, he worked tracks that had been recommended by Wüst who thanked him in 1963 for the 'major contribution' he had made with h is sections across the Arabian Sea. The second cruise turned into a round-the-world voyage with a study of the Kuroshio Current in the western Pacific following the investigations in the Indian Ocean. During the Kuroshio study, Fedorov was on board to work with Stommel, having taken leave from h is post as secretary of the Intervogernmental Oceanographic Commission. Since he was a Soviet national and the satellite navigation equipment on the ship was classified at the time, it could not be used while he was on board and it stayed under a protective sheet. Then, when he left the ship in Tokyo, the wraps were taken off. During an open house there in port, Stommel noticed that certain visitors were asking a number of probing questions about the navigation equipment. H e answered them, then asked where they

54

Transient current5

were from. 'The People's Republic o f China'. they replied. And Stommel said, much later: 'I didn't mind. We had orders to keep the navigation equipment hidden from Fedorov-but not from anyone else.' Both curiosity aiid security requirements had been satisfied. As Paul Fye said, the International Indian Ocean Expedition took the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution out of i t s province, the Atlantic. I t broadened Miller's views, too. aiid may have been one of the factors that later led hiin and several of h is colleagues to form a group known as the Associated Scientists of Woods Hole which has among i t s aims o-operative research with foreign countries. Ship costs are so high at present and difficulties in getting permission to work in territorial waters so great that Miller and h is associates often prefer to work with other countries, using their ships and sharing data obtained. This has not yet brought Miller back to the Indian Ocean but Atlrrntis II returned there on a nineteen-month cruise that ended in May 1977, looking once more both at circulation near the equator and at the structure o f the seabed.

The equatorial Indian Ocean attracted experimenters almost from the start of the expedition, seeking to test the theories that had been advanced about the existence of an undercurrent there. One was Bruce Taft. now at the University o f Washington in Seattle but then a graduate student at Scripps. H e had taken the equatorial undercurrent as a subject for h is thesis under John Knauss who had studied the pheiiomenon in the Pacific. In an interview. Taft related how their investigations began. The existence o f an eastward- flowing subsurface current at the equator was f irst discovered in the Atlantic in I 8 8 6 by an American oceanographer, J. Y. Buchanan, who put a drogue down over the side of h is ship, Bziccaneer, and found that. at a depth of 55 metres, it was being towed in a direction opposite that of the surface current. At the start of the twentieth century, Buchanan's findings were not taken very seriously and, in fact, Taft and Knauss have remarked that their significance was not appreciated until 1952 when ail eastward-moving current in the lower part of the surface layer was discovered at the equator in the Pacific by a group o f scientists led by Townsend Cromwell, whose name was given to the current after h is death in an air crash. Kiiauss studied the undercurrent in the central Pacific in I960 while others looked at it in the western Pacific and in the Atlantic. These two oceans, Taft noted. share a common feature: the trade winds that drive their surface circulation westward at the equator. The atmospheric circulation over the Indian Ocean, on the other hand, i s inonsoonal. What effect would this have on the equatorial circulation? 'Knauss told the theoreticians that we were going to the Indian Ocean and asked them what we would find.' said Taft. 'Their answer was silence.'

I t was at the end of June 1962, as was mentioned earlier. that a team of physical oceanographers took over Argo at Singapore on Scripps' Lusaid Expedition. They were led by Knauss, who had moved to the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, and included not only American and Japanese scientists but also three more Unesco Shipboard Fellows froin Egypt, India and Pakistan. They were to work for three months, seeking the equatorial undercurrent during the summer south-west monsoon. From Singapore. they moved westward to klombasa, straddling the equator between 2" N. and 2" S.. then steamed back east. As Taft described it:

The results were hard to interpret. One station was not like another. they changed from month to month. while in the Pacific, Knauss had found a current at every station and could get a picture o f f low. Stommel was with LIS on this cruise. He had been interested in the problem o f sampling the ocean and he cited our work as ail example o f a poorly resolved survey. The current was changing too much in between stations.

At first, Knauss and Taft reported in Nuttire in April 1963 that 'during the period of observation there was no strong eastward, subsurface flow similar to that found in the two other oceans'.

5 5

12ssaull on the largest unknown

Then they went back during the winter monsoon, taking the ship at Colombo in mid- February I 9 6 3 with their team of physical oceanographers and keeping her until May in Mombasa. During this period. they were in the north-east monsoon. North of the equator, the winds were blowing from the east and, Taft thought, the Indian Ocean was perhaps more l ike the other oceans. In these circumstances they did detect an undercurrent, weak but definitely there. Writing in Science in January 1964, Knauss and Taft reported that, after further analysis o f the data on their f i rs t cruise, they had determined that 'an equatorial undercurrent structure' had been present in the eastern Indian Ocean. Then they concluded:

These studies show that an equatorial undercurrent does exist in the Indian Ocean with many o f the properties associated with the undercurrents of the Pacific and the Atlantic. . . . However. the observed current structure i s certainly different from that typically observed at the equator in the other oceans. The speed o f the eastward flow in the undercurrent o f the Indian Ocean i s only half that found in the Pacific. Although the eastward velocity component does appear to be steady over periods o f weeks when the undercurrent i s developed and can be traced over half the width o f the ocean, there were times at which the undercurrent was either weakly developed or not present.

The following year, Swallow went out with Discoiierji to the same region and reported somewhat conflicting results. This was Discovery s second major cruise during the International Indian Ocean Expedition. She arrived in Aden in March I964 and headed for Mauritius. stopping to put a party ashore on Hasikaya. the westernmost of the Kuria Muria Islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden. The visit was described by R. S. Bailey, the ornithologist in the group:

Hasikaya was the most desolate island I have ever encountered. Only one species o f land plant was found growing and rats were apparently the only mammals. Only one true land bird was seen, a Peregrine which apparently subsisted on the rats. The island was deserted by most of the seabirds seen in the surroundings seas during the southwest monsoon and only the Blue-Faced Booby was resting.

This trip ashore during the north-east monsoon had clearly shown the effect on the bird community of the seasonal change in the Arabian Sea for, as Bailey wrote: 'The seas off Arabia in March were warm and few birds were seen.' The halt at Hasikaya provided an opportunity to use Discoijery's open well to haul up a bottom plate and replace it with another carrying the transducer, a device converting sound to electrical energy, needed to operate the ship's sound-ranging gear. Swallow described what happened in a letter to Deacon, h is director: 'Unfortunately, the forward crane broke down just at the awkward point when both plates were out and we had a hole in the bottom of the ship.' The crane was then repaired, the new plate installed and a crew member dived down to make sure that it was well seated.

On the way south, Swallow reported plenty of l i fe in the inshore waters and 'there was much phosphorescence and several squid seen on station at night'. Then, further out to sea, a 5.600-metre hydrographic cast was made into a trench that O u w had found on a previous cruise. Swallow said that pressure at this depth was so great that a thermometer imploded. When it was hauled up. 'all that was lef t were bits of glass and mercury embedded in the frame', an incident which might have been the result of 'using a new wire on a Friday the 13th'.

Discovery started looking for the equatorial undercurrent at 5" N. She had been taking two stations a day, then she closed the interval first to every sixty miles, then every thirty miles. Swallow wrote Deacon that they found their first evidence o f an undercurrent at 1 xo N. At 1 O N. they anchored a buoy and measured the current for a day. The buoy served as a reference point on which Discoverj~ could take a radar bearing as she drifted with a current meter hanging overside. Swallow described their technique: a

56

Transient currents

quick set was made across the equator to I xo S. with, every thirty miles, a current meter profile to get the flow down to 200 metres and a water bottle cast to 3 50 metres. In making the profile, one current ineter was kept ten metres down while another was lowered to various depths. In the equatorial undercurrent running opposite to the surface current, Swallow noted that 'it was quite remarkable to see two wires crossing, one leading aft and the other all the way forward'. From Mauritius, the ship investigated equatorial waters to Cochin and back to the Seychelles and Mombasa. Two days were lost repairing the tube that operated the ship's log, bent by what Swallow believed was a whale, one of several that had been playing around the ship. Stations were taken at such frequent intervals during this cruise that water samples were piling up for analysis by chemists who did not have the usual breaks between stations to get their work done. Swallow decided to analyse for nutr ients only on alternate stations and wrote to Deacon: 'I think it wi l l be more useful to have fewer good quality results than run the risk of piling up a lot of doubtful numbers.'

Swallow published h is findings in Nciture in October 1964 and they turned out to be quite different from those of I<nauss and Taft:

Four times during hlarch-June th is year. the equatorial undercurrent has been observed by the R.R.S. Discovery in the course o f i t s participation in the International Indian Ocean Expedition. We have found much higher speeds thail those reported b y Knauss and Taft in the same season o f the previous year. . . . Knauss and Taft found only a weak undercurrent in the western Indian Ocean, wi th maximum speeds generally less than 50 cm/sec and sometimes scarcely any significant eastward flow at all. In contrast. t w o o f our sections showed speeds exceeding 1 20 cm/ sec comparable w i th those found in the Pacific undercurrent. and some subsurface eastward movement was always found.

Swallow ended h is report with what turned out to be a remark of considerable insight:

Evidently, comparing these observations wi th those o f Knauss and Taft. the equatorial undercurrent in the western Indian Ocean undergoes more complicated fluctuations than simple seasonal ones.

At the start of this cruise, Discovery ran two north-south sections along 58" E. and 68" E. While they were not on the meridians recommended by Wust, they represented an attempt to contribute to a general survey. Recently at the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences in Wormley, Swallow said: 'We had Wust's plan in mind, everyone was trying to go along.' It was circumstances as much as philosophical differences that brought about changes. Swallow f i rs t intended to carry out east-west sections with Discovery in the Arabian Sea in 1962, but delivery of the ship was delayed and th is work was done by Atlatztis II in the summer of 1963. That year, DiscoverJi took a close look instead at upwelling off the Somali coast on a biological cruise. I t was hoped that she could redo Atlantis I I ' s sections in the winter of 1964 but she had to go back to the United Kingdom for an unscheduled refit to cure all the teething troubles of a new ship. She was able to get back to the Indian Ocean only in mid-March too late for the winter season. and so she ran those two north-south sections instead. Swallow admitted that th is left a gap in Wyrtki's atlas. but added:

If we had done those east-west sections, then we could not have carried out current measurements on the equator. During the International Indian Ocean Expedition. we tried to do two things at once. Within a large-scale survey, we attempted to answer dynamical questions. Perhaps we did not do a good job on either. Perhaps. too, this i s part of the process o f learning when one works in an unknown place.

Following the investigations along the equator, Discover)) turned to the Somali Current in August 1964, carrying out a two-ship study (or, to use Stommel's term, an Anglo- Californian expedition) with Argo, back in the Indian Ocean for the third time on Scripps'

5 7


Dodo Expedition. They worked north along the Somali coast for more than a month on roughly parallel lines, Discovery close in shore and Argo further out at sea so as to get the full width o f the current. Both vessels were in radio contact and caught sight of each other only once.

This was slow going. Shear-that is, the difference between the current on the surface and at depth-was so great that stations could be carried out only with extreme difficulty. At 4 1 / O N., for example. Discovery found a surface current running at six knots and four knots of shear between the surface and 1 O0 metres down. 'The problem was to get the water bottles to trip,' James Crease, a physical oceanographer who was aboard Discoverj,. said: 'When we put messenger weights on the wire to trip the bottles, they wouldn't go down. The wire was vibrating in the current and it was being bent by the shear.' Discovery's captain had to manœuvre his ship constantly to keep the wire vertical during a Nansen bottle cast. Usually, bottles could be sent down with one winch and a vertical net haul made with another but not here. Only one wire could be worked at a time, slowing the work even more. 'That was a funny cruise', Crease said, 'we were less than eight degrees from the equator, but the water was only around thirteen degrees Celsius, much cooler than British waters in summer'. On i t s way north, the Somali Current was so strong when it turned away from the coast that, to use the oceanographer's terminology, it tilted the thermocline, the boundary between warm surface and cold deep water. Cold water upwelled, changing the environment for the tropical f ish population at the surface. Peter Foxon, a biologist aboard Discovery. wrote in Deep-sea Researcli:

Dead and moribund fish in large numbers. together with the remains o f squid and cuttlefish. were observed concentrated in an inshore area south of Ras hiabber [on the Somali coast] but also dispersed in smaller numbers over a much larger area southwards as far as Ras E l Cheil and northwards to Cape Guardafui and into the Gulf o f Aden. Of the various species sampled, porcupine fish . . . were the most abundant and were estimated to comprise at least 75 per cent o f the mortality, while the triggerfish. . . were the next most common species.

Foxton saw low temperatures as the cause of the death of these fish, none of them commercially important species. This was the only instance of large-scale f ish mortality reported during the Indian Ocean expedition. N o evidence was found of f ish kills previously attributed to hydrogen sulphide in deep waters of the Arabian Sea although Vityaz did detect hydrogen sulphide there in 1960.

The Somali Current cruise stands out in Crease's mind because o f the 'astonishingly sharp frontal chages' that he witnessed. In these waters off the Somali coast in summer, seamen often report turbulence and strong offsets in their course. A merchantman passing through the area while the two oceanographic ships were at work told of sighting a continuous l ine of breakers in the open sea. When she moved into them, her bow was deflected and a drop in the sea surface temperature was observed. 'We did station work in this frontal zone.' said Crease, 'On one side of the ship. the water was stratified, on the other side it was mixed. On could see a bit of detritus on the surface. That was the front.'

Argo, too, carried out observations in the cold waters off Ras Mabber. Stommel and Wooster wrote of their results:

We were delighted to find such a highly developed cold region, marked as well by surface fog, dead fish and undersaturated oxygen. From differences between the observations of Argo and disco ve-^, it appears that there i s considerable variability in detail in this cold area, especially near Ras Mabber and in the long thin tongue o f cold water extending far to the east after the Somali Current leaves the coast. . . . The only other place in the world ocean where such low surface temperatures are found at such low latitudes i s the Peruvian coast, and even there it i s uncommon to find surface temperatures lower than I 5 OC within I O o of the equator.

In reporting on the entire cruise. they said:

5 8

Our work in the Somali Current was of an exploratory nature. . . . Some results o f Atlantis II in 1963 suggested that the Somali Current might be broad and diffLise and difficult to pinpoint. We found. on the contrary. that it i s a clearly marked, definite. intense narrow stream, easily measurable and identifiable. The Somali Current as we found it appears to be o f theoretical interest because, although l ike the Gulf Stream and Kuroshio it flows toward the north as an intense boundary current along the western coast o f a great ocean basin. it differs from them in fundamental ways: ( 1 ) it i s present during only part o f the year, since the driving wind stresses reverse with the monsoons . . . (2) it flows across the equator . . . ( 3 ) the current separates from the coast l ine in a region where the coast i s very straight and steep. and where the bottom topography i s smooth (whereas the Gulf Stream and Kuroshio leave the coast at prominent capes, and (4) there i s a conspicuous cold upwelling region j u s t north o f the point o f separation.

Swal low gave an account in 1965 of Discovery's findings. R u n n i n g a l i ne of stations eastward from the coast at 4%' N.. Discovery saw the weak, broad countercurrent outside the main Somali current which had been indicated in 1 963 by Atlantis II. T h e sea changed qu ick ly in these waters. F ive mi les from the coast, the Somali Current was weak; ten mi les farther out, it was running at six knots and the ship w o r k e d under the conditions Crease described. W h e n the scientists lowered their current meters I 4 0 mi les out, the current was down to less than one knot. Running the opposite way, a deep current of 0.4 knots towards the south-east was detected at a depth of 1,000 metres. On this cruise, Swallow wrote, 'the strongest surface current encountered was 6.9 knots, 22 mi les offshore near 8' N., where the current was already beginning to turn away from the coast.'

The fo l low ing year, Swal low and John Bruce of Woods H o l e publ ished a m o r e detailed report of the work done by Argo and Disc«iier:ii. They pointed out that the surface current found by the two ships dur ing the south-west monsoon in 1964 fitted the description rendered a century earlier by A. G. Findlay in his Direcforj7,fur the Nlli.igntiotz o f the Ztzrlintz Oce~iti. published in 1866:

On the eastern coast o f Africa the current sets along the coast to the N.N.E. at a velocity o f 2 to 4 miles per hour. . . . To the south o f Soltotra. at a distance of about 150 miles. is a great whirl o f current. . . it commences about the parallel o f Ras Hafun. when the current strikes o f f to the eastward to the 55th meridian. then to the southward. to the 5th parallel. when it again curves up to the northeastward, forming a complete whir l . A t the northern limit the velocity i s very great, being 4 to 5 miles per hour, while at i t s southern extreme it i s only 3 / 4 to I mile per hour.

L i t t le had been added during the intervening ninety-eight years to this description because of the manifest d i f f icul ty of w o r k i n g in so strong a current. What the expedition did contr ibute beyond the mariner's lore were measurements of subsurface currents that were far froin conclusive. Changes were occurr ing even on a smal l scale. At one station. Discovery tracked two neutral ly buoyant floats (the so-called Swal low floats) at a depth of 1 .O00 metres and found that w h i l e they were separated by only seven kilometres hor izontal ly and less than 1 O0 metres vertically, their mean velocities differed by 1 4 centimetres per second (I knot is approximately 50 Centimetres per second). 'Many m o r e measurements would be needed for an adequate description of the flow at intermediate depths in this area,' wro te Swallow and Bruce in their conclusion w h i c h was almost apologetic.

The uncertainties o f the surface current estimates, and the brief duration o f the current meter observations. are such that their use can only be justified by the great speed o f the current and the shortage o f other observations in the area.

Stonimel and Wooster had been equally cautious in their own repor t on the behaviour of the Somali Current in the region of cold surface water, preferr ing to withhold any lengthy discussion until m o r e observations cou ld b e made. Swallow once summed up these early studies:

59


What we saw during the International Indian Ocean Expedition was a strong current wi th complicated structures that came and went. It was impossible to observe them in detail over a long period o f time from a ship that remained in one place. We needed continuity o f observations in selected places.

The end of the expedition in 1965 signalled the start of a long campaign to get these observations. In the forefront was Stommel, who had admittedly changed h is thinking since he wrote those querulous letters to the editor of The Indian Ocean Bubble. That attitude could be traced to what he considered the casual origins of the expedition the day that Iselin slipped into the office at Woods Hole where he and Fuglister had been talking. 'I'm a scientific puritan,' Stommel said. 'It seemed such an awful way to start a programme, but as time went on, I got more and more interested in the thing.'

What did interest him was the action of variable wind stresses on the ocean, a subject on which he had published with a colleague as early as 1956. This led to h is participation in the joint investigation by Argo and Discoverj' in which the two ships worked the Somali Current the way oceanographers studied the Gulf Stream, zigzagging across it to put together a detailed picture. Next. Stommel pushed for a study of the Somali Current in a report to the White House on prospects for oceanographic research. H e tried again in 1969, proposing an Arabian Sea programme at an international meeting on global ocean research convened in Ponza in Italy by two United Nations bodies and SCOR. The meeting recommended 'a well-documented study of the ocean-atmosphere environment both for forecasting the monsoon and to assist in developing numerical models for the general oceanic circulation'. It stated that while the monsoons are perhaps the most dependable climatological reversing wind system in the world,

the precipitation associated with the south-west monsoon i s highly variable from year to year, not only in inception and termination o f the rain but also in the intensity and frequency. Some recent evidence suggests that the variation might be associated with changes in the surface temperature o f the Arabian Sea. Much could be learned about the circulation wi th modest instrumentation along the shores o f Somalia and southern Arabia and with a research vessel assigned to the area.

Stommel could not sway policy-makers at f i rs t but he was able to influence h is students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of them. Ants Leetmaa, went to the Somali coast in the late 1960s using small boats to put down current meters and temperature recorders and travelling on shore by jeep from one observation point to another.

This was research on a shoestring, not at all on the scale of the Indian Ocean expedition. Ships were expensive to run, so much so that their cost precluded any attempt to use them to get that continuous picture of yearlong change in transient currents. Stommel and his students were looking for substitutes. Another student, Robert Knox who went on to work at Scripps. decided that Gan Island in the Maldives would be a good site for a long-term current study, situated as it i s only thirty miles from the equator with water 2,000 metres deep within easy reach. Knox set up his study with the help of the British Meteorological Office and the Royal Air Force then based on Gan. Once a week, starting in January 1973, men from the base went out aboard a 20-metre RAF pinnace and took a profile of currents and temperatures from the surface down to 300 metres. The work continued until mid- 1975 when the RAF base was closed, giving almost two years o f data. When Knox published h is results in 1976, he said that the eastward equatorial undercurrent beneath a westward surface flow was found in 1973 but not in I974 when the north-east trades were not nearly as strong. A similar discrepancy between one year and the next had been seen by Knauss and Taft in Argo in I963 and Swallow in Discoveiy in 1964.

As Knox started h is work, new motivation for studies in the Indian Ocean appeared. The World Meterogological Organization and the International Council of Scientific

60

Transient currents

Unions had launched their Global Atmospheric Research Programme at the end of the 1960s. CARP set as a target for the end of the 1970s what was to become known as a Global Weather Experiment with a close scrutiny of the monsoon as one of i t s objectives. Stommel was appointed chairman of a committee set up by SCOR to plan the contribution that oceanographers would make to the Global Weather Experiment. H e had already created a less formal body known as FOTAS. Friends of the Arabian Sea, whose coat-of- arms depicted a turbaned mariner lowering a current meter from a dhow off a lonely atoll with a whale cavorting in the background. Stommel himself was working in somewhat the same way in the Indian Ocean. Ever on the lookout for a shore base and well aware of the need to continue the current measurements begun at Gan, he chartered another 20- metre craft. the schooner LLZ Curieuse, in the Seychelles and used her to make current and temperature profiles for six months in 1975 and another six months in 1976. Deep currents along the equator were recorded by current meters left moored for half a year, another vast improvement over what could be done at the time o f the International Indian Ocean Expedition. A l l th is work in I 9 7 5 and 1976 was part of INDEX, an Indian Ocean Experiment carried out as a preliminary to the Global Weather Experiment of 1979.

The sanie tactics were used along the coast of Kenya where a Norwegian fisheries research vessel, Dr Fridtjuf Nansen, deployed seven moorings of current meters and temperature recorders for six months in 1976. This was for the University of Miami and the Institute for Marine Science at Kiel. The late Walter Düing from K ie l had f i rs t studied the Somali Current with Dietrich aboard Meteor and maintained h is interest in it after he moved to Miami for it was a western boundary current l ike the neighbouring Gulf Stream. H e worked with Fritz Schott from Kiel who later joined him in Miami. Attention was focused on the Somali Current as an influence on the monsoon. It had been observed that cold water upwelled along the Somali coast was transported eastward into the Arabian Sea. In summer when the sea surface warms up all over the Northern Hemisphere, it cools in the Arabian Sea. In May, i t s temperature i s nearly 30 OC over most of the Arabian Sea but, by August, it has dropped 2 OC on the eastern side of the Arabian Sea, about 4 to 5 OC in the centre and as much as I 6 OC in the upwelling areas. Evidence hinted that rainfall fluctuations along the west coast of India might be related to fluctuations in sea surface temperature over the western Arabian Sea. To get long-term temperature records. another expedient was found. Bruce from Woods Hole set up a programme to make expendable-bathythermograph observations from tankers running to and from the Gulf on the long route around the Cape of Good Hope. The work was started in 1975 with observers boarding tankers to make the XBT casts.

Even before the Global Weather Experiment was carried out, a massive increase in data enabled new conclusions to be drawn about the influence of the monsoon on the Somali Current and vice versa. On the basis of observations made in 197 1 and 1972, Leetmaa found that the onset of the Somali Current south o f the equator occurs one month before the onset of the south-west monsoon over the northern Indian Ocean. Düing wrote in 1977 that 'both observation and theory reveal that the early onset of the Somali Current i s governed by local winds, whereas remote forcing plays an important role later on'.

The more the oceanographers learned, the less they seemed to be able to take for granted. In 1976, Swallow and James Luyten from Woods Hole worked on the equatorial undercurrents during the long Indian Ocean cruise o f Atlantis II. Woods Hole had devised a probe, the white horse, that could be dropped over the side of the ship and tracked acoustically with an accuracy of two or three metres. With each new technical advance, old concepts of ocean circulation had to be reworked. Knauss and Taft, then Swallow had found an eastward-flowing undercurrent along the equator during the expedition. A dozen years later in May and June 1976 at the start of the south-west monsoon, Luyten

61

Assault on the largesi unknown

and Swallow tracked their White Horse on i t s way to the bottom. They found two westward-flowing currents at depths of 200-750 metres, leading them to suggest that 'it i s not clear what one should identify as the 'equatorial undercurrent', rather we find many undercurrents'. Luyten came to the same conclusion after he looked at readings from current meters moored in deep water on the equator in 1976. H e believes that these deep- flowing equatorial jets carry the information westward across the Indian Ocean that an organized monsoon has started.

The effect of the start of the monsoon attracted scientists to the Indian Ocean during the international expedition and it s t i l l does. Swallow sees observations and theory moving ahead in alternate steps, the theoreticians revising their models when the new data come in. In 1969, he recalled, it was shown mathematically that in the event of a sudden wind stress north of the equator in the Indian Ocean, a western boundary current would appear in a few weeks. 'This fitted what we could see but Leetmaa disagreed, for he found that the current was there before the wind started,' Swallow said. There was the possibility of another mechanism. The south-east trade winds south of the equator are unable to move the surface water to the north because of the north-east winds that prevail during the winter monsoon. Then, when the north-east winds slack off and befure the south-west monsoon begins in summer. the south-east trades can start to drive a current to the north-west, for these i s nothing to hold it back. Later modellers worked on this assumption and found that the wind south of the equator was enough to start a boundary current reaching as far as 5" N.

To put these ideas to the test, another 'combined assault' on the Indian Ocean was needed so that the Somali Current could be observed at successive stages and in a number of places at the same time. The opportunity arose in 1979 with MONEX, the Monsoon Experiment run as part of the Global Weather Experiment. February to July of that year saw the largest effort yet made to trace the Somali Current. involving as it did research ships operated by France, India, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. During the Global Weather Experiment, geostationary satellites provided a daily picture of the winds over the Indian Ocean by taking photographs of cloud cover every thirty minutes. Measuring the movement of the clouds gave a reliable indication of wind speed and direction except, of course, during cloudless spells. 'The promise o f wind measurements meant that th is was the time to do an investigation of the Somali Current.' Swallow said. 'Other oceans have transient currents but one cannot relate them to an external cause as easily as in the Indian Ocean.'

Swallow, who served as chairman of the Indian Ocean Panel o f the SCOR working group dealing with the Global Atmospheric Research Programme, could only give preliminary results of the work during MONEX which will serve as grist for the mills of theoreticians for years to come. Coverage was thorough. Five Soviet vessels -Akademik Koruluii, Akadernic Shirsliov, Priliv, Pribqv and Volnu-ran a swath straddling the equator. They and four Indian ships-Deepuk, BetHa, Dnrshak and Guveshani-covered the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, taking meteorological and oceanographic observations. A n American ship, Cufurnbw Zselin from the University of Miami, was used by Düing to work along the Somali coast and by Luyten in equatorial waters. At the start of her stay in the Indian Ocean in March. she set out moored current meters. picking them up in July as she made her last section. Leetrnaa was in the area in May and June aboard Researcher. a vessel operated by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration's laboratory in Miami. During the same two months, Swallow was in the Arabian Sea in Discovery. Co-ordination was loose, yet adequate. A l l three ships studied the Somali Current in May and put into Mombasa at the end of that month for a f i rs t assessment of what they had done.

In Discuvery, Swallow began with a section across the equator in May when he

Trdnsienl cLiI-retits

found the Somali Current running at 4 knots, not yet fully developed nor turning away from the coast at 4O N. North of the equator, the south-west monsoon winds had not yet started. When he did the section again in June, he found the current running 6.5 knots at 3 O N. One degree farther north, the current turned offshore and headed east at 4 knots until it seemed to duck under the warm surface of the Arabian Sea. No ship was able to find the 6.5-knot current veering away from the coast at 8' N. that had been seen in August 1964. Swallow interpreted the discrepancy warily. In 1979, the onset of the south-west monsoon was erratic but not necessarily unique. What he saw may happen in some years. but not others. Investigations also showed a deep countercurrent beneath the Somali Current just north of the equator. It disappeared later, Swallow said, but s t i l l decreased the total volume of water that the Somali Current was transporting.

Oceanography has been revolutionized since the end of the International Indian Ocean Expedition. Where ships once groped with bottles on a wire, an artificial satellite can take infra-red pictures showing sea surface temperature and the upwelling of colder water where the Somali Current tu rns offshore. This was done in 1979 with the satellite sending i t s pictures to a receiving station in Mombasa. Drifting buoys were also put to work. During the Global Weather Experiment, about 300 were deployed in the Southern Ocean, that pole-girdling sea devoid of land-based weather stations, to measure barometric pressure, and sea surface temperatures. Four t imes a day, they sent their position and data to satellites overhead. Swallow kept two buoys for h is Somali Current experiment and early in May 1979. he put them over the side at 49" E. j u s t north of the equator. H e followed their wanderings with great curiosity. One drifted south, described a loop. headed for the coast and then turned north to run into the area where the Somali Current was diving under the warm surface. The second, set out less than I O0 miles away, moved east on the equatorial current, stopped around 6 2 O E. in mid-August and, after oscillating as though in hesitation, kept riding the current east until in December it was off the Java coast. Oceanographers have always used drift bottles to trace current but never dreamt of the day when the bottle would give i t s position every six hours.

Swallow has reflected on what has changed in h is profession since he first saw the Indian Ocean on Discovery. 'Some things are the same. The speed o f the ship i s j us t as slow. She's fifteen years older and that has not helped. More and more things have been added and one feels crowded.' Automatic devices record salinity, temperature, depth and oxygen on stations, but water bottles must s t i l l be lowered to calibrate the new devices.

It takes just as long to do a station. N o matter what i s on the wire, you cannot lower it faster than one metre a second. And there i s so much more detail. The problem now i s to filter everything wi th an eye as to what you can use.

The years following the Global Weather Experiment, l ike those after the Indian Ocean expedition, will be used to digest results and construct new theories. Recent research has established that much of the energy of the great currents in the sea i s transported by the eddies that they throw off. The existence of these eddies in the Gulf Stream and the East Australian current has been known for a long time and they have now been found in the Somali Current, leading Swallow and others to believe that Findlay had them in mind when he wrote of h is 'great whirl'. H i s concept must be reworked by theoreticians as they confront the body of information brought back by the latest expedition to the Indian Ocean. The physical oceanographer i s much closer to understanding this most intractable of oceans, but he s t i l l cannot speak of it with the assurance o f the marine geologist. It remains a very tricky affair. In retrospect, the argument between the surveyors and the experimenters loses much o f its relevance. Given the nature ofthe problem and the means available at the time, neither one was likely to solve it.

Tracking the monsoon 6

Of all the disciplines enlisted in the study of the Indian Ocean, none shows more contrast between past and present than meteorology. During the Monsoon Experiment? meteorologists ran what has been called the biggest international co-operative scientific venture o f all time. Their Global Weather Experiment called on the services o f 3,400 land stations, 800 upper-air stations, 9 weather ships, more than 7,000 merchant ships, 1.000 commercial aircraft, 1 O0 research aircraft, 50 or more research ships, 5 weather satellites in stationary orbit, 300 balloons at high altitude and the buoys drifting on the Southern Ocean. Things were not that way at all during the International Indian Ocean Expedition. Colin Ramage, the professor o f meteorology at the Universtiy of Hawaii who directed its meteorological programme, has commented that, except for a few specific activities, meteorologists in the main were just going along for the ride.

W e made as many measurements as possible from oceanographic research vessels sailing on cruises designed for non-meteorological purposes. W e were philosophical about this, for our ignorance was often too great to allow us to specify ways o f reducing it.

Nevertheless, the expedition's meteorological programme i s often cited as an example o f the co-ordination not found elsewhere. Snider's efforts were the most fruitful. In the preface to h is oceanographic atlas, Wyrtki wrote:

In contrast, the meteorological effort, concentrated over 24 months, has given us a continuous and systematic coverage o f the various phases in the development o f the monsoon.

This was done at a time when the artificial satellite had only begun to lend its totally new capability to the meteorologist's hunt for an understanding o f atmospheric circulation. Observations from any and all sources were welcomed: commercial and military transport aircraft, merchant ships and, of course, the expedition's research ships, helpful only to a limited degree. 'Although 40 research vessels are participating in the Expedition,' Ramage once wrote, 'at any one time fewer than 10 are making measurements. These 10, spread over 75 million square kilometres o f oceans, can scarcely begin to collect a significant amount of usable information.' A l l these data were funnelled for processing and use into an International Meteorological Centre set up for the expedition by the Indian Government at the Colaba Observatory outside Bombay in January 1963. Aid came from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in the form o f a computer financed by what was then the United Nations Special Fund. During 1963-64, the two years devoted to intensive observations, the centre was a busy place with more than 1 O0 staff members provided by the India Meteorological Department and

64

Tracking the monsoon

others from WMO and the United States. In a pamphlet that he wrote for WMO on Meteorology iiz the Indian Ocean, Ramage caught i t s atmosphere:

Throughout the night, staff in the small, air-conditioned communications room have been receiving broadcast coded weather reports from the Indian Ocean region in morse code and on teleprinters. Pictures o f charts analysed a few minutes before in the meteorological centres at Nairobi, i ì~oscow. Sangley Point and Canberra unroll from facsimile printers. Across the compound o f Colaba Observatory in the Signa1 Office o f the western Regional Meteorological Centre, other teleprinters disgorge figure-crammed sheets o f paper containing detailed information on Indian weather, and on the weather over the whole eastern hemisphere north o f the equator.

H e told how these data were transcribed on charts for analysts who sought to produce a picture of the weather. At two in the afternoon, analysts and all the other scientists at the centre met to discuss both routine and research. There was no dearth o f data: every day, some 400 observations by ships and 2,000 by land stations reached the communications room. Even so, problems in radio transmission meant that the centre got less than half the observations made. Copies of all observations were sent by mail so they could be used for research even if they were not much good for forecasting.

They contributed to the Meteorological Atlas of the Intemcitionul Indian Ocearz Expedition published in two volumes in 1972 by the National Science Foundation in Washington as a joint undertaking by NSF and the India Meteorological Department. The first volume was compiled by Ramage, F. R. Miller and Charmian Jeffries. In 144 charts based on 194.000 ship observations. it describes the surface climate of 1963-64. These charts give averages by months and by five-degree squares of wind, pressure, air and sea surface temperature. vapour pressure, clouds, precipitation and heat exchange. The second volume i s devoted to the upper-air climate of the Indian Ocean and i t s adjoining continents. I t s authors, Ramage and C. R. V. Raman. who served as director of the International Meteorological Centre, state that the averages it presents are based on the results of about 750,000 balloon ascents made at 274 stations operated by 45 meteorological services: 1 1 8,000 wind measurements by crews of 32 airlines and air forces and several hundred soundings by research and naval ships.

Commercial and military aircraft were used to take time-lapse films of the clouds they encountered while flying over the Indian Ocean. Ramage explained how it was done:

The technique i s a relatively simple one developed many years ago and spectacularly used in science films to compress into a few seconds the blooming cycles o f flowers. For many years, too. time-lapse movies have been taken from fixed ground stations o f the changing cloud patterns in the heavens, thus allowing a complete day's sequence to be subsequently viewed in a few minutes. The next step has been to place time-lapse cameras on aircraft. have them photograph the clouds at intervals o f one frame every three seconds, recording o n 30 metres o f 16-millimetre film every cloud which comes within camera range o n a six hour flight. When the film i s developed, it i s run through a projector at the normal speed o f I 6 frames a second and the viewer gets the rather exciting impression o f flying at about 50 times the speed o f the aircraft or at around 30,000 kilometres per hour. What airborne time-lapse photography does then, i s record all the clouds visible in strips about 2,500 kilometres long and 60 kilometres wide, a quite considerable improvement over spot observations made from single observing points.

The method had i t s drawbacks since it was limited to beaten paths. In those days, there was only one commercial air route over the entire southern Indian Ocean and this meant a big hole in the Observations. Ramage was glad to see meteorological satellites plug the gap to some extent after TIROS I was launched by the United States in 1960.

Throughout the period o f maximum meteorological activity in the expedition. during 1963 and 1964. at least one and often t w o weather satellites were photographing the region. . . . Unfortunately because o f readout and programming limitations, the TIROS family o f satellites has

65


photographed the Indian Ocean only sporadically. On 28 August I964 the first o f a new family o f weather satellites was successfully orbited. This satellite photographs every part o f the earth oilce a day and also records the character and height of night-time clouds using infra-red radiation sensors. The implications o f this tremendous advance for our Indian Ocean investigations are not as yet properly understood, but it means that at last we now have for the first t ime the opportunity to attempt a complete description o f the whole atmospheric distribution over the Indian Ocean.

The Colaba meteorological centre was equipped with an Automatic Picture Taking Station provided by the National Science Foundation so that it could receive pictures of cloud patterns transmitted by weather satellites passing overhead.

Technology went astray with NOMAD, a floating automatic weather station that was supposed to transmit observations every six hours from i t s position in the Bay of Bengal. Ramage remembers that, after months of delays and near-disasters, it was finally anchored in 3,000 metres of water. 'Then, after a few months, i t s radio quit and it was neither seen nor heard from again.' This was all the more regrettable because coverage of the Bay of Bengal by conventional techniques was spotty.

A l l th is provided a meteorological backdrop for the oceanographers in the expedition. Then there were experiments in meterology itself. These sought to learn the mechanism of the monsoon, and the factors that lead to i ts onset and determine i t s strength and fluctuations. Here. as so often happens in meteorology, the hope of prediction was a driving force. Without the aid of science, Indian farmers growing their summer crops could look only to the purzchutzgum or almanac which. for example, predicted for I 966-67: 'This year a cloud by name 'Avartha' will be born at the summit of 'Meru' mountains and will cause 'medium quantity' of rainfall. There will be fear of war and famine in the country.'

In h is WMO booklet, Ramade explained why this monsoonal climate occurs in the Indian Ocean.

The monsoons blow in response to the seasonal change in the difference in pressure. resulting from the difference in temperature between land and sea. and where great continents border the ocean large temperature differences might be expected. The Indian Ocean i s the only ocean which does not extend from polar regions o f one hemisphere into the polar regions o f the other, being blocked o n i ts northern side by the continental land mass o f Asia. Thus when the sun moves north o f the equator in the northern hemisphere summer. the land mass o f Asia with i ts relatively l o w heat capacity i s rapidly warmed. On the other hand, the northern Indian Ocean between the equator and Asia stores the sun's heat within i t s deep surface layer. Consequently, the land more readily gives of f heat than the sea. and the air over the land becomes warmer than the air over the neighbouring ocean. The warmer the air is, the less dense it i s and. the less dense it is. the lower is the surface air pressure. A gradient o f air pressure i s established between the sea and the land causing the surface air to f low from the sea to the land. . . . During summer. surface air flows from the Indian Ocean toward lower pressure over southern Asia. ascends as it i s heated over the land until it reaches a level where the pressure gradient i s reversed whereupon it flows on a return trajectory from land to sea. where it descends to be once more taken up by the landward pressure gradient.

The summer monsoon lasts until the seasonal march of the sun changes the situation. In winter. as Ramage explained, the reverse occurs. Surface air over the land i s cooler than over the sea because Asia holds heat less well than the Indian Ocean does. So low level winds blow out from the continent to the ocean, rise and return back to the land. The process was explained for the f irst time in 1686 by the English astronomer, Edmund Halley, best known for the comet he identified. H e wrote:

Such as one (cause) is. I conceive, the Action o f the Suns Beams upon the Air and Water, as he passes every day over the Oceans, considered together with the Nature o f Soy1 and Scituation o f the

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adjoyning Continents: I say, therefore, first that according to the Luws ojStutics the Air which i s less rarified or expanded by heat and consequently more ponderous. must have a Motion towards those parts there of. which are more rarified and less ponderous. to bring it to an Aeqidibri i i tn.

At one point, five research aircraft were flying out o f Bombay, one from Woods Hole and four from the Research Flight Facility o f the United States Weather Bureau. The Woods Hole plane with Andrew Bunker in charge measured winds and temperatures from 30 metres above the Arabian Sea to 5,000 metres. This helped Bunker to see how sea and atmosphere go through their cycles o f influencing each other, starting on a global scale when the s u n comes back to the Northern Hemisphere in the spring to warm Asia and going down to the highly local interaction in which upwelling cold water cools the atmosphere and thus changes wind velocities.

The Weather Bureau flew i t s main missions with two large DC-6's, transport aircraft converted to carry out scientific missions. One o f these planes was on the f irst aerial cyclone reconnaissance ever f lown in the northern Indian Ocean, investigating a disturbance that turned out to be a tropical cyclone with winds o f 70 knots. Two days later, when the cyclone had intensified, Raman was aboard the plane that penetrated the cyclone to it's centre. 'I thought the aircraft was falling to pieces,' he said, 'We dropped 300 feet in a single second. As we crossed the eye o f the storm, the wind changed from 1 O0 knots south-south-west to I 0 4 knots north-north-east.' Three hours before his plane flew into the storm, the same cyclone had been photographed by TIROS VI, a weather satellite. A comparison of photos taken by the aircraft and the satellite provided the f i rs t three dimensional view o f a tropical cyclone in the Arabian Sea, i t s eye a clear area twenty kilometres across and i t s wall clouds looming 15.000 metres.

Ramage had long been interested in early summer monsoon rainfall over the Bay o f Bengal and he had a chance to see it at a close hand on a research flight by two DC-6's. one flying at 20,000 feet, the other at 1,500 feet. H e was in the scientist's seat on the high- flying aircraft and he described what h e saw in an article he wrote for Explorer's Journal:

We hade approached to within 150 mi les o f the Andaman Islands when one o f the radars picked up a circular rain-free area about 30 miles in diameter. W e flew on across the southern edge of this area into an amphitheatre o f multi-layered nimbo-stratus cloud. In the centre only thin milky cloud above us and almost none below, and five minutes later w e were once again in rain clouds. Could this have been the eye of a monsoon depression? We asked our colleagues flying at 1,500 feet and they confirmed our observations.. . . We had apparently traversed a cyclone centre with a circulation complete only in a layer of the atmosphere between about 10,000 and 25,000 feet. . . .

As we flew on. we noted how the island o f Ceylon interrupted the predominating southwest winds to produce an enormous lee effect to the northeast where no l o w clouds could form. Our companion aircraft, winging in towards Madras in the late evening at 1,500 feet in completely clear conditions, observed, beginning at about 100 miles out to sea, a rise in temperature which continued and astonishingly reached more than 5 O C over th is last leg. This could only be the effect o f the massive Indian sea breeze, probably the greatest local wind system in the world, distinct from the monsoon and noticeable only when the monsoon i tsel f i s not strong, but nevertheless a feature o f great importance in the rainfall patterns of the subcontinent, particularly in spring, early summer and autumn.

Solar radiation. that basic factor in the ocean's heat budget, was measured in 1963-64 at six coastal sites in India and Africa and on seven Indian Ocean islands by a team under Donald J. Portmann of the University of Michigan. The values they got were lower than what had usually been assumed for radiation from a clear sky, a difference that Ramage traced to some extent to volcanic material discharged into the sky by Mount Agung on Bali jus t before the team set up i t s network.

Energy i s constantly being exchanged between the atmosphere and the ocean. Small-scale measurement of the exchange was the goal defined by a meteorology working

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group appointed for the expedition in I 96 1 by the United States National Academy of Sciences Committee on Oceanography. Robert Fleagle, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, was chairman of the group and he remembers how i t s programme had to be laid out.

We recognized that the determination o f ocean-atmospheric interaction was at the limit o f feasibility at the time. Scientific understanding o f this interaction was inadequate. to say nothing o f the logistic problems o f working at such a distance. Prior to the expedition, air-sea interaction research had been done on protected bodies of water such as inland lakes and in middle latitudes, not in the tropics. Working in the Indian Ocean meant taking a big leap forward from what was known. so big that we discussed whether we should do it at all. M y view was that we couldn't say no, we had to do our best.

Within these limitations, the group set out to determine evaporation rates and the flow of heat and momentum between the atmosphere and the ocean. This was done, Fleagle said, in several ways. both from aircraft and on the sea surface. One difficulty was the influence o f a research ship on the temperature, humidity and wind speed it was supposed to be measuring. To get around this, meteorologists from the University of Washington designed a specially instrumented spar buoy known as MENTOR (a spar buoy i s something like a telephone pole floating vertically in the sea and provides a near-steady platform). It measured the turbulent fluxes from the sea surface to the top of its ten-metre mast, transmitting i t s data to scientists aboard a chartered Dutch tug Oceaan at the other end of a cable 500 metres long. MENTOR worked in an area between 80 and 320 kilometres west of Bombay. While it was getting a close-up of air-sea interaction, the Woods Hole aircraft flew over it at altitudes from 450 to 4,500 metres to collect data so that an attempt could be made to evaluate all the energy entering and leaving this 'box' that measured 1 30 by 140 by 5 kilometres. Gratifyingly, Ramage remarked. an old formula for calculating evaporation from the sea, using ship observations, gave results midway between those obtained from the aircraft and the spar buoy measurements. According to Fleagle:

The results were limited in time to only one month and we had no more than twelve days o f data. but I think it s t i l l was a big step forward. We showed that measurements could be made iil favourable circumstances, the steady-state conditions of clear weather. although it was beyond our capability at the time to take measurements in disturbed conditions. We defined more accurately than before the observational strategy for a tropical air-sea interaction experiment.

Here we can see the germination of the approach that the Monsoon Experiment took on such an infinitely bigger scale in I970 to try to improve the meteorologist's ability to predict the monsoon. Perhaps it will answer some of the questions Ramage raised when, writing in 1965. he tried to summarize what meteorology had achieved during the expedition:

The chances o f developing a long-range forecasting system giving useful indications of the intensity and distribution o f rains two or three months in advance seem as remote as ever. The atmosphere i s turbulent and chaotic and it i s doubtful if we can do any better than use long climatological records and detailed statistics in order to come up with a sort o f odds on what the next season's rainfall w i l l be.

However, continued study o f measurements made at the interface between air and sea may lead to discovering, not only how energy i s exchanged between these two interlocked systems, but also how much i s exchanged. The discovery, when related to world-wide photography and radiometry by weather satellites, could help us elucidate the role o f the monsoons in the total atmospheric circulation. Possessing these essential prerequisites. we would have a good chance of improving short-range weather forecasts, that is, forecasts extending over two or three days or possibly a week. The benefits to be derived from even this modest improvement could be

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considerable. particularly in aiding flood prevention and control and in enabling irrigation engineers to make the best possible use o f stored water. Forecasts o f this length could aid Indian Ocean fishermen who are forced to keep in port during much o f the summer monsoon because o f heavy seas. However. even at the height o f the monsoon, l u l l s occur lasting a week or more during which a temporary resumption o f large-scale fishing would be feasible. Since fish are more plentiful in summer than in winter. at least over the Arabian Sea, the advantage to the fisherman from these improved short-range forecasts i s obvious. The apparently rhythmic nature o f rain- and-break, rain-and-break, during the summer monsoon encourages LIS to delve more deeply into the underlying causes of the rhythm and in particular the causes for interruptions or changes in the rhythm. Finding the rhythm o f a total season, however, seems almost certainly beyond our immediate grasp.

69

L i fe in the ocean 7

The meteorologist's practical concern for the fisherman struck a note already heard during the expedition. The reader will recall how a preliminary prospectus spoke o f benefits that could be brought to protein-hungry countries and how Stommel, in h is letter to the Bubble. bristled at the inference. Here was another controversy that only time could resolve.

N o one argued over the need to better the Indian Ocean's yield. Representing 20 per cent o f the world's ocean area and 30 per cent of i t s population. it produced less than 4 per cent o f the marine fish catch in 1 960. The expedition did not look for new fishing grounds but tried to learn the environment o f l i fe in the sea. Oceanography i s a great integrator of i ts component sciences. The marine biologist turns to the physical oceanographer to describe the currents upon which the plankton (their names comes from the Greek word for wandering) drift or to detect areas where upwelling water raises nutrients from the depths to fertilize the sunlit surface layer so marine plant life can flourish. This upwelling process i s essential in tropical oceans, otherwise far less productive than the waters o f cold latitudes. When the expedition was planned, marine biologists decided to seek such areas in the Indian Ocean and to take a general survey o f i t s living resources, starting with one- celled plants and running up to sharks and tuna, the king predators on top o f the marine food chain. Like the physical oceanographers, they did things on their own. Some worked survey sections, others examined processes, once again to the despair o f the atlas makers. In her introduction to the Phytoplankton Production Atlas of the Iiitertiational Indiari Ocean Expedition, published in 1976 by the Institute for Marine Sciences at the University o f Kiel, Brigitta Babenerd wrote: 'The lack o f a systematic survey for the entire ocean and the necessity to combine data from many years. . . made the preparation of the Atlas rather troublesome.' Nevertheless, she succeeded in mapping the distribution o f plant plankton by depths and seasons along with the factors such as presence o f nutrients or the optical properties o f the sea's upper layers that govern their growth. Detailed measurements on vertical sections were taken from only a few ships, among them Anton BruLin and Atlantis II from the United States, Gascoyne and Diatnantirm from Australia, Discoveiy from the United Kingdom, and Kagoshima Maru, Koyo M a n i and Unlitaka Maru from Japan. This atlas, the last to be produced for the expedition, was edited by Babenerd and Johannes k e y who had supervised i t s preparation until h i s death in 1975. Financial support for i t s publication came from the German Research Society and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at Unesco.

A good definition o f what marine biologists were seeking came from John Ryther at Woods Hole, director o f the United States Biological Programme for the expedition. when he wrote in 1963:

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L i f e in the ocean

For the systematist, the Indian Ocean represents a wor ld of which only tantalizing glimpses have been obtained. A few fortunate individuals have taken part in expeditions to some of the more remote, exotic island groups (the Seychelles, the Maldives. the Laccadives. the Comores. the Chagos) and have brought back a wealth of new material. Just enough i s known of the flora and fauna of these areas to whet the appetite o f the taxonomist wi th the desire to make a thorough and exhaustive study of the entire region. . . .

For the ecologist. there are reports o f many fascinating phenomena of unknown nature and origin. Vast f i sh mortalities in the central Arabian Sea are perhaps produced by the overturn o f water from middeptlis reportedly devoid of oxygen and laden with hydrogen sulphide. The central Bay of Bengal may at times have similar properties. Are these anoxic layers related to the biological productivity o f the overlying surface waters? Do they reflect stagnation implying lack o f vertical or horizontal circulation for long periods o f time? Notorious outbreaks o f discolored water, sometimes also producing mass mortalities of marine life, are frequently reported along the coasts of India and Africa. Are these 'blooms' o f dinoflagellates similar to the causative agent o f the Florida red tide? Are they the resul t o f fertilization of the coastal waters from upwelling processes . . .? Huge meadows o f blue-green algae extending for many hundreds of square miles are known to occur in the Arabian Sea. What makes these plants grow in this particular region? U'here do they get their nutrients? How does their presence affect other forms of marine life'? These are just a few of the problems. probably unique in the Indian Ocean. which wi l l require a combination of physical. chemical and biological information to answer.

Such a combination was sought by the Australians in a series of six 'Seasonal Biological Cruises' along the I 1 Oo E. meridian between 32" S. and l o o N. in 1962-63 by their converted frigates, Gíiscoyrle and Diumantirzír. Help came from French oceanographers at Nouinea in New Caledonia who did midwater trawling. Among the results was the description of a major upwelling area south of Java where productivity was nearly twice the winter mean because water r ich in phosphates was getting to the surface. The Australians ran these cruises every two months, taking stations every ninety miles while their ships sailed along the meridian e n route from Fremantle to Singapore. The work was all the more welcome because of the lack o f observations by other vessels in the south- eastern Indian Ocean. Highley, in h is history of Australia's contribution to the expedition, writes that the Seasonal Biological Cruises, more comprehensive in their approach to seasonal changes than any previous study, 'provided new insight into seasonal variability in the oceans'. It was systematic surveying, unspectacular but basic. Highley quoted Stommel who had said: 'This difficult, painstaking and somewhat tedious work i s the very foundation upon which all other study of the ocean must be built.'

It made sense logistically for Australia to do regular seasonal studies of an ocean that literally washed i t s doorstep. Other countries had to be more specific when they mounted their long-range expeditions. Interest in the biological consequences of upwelling in the Arabian Sea was so high that this became Discovery's main target of investigation when the British took her into the Indian Ocean for the f i rs t time in 196. The existence of the upwelling had been known since 1922 but it had never been studied during the south- west summer monsoon when rough seas were enough to discourage all but the largest research vessels. Ronald Currie, a marine biologist then with Swallow at Wormley, led this cruise into the Arabian Sea when the Somali Current was at i t s full. H e never forgot it. Currie, now director of the Dunstaffnage Marine Research Laboratory o f the Scottish Marine Biological Association, said later: 'No one dreamt of a seven-knot current in mid- ocean. I t altered the earliest concepts in one's mind. When I started work, we looked at the ocean as very large bodies of water moving around sluggishly.' Movement i s seldom sluggish during the south-west monsoon in the Arabian Sea. When Discovery went back there with Swallow in July 1979, a message from the ship was posted on the bulletin board of the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences: 'WIND SOUTH-WEST 40 KNOTS. HEAVY SEAS. HOVE TO SINCE FRIDAY.'

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A Soviet ship, Vladimir Vorob’ev, had worked in the area in the winter of 196016 I, getting data that could be compared with what Discovery was to learn later during the height of the summer monsoon. The British vessel sailed from her home port of Plymouth in June 1963 and began her first biological work in the Red Sea where she sampled a large bloom of Trichodesrniun? erytlzmetini, the reddish microscopic algae that gives this sea i t s name (and which seamen prefer to call ‘sea sawdust’). Then the unexpected happened, as it so often does on oceanographic voyages. Deacon, writing about the cruise in Ocearzus, told how the ship was diverted to the island of Abu A l i to pick up an injured lighthouse keeper whose donkey had apparently rolled on him. ‘There seemed to be not much wrong with him except that h is friends had bandaged him too tight, but to be quite safe he was taken to Aden.’

From Aden, and after answering another distress call, Discoi~ery finally got down to business off Arabia in the upwelling zone. Currie wrote in Fishing News hiternutionul:

The survey took the ship along a zig-zag track of f the coast, stopping every 1 O or 20 mi les to make measurements o f the currents, to take water samples at different depths down to the bottom and to collect plankton in fine mesh nylon nets from the different layers in the sea. Altogether, an area o f nearly 100.000 square miles was covered in the course o f the survey. . . .

We worked many lines of stations across tanker routes. They seemed to alter course only at the last minute.

Lying along the coast there was a belt o f cold water which could only be brought about by an uprising o f deeper water-water r ich in all the nutrient necessary for plankton growth. . . . The echo sounders showed an abundance o f large discrete echoes in the upper layers and typically compact shoals o f f ish deeper down at depths o f some I20 fathoms.

In another article that appeared in The Geogruphiccil~ciguzine, Currie told of what he and h i s fellow marine biologists had witnessed: A t one position near the Kuria Mur ia Islands the water was so heavily discoloured w i th plankton that the sea had a blood-red appearance. This was caused by a dense growth o f microscopic dinoflagellates, tiny little cells looking rather l ike an acorn but only about 1 /600th of an inch in length. A tablespoonful o f the red water would have contained about 50,000 such cells [these are not the same organisms as Trichodesmiim erytlzrcieuni although they stain the sea the same colour].

Even the atmosphere in the upwelling region seemed to create an impression o f luxuriant marine life. Compared with the air-conditioned interior o f the ship. the cold. damp air bore a very noticeable clinging smell o f fish. while the ripples on the green water displayed a rich. glutinous texture often degenerating into a frothy scum. Schools o f dolphins, sometimes so numerous that they seemed to stretch to the horizon, surrounded the ship, delaying only momentarily to revel in the bow wave. The whole sea seemed to be teeming with life.

A t the time. Currie hesitated to draw any conclusions about the abundance o f fish in the region because a proper fishery survey had not been made but he ventured that ‘the density o f the f ish shoals recorded seemed to be roughly comparable with those on the good fishing grounds of northern European waters’. On Discoiwv, biologists soon found out why so little research had been done during the south-west monsoon off the Arabian coast. One o f them was Arthur de C. Baker, a planktologist who had sailed on Discoiwji S predecessor, Discoiwrji If (only the British can explain why Discovery If came before Discovery), celebrated for her work in the Antarctic.

Discover,! 11 rolled like a pig. She never pitched, but she had a predictable roll. The new Discoverj. pitched and rolled in a totally different way. She was stiffer. she didn’t always go along with the water. She would start a roll, then come back and catch you unawares. I t was tiring on your legs.

Baker found h is services in great demand.

On that cruise, none o f u s were specialists. I just came along because they needed an extra pair o f hands. It was the most consistently bad weather I have ever experienced. We had a particular

72

L i fe iii the occaii

problem wi th our vertical net hauls because of the up-and-down movement of the ship. The net was equipped wi th an accumulator system to take up slack but it would s t i l l close prematurely when the wire went slack. We had to r ig up a block and each of us took turns standing on a platform and hauling in the slack on the net. We were fishing five depths and we each pulled on that l ine half an hour at a time. We were like bell-ringers.

It was dull work.

You couldn’t poke away at the catch. If biology i s to be exciting, one must look down a microscope and this was not microscope weather. In the upwelling area. the productivity o f the phytoplankton was so high that the sieve on our net kept clogging. That made it hard to treat the samples.

Few samples of zooplankton were talten off the Arabian coast but, on occasion, Discovery’s neuston net. towed on water skis out lo one side of the ship to skim the l i fe on the first few centimetres of the surface. would bring in tuna larvae. ‘That gave us a chance to sit down and count tuna larvae because we could to it with the naked eye.’ These were rough-and-ready eslimates: the real job of sorting plankton m u s t be done on shore. Sorting has always been the bane of tnariiie biology for it i s such tedious and yet demanding work. Baker continued:

When I came to this iristitute in 195 1 . the lady who looked after our zooplankton collection said that the only way to solve the sorting problem would be to give it to a nunnery. She would use students during their holidays. And yet. it i s good to sort a sample. One gets more of a feel for it than j u s t looking at a column of numbers.

H i s remark was apposite because, as we shall see shortly, plankton sorting led to a bloom of marine biological research in India.

Biologists, l ike the physical oceanographers, had their hands full in the Somali Current during the summer monsoon. Currie recalled what happened when they towed a inidwater trawl in the areas where the current was changing with depth. ‘It was a hell of a job. Occasionally, the net would overtake the ship, at other times we would have several tons of strain on the wire.’ H e had previously worked in the Indian Ocean in 195 I aboard Discoiiery II when she took stations south of Sr i Lanka along the 90° E. meridian on her way from the Antarctic. There, the Indian Ocean had looked poor, in contrast to the productive Arabian Sea that Currie was to find in 1963. H e has never been able to answer some of the questions that arose there.

Although the sea was rich. there was a great shortage o f bird life. Perhaps there was a shortage o f nesting sites or perhaps the higher levels of l i fe were developed further out at sea. It would be a fascinating area to go back to.

Currie was among the many oceanographers on the expedition who spolie nostalgically of the ease with which they could work in coastal zones as compared to the red tape and formalities of the present. Most upwelling areas are close in shore and you must get within five mi les ofthe coast. In the past, you went to see the port captain and bought him a drink. N o w you have to go through the Foreign Office. These days. people get shirty. When we were working offthe Western European coast, we drifted into shore. As we came in, we found a destroyer pointing her guns at us. Yet it i s essential that you can change plans from one minute to the next. You cannot preplan six months in advance if you want to follow a patch of cold water or a fish shoal.

One of the prime movers of the International Indian Ocean Expedition in the United Kingdom, Currie has always thought the effort worthwhile: ‘The expedition did not lead to any new theories in biology but it widened our experience and gave us regional information.’ H e would l i k e to return and apply the knowledge and techniques marine biology has acquired since then. Biologists would now look at the eddies in the Arabian Sea, the ‘great whirl’ that the physical investigators found. These eddies. Currie pointed

7 3

Assault on the largesi unknown

out, may well be self-contained biological systems that last for two or three years and. as such, their importance i s obvious. Methods would not be the same.

We used to look at a 250-metre layer ofwater. N o w we know that vertical migration takes place on a fine scale. We study layers o f only tens o f metres, each with different populations and different stages o f organisms.

In biology as in the other marine sciences, there i s always this new attention to details in closeup. I t i s as if people had been studying the moon through a telescope and suddenly found themselves on i t s surface.

In 1963, our lines were 130 miles apart and we took stations every ten to thirty miles. Now, we would do a grid o f stations only five or te i i miles apart in areas where there i s lots o f activity. In the Arabian Sea. there i s tremendous production over four months, as much as in the Antarctic. But we s t i l l do not know what happens of f Arabia during the winter monsoon and where the fish shoals go. I t 's a different ocean then.

Discoiie-1 was a versatile ship. changing scientific crews and missions from one leg to the next of her cruises in the Indian Ocean where she ran the whole gamut of oceanography: physical, biological, geological. At the time. biologists tended to regard themselves as the stepchildren of the marine sciences. A remedy to this was sought in the United States Biological Programme under Ryther. With all the talk about the Indian Ocean as a source of food and living resources, Ryther did not have too much trouble getting a ship, a programme and a free hand to run it. The ship was the stately ex-presidential yacht Anton Bruzm, 243 feet long and displacing 1,700 tons. By the tinie her conversion was over, the presidential suite had become quarters for eight scientists and she had the laboratories and winches needed for biological and fisheries research. As Ryther explained in an interview at Woods Hole, biological oceanographers in the United States were not concentrated in any single institution large enough to run such a single programme ship. Therefore, she was managed as a service facility by Ryther and Edward Chin, also of Woods Hole, carrying out nine cruises for a variety of purposes and scientists duving two years in 1 963 and 1964. Only eight of her scientific staff were permaiiently assigned to the ship: the others came and went, biologists followed by fisheries researchers. 'We had so much freedom in those days,' Ryther said, 'We had no committee meetings. Ed Chin and I j us t picked the people who wanted to go.'

Ryther himself led one leg of Anton Bmzm 's fourth cruise, joining the ship at Mauritius in 1963 for a study of primary production and physical oceanography in the Arabian Sea. The winds of the south-west monsoon had died down but upwelling was st i l l going on off Aden. Like Currie, Ryther was struck by the great burst of life in these waters.

When we were hove to at night on station, we could see sea snakes swimming on the surface. We encountered bioluminescent zooplankton in quantities we had never seen before. We saw large rafts o f TtYchodesrnizrnz. reddish-yellow in such accumulations.

On this cruise, bottom samplers brought up skeletons of dead f ish off the Arabian coast, an indication of fish kills attributed to low oxygen in deep water.

Reporting on the cruise, A. R. Pruter and Richard Shomura of the United States Bureau of Commercial Fisheries wrote in Nnutilus:

Extremely fertile waters were found in an area o f diverging currents located some 240-320 kilometres of f the Arabian Coast. In terms o f carbon assimilation, primary productivity in these waters was an order o f magnitude greater than that o f the oceans as a whole. A t two stations of f the Gul f o f Oman, rates o f productivity were 5.7 and 6.4 g carbon/m2/day-values considerably higher than ever before reported for the open sea. . . . Results o f t h i s cruise offer an explanation of the probable course o f events causing previously reported mass f i sh mortalities in the Western Arabian Sea. The concentration o f dissolved oxygen was observed to decrease rapidly with depth,

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Life in the ocean

reaching less than 1 .O ml/litre at I 00 metres and less than 0. 1 i n l / l i t r e at mid-depths o f 500 to 1 000 metres at some stations. Sinking and decomposition o f organic matter could create anaerobic conditions. Subsequent mixing of this anoxic water with surface water might easily lead to the death o f fishes.

Following this cruise, Anton Bruiiri did some exploratory fishing in the same area. Pruter and Shomura stated:

Considering the small size of the t rawl nets used, t w o successful t rawl hauls made of f the Southeast Arabian Coast yielded exceptionally large catches o f fish. One 30-minute haul produced 2.545 kilos; the other, o f 45-minute duration. yielded 773 kilos o f fish and 8 3 6 kilos o f swimming crabs.

A t a press conference held in February I 9 6 5 at the United Nations in New York, Chin was quoted by the NeJi, York Tinitis in a description of another net haul off Muscat and Oman in which three tons of f i sh and crabs were brought up froin the bottom after forty-five minutes of trawling and h e also mentioned 'rich fish hauls off Somalia and Burma'.

In a paper that Ryther produced with four other Woods Hole authors-John R. Hall. Allan K. Pease, Andrew Bakun and Mark M. Jones-to estimate primary production in the Western Indian Ocean on the basis of the Anton Bmwz cruises, it was mentioned that the mean daily rate of production here was twice the average of the world ocean. The authors cautioned in Linmolog\~ und OceanogrLrplzjl:

However, the use of means i s misleading in a region where production was found to vary wi th in a range o f more than a hundredfold. Over half the total organic production occurred in approximately 20 per cent o f the region studied; more than one-fifth of the total was in the Western Arabian Sea alone. where the mean production i s approximately ten times that o f the world's oceans. Thus, while the western Indian Ocean as a whole may be considered as somewhat more productive than most other large oceanic areas. it i s a region o f great contrast containing both some o f the richest and some o f the most infertile waters that have been described.

During her two-year stay in the Indian Ocean. Anton Bru~in was something of a United Nations afloat. Except for her permanant staff. one-quarter of the scientists who sailed on her were not American. They came from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Egypt, Hong Kong, India. Israel. Italy, Madagascar, Pakistan, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand and Zanzibar. One of them Marta Vaniiucci, then deputy director of the Oceanographic Institute at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and now with Unesco's regional science and technology office in New Delhi, Described her experiences in an interview. She flew from São Paulo and boarded the ship in Bombay for i ts fifth cruise from January to March in 1964. She was interested in hydromedusae. using the distribution of various species of these jellyfish to indicate water masses (thus, for example, she could identify Antarctic bottom water at only 10 degrees north of the equator). There was much routine work, sorting medusae from samples on the ship. Then there was the excitement when the net hauls came up or when the surrounding ocean intruded on the laboratory. She liked to be out on deck to catch the 'green flash' as the sun dipped in the tropical seas, i t s upper rim turning from red to pale green. On board, there was more than medusae to interest an observer. 'Each ship has i t s own atmosphere', she said, 'It i s just a little speck of dust in the middle of nowhere. People change'. At Mauritius in harbour. the ship was battened down in expectation of a cyclone, giving her a chance to watch the effect of meteorology on human behaviour. Quarrels started, some of the officers were pessimistic, even a theoretical mutiny was plotted before the alert passed, moods changed and research could begin again. Vannucci remembered, too. how fisheries investigators longlined for tuna. This was done only to understand relationships between species as the Japanese had already been operating a commercial longline fishery in the Indian Ocean for nearly ten years.

Assault on the largest utiktiowti

I t was a bloody mess. They were trying to catch tuna. but often they got sharks. When the sharks were brought in. all the pristine violence in man came out. The sharks were beaten. gutted alive and thrown back into the sea.

A ntorz Brtiun s maiden cruise during the expedition was o f an entirely different nature. It was then that links were established between the ship's biological programme and marine scientist in countries bordering the waters where she was operating, particularly India. Her chief scientist on this cruise was Eugene C. Lafond, an American physical oceanographer who directed the marine environment division o f the United States Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego before h is recent retirement. LaFond i s an inveterate internationalist. H e i s considered one of the fathers o f oceanography in India, having gone there for the f irst time as a Fulbright professor of physical oceanography in I 9 5 2 for one year. H i s experiences motivated him to state, in a letter to Tlzeináiarz Ocean Bubble in JUIY 1959: I have been interested in the various discussions of the proposed oceanographic studies for the Indian Ocean appearing in 'The Indiari Oceari Bubble'. To me. the problem i s not what to do, but rather. who i i i the Iridian Oceari regiori cciri be roiirided zip to do it? Everyone should be reminded that this the Indiari Oceuri. not the Woods Hole or Scripps ocean.

To spread the gospel and attain any lasting results. the work has to be carried on partly by the scientists of the Indian Ocean area. This does not mean just coming along for the ride, but actually given a major share in planning, analysis and reportirzg. Most Asian students will be enthusiastic about the work if given opportunity to collect data for thesis material. This opportunity and encouragement should be the primary goal of the expedition. . . .

Unfortunately, i t i s not possible to deal directly with students. I t i s necessary to go down through the chain of command. The most promising approach would be to contact high-level people. such as heads of scientific organizations, Navy laboratories, fisheries, or universities, explaining the proposed program. Eventually. through these contacts, i t may be possible to assemble some good Indian Ocean scientists and get them started in oceanographic research in their ocean.

LaFond had done precisely that when he went to Andhra University at Waltair in South India on h is Fulbright grant. H e i s not a man to talk piously about higher motivations. H e once said to a journalist:

Look. I'm physical oceanographer. I've written 150 papers in physical oceanography. But now I want to do something for somebody. If I were a carpenter, I could build houses for people. But I'm not. Oceanography i s the only thing I know.

H e agreed to accept the professorship at Andhra when he was assured that the Indian Navy would provide him with a ship to do research. He and his wife, Katherine, a chemical oceanographer at Scripps, and their two children, sailed to England, caught a ship to Bombay and finally turned up at the railway station in Waltair with twenty-seven pieces o f luggage packed with Nansen bottles, plankton nets, bathythermographs, reversing thermometers, bottom grabs. . . all borrowed from the United States Navy. They were me t by faculty members, among them C. Mahadevan. a noted Indian geologist and one o f the powers behind the move to combine elements of the zoology, geology and geophysics departments at his university into an oceanographic unit. Soon. the LaFonds were housekeeping in a bungalow on the campus with a charcoal stove for cooking and a bicycle for transportation. That did not bother LaFond, he was more interested in getting a ship. H e had been promised a minesweeper by the Indian Navy but he could not wait. At Visakhapatnam, a nearby port, he talked to the deputy harbour master who took LaFond and his students to sea in his harbour tug with a bathythermograph lowered 300 metres into the sea by hand. They were able to show that, as they moved away from the coast, surface water was 'downwelling'. Soon. LaFoiid had his minesweeper with i ts big winch which was put to the more peaceful task o f handling bottom dredges, grab samplers and

16

Lice in the ocean

nets. Nansen bottle casts needed a long light wire rope but only 200-metre lengths were available. LaFond had the wire spliced and placed the Nansen bottles on the splices so that the ‘messenger’ weights that close the bottles could slide down freely between them. The Indian Navy made their minesweepers available to the university for fifty-eight cruises along the east coast of India with Indian students in oceanography.

The oceanographic unit had to build i t s own bottom dredges; it also purchased a small catamaran with a sail hoisted over two logs so that a biologist could get a mi le out to sea. fil l a clay pot with water and pour it through a small net to collect plankton. Water samples were also collected for chemical analysis and water temperatures were measured from the catamaran. A student of inshore oceanography took beach profiles with even less equipment. LaFond had him buy an eight-foot bamboo pole and graduate it into tenths of a foot. Then they found a big rock on the beach and wrestled it to the crest of the berm. j u s t where the beach started to drop away. This was their reference point from which they could take a sight on the pole with respect to the horizon as they moved it towards the water, eight feet at a time. The student did this every day. At the end o f eight months, he had a record of how the beach had changed and the data he needed for a thesis. A bamboo pole could be used to measure wave heights. With an eight-pound rock tied to it, the pole became a penetrometer enabling one to learn the compactness of the sand. ‘A bamboo pole cost 2 annas,’ LaFond said. ‘You can do a lot without sophisticated equipment.’

In 1 95 3 , LaFond went back to San Diego but he returned to India for another period in 1 955 without his children but with h is wife. At the end of th is tour, Andhra University was well-established as a seedbed of oceanography and eventually sixteen researchers there earned their doctorates. Mahadevan had died, but LaFond worked closely with N. K. Panikkar, the Indian marine biologist already cited here as an early member o f SCOR. The second stay strengthened LaFond’s determination to spread oceanography internationally, even if it slowed h is own career as a scientist (later, he spent a year in Paris as deputy director of Unesco’s Office of Oceanography). H e was an obvious choice to lead the f irst cruise of Anton Bruun in the expedition. Panikkar worked on the Indian side of a joint programme with Anton BI.ZLZL~Z while T. S. S. Rao, an Indian planktologist, set up a liaison office to assist scientists coming to India to participate.

Before the LaFonds went to sea, they spent nearly three months in India to explain the goals of the biological programme. ‘Panikkar sent u s to every Indian oceanographic laboratory.’ he said. ‘Katherine and I lectured all over the country, telling scientists what we knew about the Indian Oceanrgiving them an idea of what the expedition was trying to do and inviting them to go on Aizron Bruun.’ LaFond’s ties to India have never been cut. After he retired, he remained in San Diego as secretary-general of IAPSO, the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Ocean, but he packed h is library of oceanographic books and journals into forty-four boxes and shipped it to the Indian National Institute of Oceanography in Goa. ‘They can use them better than I can now.’

Antorz Bruun’s first cruise resembled the maiden voyages of other ships in the expedition. Things went wrong, scientists had to improvise to get results for the time they spent at sea. The ship sailed from Bombay on 12 March 1 9 6 3 , bound for the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal with twenty-five scientists aboard, five of them Indians. As American scientists completed their projects, they were replaced by Indians, twenty-four in all who took part in the cruise. Changes were made in the ship’s routine for them. LaFond reported:

Proper food for Asian scientists had to be considered. When I knew the Indians and Thais would be on board, I consulted the person who purchased food for the Indian Navy. He recommended a number of dahls [lentils] and spices which we purchased in Bombay. However, we found out later that there are so many cultural districts in India it i s not possible to have the specific lentil and spice o f each district. No one starved, but some accustomed diets suffered.

77

Assault on the largest unltnown

While he was working at Andhra, LaFond had studies the circulation on the western side of the Bay of Bengal. N o w he wanted to look at the eastern side to test the hypothesis that upwelling should take place off the coasts of Burma and Thailand during the north-east winter monsoon. The ship worked her way across the southern half of the Andaman Sea to Phuket in Thailand were Thai scientists came aboard. This was mainly a biological investigation with five different net hauls at each station and, in some cases, trawling and dredging for bottom organisms. A n unscheduled call had to be made at Chittagong for fuel and water, unavailable at Phuket. The ship's air-conditioning system was acting up, making l i fe difficult for researchers who needed a cold uniform temperature, particularly for the culture of algae. Worst of all, a big new dredging winch proved balky. 'The cable wouldn't lay level on the drum', LaFond said, 'It popped and jerked while we were making deep trawls. Every time something failed, I put in my own programme with another winch. That was how we were able to make deep Nansen bottle casts in the Bay of Bengal.' Thanks to the faulty dredging winch, LaFond was able to determine the circulation in the Bay. As predicted by theory, he found upwelling and high production of plant plankton off Thailand and Burma while the monsoon changed from north-east to south-west. A contribution was even made to marine geology. Anton Bruzin kept her precision depth recorder going along the central east coast of India and discovered three new submarine canyons on the edge of the continental shelf. They were named Andhra, Mahadevan and Krishna in honour of the university where modern oceanography had begun in India and the two figures responsible for i t s introduction, Mahadevan and the university's late vice-chancellor. This discovery and other results were announced at a two-day seminar at Visakhapatnam aboard Anton Briizin j us t before the cruise ended. The United States Government paid the way for Indian oceanographers from all over the country so they could attend. 'People from Andhra were glad to see u s again', Lafond said, 'It was a happy time, even though we had a broken winch.' Besides chemical analysis o f sea water samples and measurements of primary production on board, a large collection of plankton, fish, molluscs and sediment was taken ashore and analysed both in India and the United States.

Results of biological cruises during the expedition and in subsequent years were reviewed in 197 1 by a symposium at the University of Kiel that set out to summarize the state of knowledge of Indian Ocean biology. This was organized by SCOR and the marine productivity section of the International Biological Programme with the help of Unesco, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Association of Biological Oceanography. Kiel was an appropriate place to hold such a meeting: Krey had been associated with the expedition from the start and Mefeor had made a major biological contribution during her long Indian Ocean cruise. The symposium proceedings were published by Springer-Verlag in The Biologj> qf the Indian Ocean with Berndt Zeitzschel of the Institute for Marine Sciences in Kiel as i t s editor.

Zeitzschel later became director of the institute and he was serving in this capacity when he tried to sum up what the expedition meant to the marine biologist.

A t that time. nothing was known o f the distribution o f plankton in the open ocean. We needed a basic survey to give LIS information on species and seasonal productivity. The expedition was an inventory. No one would do this today.

Instead of jus t taking a census, marine biologists now prefer to follow a patch of plankton, describe i t s environment and carry out shipboard experiments to learn the feeding rates o f the animals in i t s population.

This was not done during the expedition. Zooplankton could only be counted individually and identified. As related earlier, SCORs working group in Indian Ocean biology had suggested that India should set up a sorting centre to handle samples from

7 8

L i fe in ( l ie ocean

The Unesco-supported Indian Ocean Biological Centre in Cochin. (Plioio: Unecco/G. Hetnpel.)

ships in the expedition. The idea had been discussed informally by Snider. Revelle and Panikkar when they met at the oceanographic congress in 1959 in New York and it was well received by the Indian National Committee on Oceanic Research. In I96 1, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at Unesco announced that India had agreed to establish an Indian Ocean Biological Centre at Cochin in the southern state o f Kerala on the Arabian Sea. A consultative committee composed o f Martin Johnson from the United States, Shigeru Motoda from Japan and Michael Vinogradov from the USSR met in India to plan i t s start. Unesco was to provide basic scientific equipment and a curator; India would take care o f the physical plant, the staff and the running expenses. I t was an unusual venture. Never before had an international centre been called into existence to provide such a service for biologists. Since then, it has served as a model for similar sorting centres established with Unesco help in Singapore and Mexico. The Sinithsonian Oceanographic Sorting Center was also established in Washington, D.C., in 1962. and received samples collected aboard the Anton Briiirri.

The Indian Ocean Biological Centre was opened in February 1963 in one wing o f the Oceanographic Laboratory of Kerala University with Panikkar as its director and Vagn K. Hansen from the Danish Institute for Fisheries and Marine Research in Copenhagen as the curator engaged by Unesco. Work began at once on the samples taken by the Indian Ocean Standard N e t that had come in from ships in the expedition. Here. at least, an effort was made to co-ordinate and standardize. Every ship used the same type o f net for the samples, preserved in formalin solution, that it sent to Cochin. Sorting started with a staff of three scientists that grew to seventeen as the number o f samples rose.

The job demanded excruciating patience. A journalist once described the Cochin centre:

Asca~ilt on the largest unlanown

A dozen young Indian scientists were working side by side in silent concentration in front o f a long table. Before them were laid out rows o f petri dishes, magnifying glasses and a bank of stereoscopic microscopes. Each man was dipping a fine-tipped brush into a large dish filled with minute objects and then transferring the tiny grain on the end o f h i s brush into one o f the smaller dishes. Occasionally, he would stop and jot down a figure on a slip o f paper I had the opportunity to watch M. Sakthivel as he sorted a sample taken by Kistizu on 2 I January I 9 6 3 two degrees north o f the equator in the Arabian Sea. The sample was f i rs t filtered and dried on blotting paper. Then its volume was measured and. if it contained more than five cubic centimetres o f plankton. it had to be divided.

Sakthivel demonstrated the operation o f a plankton divider, a device resembling a roulette wheel broken down into ten individual compartments. By spinning the wheel. the sample can be distributed evenly and the research worker can work on the contents o f a single compartment. It sounds simple and it is. But before the centre received these plankton dividers, a scientist had to count all the specimens in a sample.

Even with the divider. the centre's research workers must break down each sample into sixty zoological orders and then count the number in each order. In the sample sent in by Kisrrici. Sakthivel had found 6,000 copepods. These are small crustaceans about three millimetres long and he had to herd them with his brush. In all. a sample may contain from 12.000 to 15.000 organisms. . . .

'It 's very interesting work'. he said, 'Previously, everything I had studied had only been in theory. N o w we can see all the organisms and work wi th them.'

'Besides. no two samples are alike.'

Sakthivel was one o f several young scientists at the centre who went on to conduct research on their own. Hansen had started the sorting process and it was well under way by the time he left in 1965 to be replaced as curator by Edward Brinton, a marine biologist from Scripps. Brinton agreed with Hansen's approach:

It was the only way to start and it was no mean accomplishment. But then the Indians became frustrated. They were all graduates, some with master's degrees, and they were sorting plankton for specialists in other parts o f the world. It was a service without benefit for themselves. Good sorters were getting very unhappy, just picking at a sample eight hours a day.

Brinton went a step farther, encouraging senior sorters to start their own research projects, working on a few species. Soon half the sorters were engaged in specialized topics, as reflected by nine papers published in The Biology uf the Iridian Ocean. Four of the group. Sakthivel among them, earned their Ph.D.s as a result o f this work.

The centre never would have succeeded without these people. They were a steady force, intelligent. wi th no prima donnas. I don't agree that sorting should be done by stupid people. It paid o f f in subtle ways and it wi l l continue to do so. Most o f the sorters have remained in biological oceanography in India.

During Brinton's stay in Cochin. some samples showed signs o f deterioration.

This was the first time anyone had ever sorted in the tropics and we used techniques developed for temperate climates. We would reduce the level o f formalin when we were sorting. That stuff stinks, i t 's very irritating, and we had no air-conditioning. A t times, the vapour was pretty oppressive although our people would stick to it. Deterioration was very fast with a reduced level o f formalin. This was an unanticipated problem and it took us a long t ime to find out what was wrong.

The research at the centre came at an appropriate moment. Demand for samples from the outside world was not as high as had been expected. Brinton said:

Not all that many people were clamouring for material wi th which to work. Most biologists work in their o w n areas. Perhaps more dynamic breakthroughs were anticipated. We knew that we were not going to get breakthroughs. We just wanted to learn faunistics and see in what ways the Indian Ocean was different from other oceans.

x o

L i fe in the ocean

While he was a long way from southern California, Brinton did not feel out of place in Cochin. H e found parallels between the Northern Indian Ocean cut off by the Asian land mass and the Eastern Tropical Pacific backed up against the coasts o f Central America and South America.

Both are very productive and deficient in oxygen which i s used up below the surface layer. The zooplankton in the northern Arabian Sea and in the Eastern Tropical Pacific are related. The t w o situations are analogous, one could recognize similarities. However. in the Indian Ocean, the circulation changes o n a seasonal basis and it was interesting to document th is with plankton.

Brinton was succeeded by David Tranter from Australia who. in turn, was replaced by Marta Vannucci, the last of the Unesco curators. Since 197 1, T. S. S. Rao has been in charge o f the centre. In all, 1,927 samples taken by expedition ships were sorted there, a seven-year task during which 500 species were identified. During the early years, a small rotating group o f scientists acted as a consultative committee for the centre. They met every year in Cochin and served to maintain links between Indian marine biologists and their international scientific community. Zooplankton specialists from other countries came to hold seminars for the staff who were given opportunities to work abroad.

One member of the consultative committee, Abraham Fleminger at Scripps. watched the evolution o f the centre over a number o f years.

Brinton got them to thinking in terms o f research, posing questions and aspiring to be more than technicians. Then Tranter took them to the ecological step where they began to see what had to be done to get protein from the ocean. That was much more important than catching up to the West in scholasticism.

Fleminger agreed with Brinton that plankton sorting was important even though the systematics-the identification and classification o f animals-is no longer as essential to the marine biologist as in the past. ‘It was not a blind alley’, he said, ‘They had to start learning what animals are like’.

The Indian Ocean Biological Centre has become a division o f the National Institute o f Oceanography at Goa whose Director, S. Z. Qasim, has reported that it now houses the most extensive collection of zooplankton from the Indian Ocean, nearly 7,000 samples from Australia and United Nations Development Programme projects as well as from the expedition. Starting in 1968, it published five volumes o f atlases covering the distribution o f zooplankton in the Indian Ocean. Rao, the scientist-in-charge, has described a new research programme to study tropical zooplankton both in the open sea and the backwaters of Kerala. In 1976. a symposium on warm water zooplankton was held in Goa in which seventy-seven scientists, twenty from outside India, took part. It served as a milestone. indicating how far the centre had come since the biologists f i rs t sat down with their f ine brushes to learn what had been brought back in the expedition’s nets.

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Finding fish i s not enough 8

The nets yielded food for thought, particularly second thoughts on the part o f certain fisheries researchers who became convinced that the expedition's results were of more than academic interest. In their van was the late Wilbert McLeod Chapman, director of marine resources for the Ralston-Purina Company's Van Camp Sea Food Division in San Diego, California, and one of the bulwarks of the Advisory Committee on Marine Resources Research of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). H e was a big, greying chain-smoker who turned up at oceanographic meetings everywhere to keep them from straying too far from what he considered to be their main point. When the talk drifted into the vagaries o f the Gulf Stream countercurrent, Chapman could always be relied on to rasp a reminder that fishermen merely wanted oceanographers to tell them where they could find fish. This, he seldom failed to add, would be a big improvement over the usual procedure under which it was the fishermen who had to tel l the oceanographers where the fish had been found. As early as 1964, long before the last expedition ship had returned to her home moorings, Chapman was converting the findings of scientists into his own fisheries forecasts. acting on Chapman's First Law which proclaimed: 'Anyone asking a scientist to produce useful results in less than five years i s simply making h is request of the wrong type of man.' With none of the usual hemming, hawing or hedging, Chapman stuck out h is massive neck and wrote: 'The Western Arabian Sea from the Strait of Hormuz to Aden i s one of the richest and most underveloped areas o f the world ocean.' H e cited the results o f crude local fisheries that were using beach nets to take 100,000 tons of sardines every year. H e mentioned the fish reported by Discovery and Amon Bruun; he did not overlook the lack of harbours and trained people . 'My belief i s that there are lots of fish along the South Arabian coast and that they are going to be quite difficult to get at profitably.'

H e predicted that the maximum sustainable yield of Arabian Sea fisheries would run between 1 O and 20 million tons per year, compared to the 1 million tons a year that were being caught there at the time. Chapman was a fisherman, not a dreamer; he saw problems. Every year, he remarked, as the south-west monsoon advances, a layer of almost oxygen-free water swamps the Indian continental shelf, leaving it nearly free of life. Bottom l i fe i s pressed into a thinning surface layer of brackish water to the point where organisms may even school at the surface or are cast ashore to perish. Such a precarious balance in nature accounted for the instability of the catches of oil sardine and Indian mackerel. 'Villages hunger in years of srnall catches, and use the catch to fertilize coconut palm farms in years of heavy yield, while the Indian interior i s always short of animal protein.' Chapman thought the Arabian Sea could produce every year 6 million tons of sardine-like fish to be reduced to fishmeal. 3 million tons of assorted fish that could

82


be chilled for consumption, half a million tons of shrimps, lobster and crabs for export at luxury prices and another half a million tons of tuna, grouper, snapper and king mackerel also for export.

Another optimistic note was sounded. although in more muted tones, by the Atlas of the Arabian Sea,for Fisheries Oceanograpll produced by three Scripps'scientists: Warren Wooster, Milner B. Schaefer and Margaret K. Robinson. The atlas was prepared for FAO by the Institute of Marine Resources at the University of California and it leaned heavily on data collected by the International Indian Ocean Expedition. I t s authors concluded that one of the expedition's most important findings was the high rate of primary production and the large standing crop of phytoplankton and zooplankton in the Arabian Sea, especially on i t s western side. This they called 'one of the more productive parts of the world ocean'. Primary production there was as large as in the great upwelling areas off the coast of Peru or West Africa.

The atlas appeared in 1967. The following year, FAO at a meeting in i t s Rome headquarters set up an Indian Ocean Fishery Commission to co-ordinate an 'Indian Ocean Fishery Survey and Development Programme'. The commission recognized 'the great fishery potentials of the Indian Ocean as indicated by various direct and indirect sources of evidence, notably those results from the International Indian Ocean Expedition'.

Working independently in the United States, Snider concluded that fisheries had benefited from the expedition. H e carried out a study entitled: Do ûceamgraphic Expeditions f a v Of j , in which he found that almost $40 million, largely in international agency and public funds, had been invested or committed to fisheries development in the Indian Ocean following the expedition. India was one o f the leaders in the trend. almost quadrupling i t s fisheries budget for i t s fourth five-year plan starting in 1966. Countries from outside the Indian Ocean area were the f i rs t to make use of the new findings to conduct long-range fishery operations there. Within the region. too, change could be sensed. Snider found that shrimp and lobster fisheries were being opened along the lower Mozambique Channel. Fishermen from Mozambique and Madagascar changed trawling depths following observations of fish behaviour during the expedition. Off the east coast of India, fishermen were said to have made their traditional mesh size smaller on the basis of what the expedition had learned.

Nevertheless, the influence of the expedition on fisheries development in the region was another subject for debate. In a Bruun Memorial Lecture to the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in I 97 1. George Humphrey, former president of SCOR and later chairman of the commission, declared:

It i s clear that the Indian Ocean i s an important wor ld resource which must be used by man to a far greater degree. The principal use is, and will be. fisheries. This has already been realized by FAO which has established an Indian Ocean Fisheries Commission. . . . The situation needing remedial action i s that around the Indian Ocean live a thousand mill ion people with an annual protein deficit of 3 mil l ion tons. The fisheries now yield only 2.5 mil l ion tons. To [increase this yield] would require not simply the application of fisheries science or of oceanography, but also the use of economic planning and management on a large scale. Most difficult o f all. it would require goodwill among nations o n a global scale. It i s not surprising then that. despite what was said at i t s beginning. the expedition has not solved any fisheries problems nor has it led to increased rational exploitation of fisheries resources. What the expedition has done i s to provide an oceanographic basis for planning.

Humphrey referred h is audience to the conclusion drawn by an American fisheries authority, John C. Marr, who was then serving as leader of FAO's Indian Ocean Programme of which, as Marr said, Wib Chapman had been the 'informal originator'. In 197 I, Marr had studied the expedition's contribution to h is own science. H e wrote in World Fisheries Policy, published by the University of Washington Press in 1972:

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It is, I think, reasonable to inquire as to the impact o f the IIOE o n fishery development in the Indian Ocean, for as Panikkar (1 966) has said: ‘When the programs o f the International Indian Ocean Expedition were formulated, fisheries potential was used as an impressive argument to stimulate interest in the project in the Asian and African countries.’ And, I would add, in other parts o f the wor ld as well. Further, ’. . . the actual fisheries work accomplished during the expedition itself has been disappointingly small’.

This i s borne out by examination of the IIOE Collected Reprints (Unesco, 1965-69). Of the total of almost five hundred papers, only ten dealt with fisheries, and only another twenty-three dealt with organisms that were, or conceivably might be the objects of concern to fisheries even though the papers themselves were not fisheries-oriented. Thus, there may be disillusion with the IIOE, particularly within the Indian Ocean region. Marr continued:

Still, there are benefits to fishery development from the HOE. These may be categorized as follows, more or less in increasing order o f direct relevance to fisheries:

1 . The general store o f information about the Indian Ocean has been greatly increased. Some o f th is information ( in addition to that listed in item 4 below) will eventually prove to be o f relevance to fishery development, most likely in completely unexpected ways.

2. There i s a continuing interest in the Indian Ocean o n the part o f the wor ld marine science community, as a result o f which additions to knowledge about the Indian Ocean will continue to accrue.

3. There i s a heightened interest in marine science on the part of some. if not many, o f the Indian Ocean countries, which will also result in additions to knowledge about the Indian Ocean.

4. There i s a body o f information about such features, for example, as the distribution o f the upwelling-high productivity areas, the depth distribution o f the oxygen minimum. and the distribution and abundance o f f ish larvae, all o f which have rather obvious relationships to fishery development.

It has been the philosophy o f some that any increase in man’s knowledge and understanding o f the ocean i s bound to also increase man’s knowledge and understanding o f fishery resources in particular and, hence, to facilitate fishery development. In this general context, there i s no question but that the IIOE has contributed greatly, as I have indicated. In the specific context o f fishery development, however, and with the benefit of hindsight. I am left with the reservation that a much greater impact could have been achieved much more efficiently.

John Ryther and Edward Chin interpret the results somewhat differently: About half o f the Anton Bruun’s cruises had fisheries research as a major part o f their activities. . . . The results o f such fisheries studies do not often end LIP in the scientific literature, but they were nevertheless widely circulated among fisheries biologists and commercial fishing interests throughout the wor ld . . . [Concerning] fisheries systematics . . . thousands o f fish specimens [were] deposited in the Smithsonian and other institutions in the United States o f America. . . . Regarding the failure o f fisheries research to result in the development o f any fishery . . . it takes more than fisheries research to develop a fishery. Just locating an exploitable resource i s not sufficient. Fisheries research can do nothing about developing a fishery unless industry (both the harvesting and marketing sectors) gets involved. Another factor that enters into play are the eating habits o f the peoples involved.

Fisheries scientists, with the notable exception of Chapman, may have looked askance at the expedition’s results because there did not seem to be any direct link between the high productivity of plant plankton during the summer monsoon upwelling in the Arabian Sea and a large population of catchable fish. This contrasted with the situation off the Peruvian coast where the upwelling caused by the Humboldt Current provides grazing for millions of tons of anchovies. In his lecture, Humphrey touched on this dilemma and referred to the work of David Cushing, a British marine biologist who in 197 I tried to estimate f ish production on the basis of the expedition’s data on primary production and on zooplankton catches. Cushing, as Humphrey said, was ‘undismayed by the weakness

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o f the data and [made] imaginative allowances for that weakness'. H e calculated tertiary (or f ish and shellfish) production as 1 per cent o f the primary plant production and 1 O per cent o f the secondary or zooplankton production. However, the ocean does not work l ike a sausage factory where everything that goes in one end can be found coming out the other. Transfer o f energy from one level o f the food web to be next, Cushing found, i s not as efficient in coastal areas of high productivity as it i s in the open ocean. Humphrey interpreted h is data: 'If this narrowing of the gap between levels continues along the food web, and since man harvests at the higher levels, the relative attraction o f high primary production areas is weakened.'

Roy Jackson, a retired Deputy Director-General of FAO and former head of i t s Department of Fisheries, would go even further. In an interview in Seattle, he warned against expecting much o f fisheries in such areas. 'Every one o f the big fisheries l o w on the food chain has collapsed: the California sardine, the British Columbia herring. the Norwegian herring, the Peruvian anchovy.' As for the waters off Saudi Arabia and in the Red Sea, indigenous fishermen are now working there and he was not too optimistic about prospects o f bettering their yields. 'You could obliterate their livelihood and go bankrupt yourself in no time', he said. He found that, on the whole, there has been a marked increase in Indian Ocean catches, but he attributed this more to mechanization and a greater fishing effort than to the results o f research. Jackson echoed Chapman: 'I know o f no fishery developed by fisheries researchers.'

Since h i s retirement from FAO, he has served as a fisheries development consultant. Of a project to develop a fishery industry on the Somali coast, the scene o f that massive upwelling, he commented: There are eleven hundred miles of coastline without a harbour even for a forty-foot boat. A t one place where a fishing harbour could be built, a 250-mile road would be needed to link it to a market. One solution might be to use a factory ship and catcher boats in these waters.

Somalia was the scene o f an ambitious undertaking in 1976 to transform 15,000 nomads, driven from their territory in the northern and north-eastern parts o f the country by the great drought o f 1974-75, into fishermen on the coast. I t s story i s related by the country's Ministry o f Fisheries in a publication. The Insfam Fishemzerz uf Somalia, that illustrates what i s implied by such drastic changes in the way people get their living and in how they cope with life. Here i s another reason why, along the shores of the Indian Ocean and elsewhere, what appear to be obvious fisheries resources cannot be exploited overnight.

Scientists who have visited the region urge that thorough studies be made o f what i s actually available by way o f fish-particularly to small boats that cannot work far offshore in the major upwelling areas-and of the possible social and economic side- effects of settling large populations on the coast as fishermen.

The Somali approach was one o f careful acculturation. The nomad knows h is o w n surroundings; thanks to h is knowledge, he can survive where the city-dweller fears man- eating wolves or 'the flying snake that grazes at night with the help o f i t s rare and valuable jewel's bright light'. But the nomad has myths o f h is o w n about the sea. The publication explains: According to one o f these, the sea i s full o f all sorts o f animals including those that are found on land such as the sheep, goats, cattle, horses, lions, etc. But these are somehow different in shape from those found on the land. And although they are eatable yet most o f them are dangerous because they are man-eaters: a completely new and strange concept to the nomad. H o w can one eat the flesh o f a man-eating animal?

Moreover. the sea i s the home o f half-fish, half-human maidens (usually o f the Jinn). All coastal towns are supposed to be invested with beautiful Jinn maidens that ensnare those w h o walk about the isolated parts o f the town or along the coast after sunset. Being also Muslims as we are, the maidens are said to take the hapless men to their 'people' and there they have to marry

8 5


them. Such people are said to lead a double life: part as normal human being and the other part as Jinn. The Jinn maidens give their husbands whatever they may wish to have but woe to them if they dare to betray them or their people, the Jinn.

Against such a background, the pastoralist nomads who were resettled along the Indian Ocean began their fishermen’s training programme.

The nomads moved to three towns: Brava, Adale and Badey. At each town, the course o f instruction was the same, starting with ‘becoming friends with the sea’ and running through fishing technology, boat handling, fishing gear and engine operation. Gradually. the new seafarers were taught how to swim, first with leg and arm exercises on the beach and getting the feel o f the sea by sitting on the shore with their feet in the water. Seasickness had to be vanquished; when trainees returned from a short trip, they were given hot tea and bread to restore their spirits. The publication noted: ‘Yet another hurdle which the trainees in f ish processing had to overcome was its smell that proved to be so revolting to the nomadic nose. Some o f the trainees even fainted on their f i rs t day at work. As an incentive the ministry’s staff also provided them with tea, bread and sweets.’ Some had trouble eating fish, an unfamiliar item in the diet of a nomad herdsman. as exemplified in a Somali joke:

A pastoralist on a visi t with h is relatives at a coastal town noticed at lunchtime a whole f ish on a large plate and in amazement inquired: ‘And what i s that supposed to be?’

H i s kinsmen explained that it was a fried fish. part o f their lunch. The pastoralist said to them advisingly: ‘I would not mind eating it, but you must kill it first!’

The ministry publication related that the nomads were apt pupils as fishermen, almost too eager. This i s because of the nomad’s pride; he i s convinced that he can do anything that anyone else h is age can do. One morning in Adale. an instructor told his class: ‘The sea is so rough today that only the best swimmers can go fishing.’ One ofthe students thereupon jumped into the water and kept swimming out to sea until his instructors went after him with a boat and brought him back. H e had proved h is point.

There i s work for the fishermen o f Somalia. According to a report by Robert L. Payne, an FAO official who has served as leader ofthe Indian Ocean Programme, Somalia has purchased eleven trawlers and combination trawler-seiners to be operated by her own fishermen. At the same time, the country has licensed five Italian factory trawlers, big vessels each 50 metres long, 900 tons and of 2,300 horsepower, which f ish the area against payment o f a 25 per cent royalty.

Payne tells o f a steady increase in activity in the Arabian Sea based particularly on the results of a two-year survey carried out in 1975-76 by Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, operated jointly by FAO and Norway. and another survey made by a Soviet fisheries research vessel, Professor Mesyatsev. Such vessels are a far cry from the general-purpose research ships that sailed in the International Indian Ocean Expedition. Dr. Fridrjof Nansen, for example, i s equipped to hunt f ish acoustically and then trawl in promising areas. Her survey was a particularly useful follow-up to the expedition in that it identified specific concentrations o f harvestable species. Payne at FAO has reported on the results she achieved: A concentration o f demersal [bottom] and pelagic [open ocean] fishes exists of f the south coast of Pakistan. Another concentration o f larger dimensions, up to about one million tons. occurs in the Gulf o f Masira of f Oman. A third concentration i s in the waters o f the People‘s Democratic Republic o f Yemen and a fourth o f f the northeast corner o f Somalia.

In addition. the waters o f Sr i Lanka have a population o f small pelagic species and, most important o f all. a stock o f mesopelagic fishes up to 100 million tons has been located in the Arabian Sea and gulf o f Oman.

The finding o f th is last vast stock would apparently indicate to what use all that primary

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Finding fish i s no1 enough

production in the upwelling regions o f the Arabian Sea i s being put. These are mid-water animals, mostly myctophids or lantern fish, suitable for reduction to fishmeal rzther than for direct human consumption. DI-. FridrjofNansen has worked the area and made one trawl haul o f twenty tons per hour, but Payne warns that not enough work has been done as yet to conclude what to expect from an average haul. The development of the resource i s going forward. In 1979, Dr. FridtjofNmsen carried out a second survey to get a better idea of i t s size. Norway has agreed to fund the preparatory phase of a major project with FAO to test the commercial viability of harvesting and using this mesopelagic stock.

Elsewhere. the countries around the Indian Ocean are finally beginning to benefit from i t s biological wealth. Payne surveyed their initiatives and summarized them:

Pukisfun: A joint venture between the United Fishing Company o f Kuwait and the Pakistan government i s sending a fleet of some twenty 28-metre refrigerated trawlers to fish Pakistani waters and deliver their catch to a mother ship for disposition into the markets o f the region. In addition, a test fishing project for small pelagic species, using a suitable purse seiner. has been designed and presented to the European Economic Community and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. Should that project be successful, a locally-owned and operated purse seine fishery will result.

Ol7iUn: Since the end of 1977. three Korean fishing vessels have been fishing in Omani waters o n a 30 per cent royalty basis. In addition, the Oman government i s in the process of establishing the Oman National Fishing Company to provide the demersal and pelagic fishery with small shore- based vessels and to distribute the products domestically and in the region.

People’s Deniocrutic Republic o j Yeinen: The government purchased a 150-ton per day fishmeal reduction plant and erected it at Mukalla in 1976. It then purchased one purse seiner to supply the plant and found that the operation was satisfactory. It subsequently purchased a 500- ton-per-day capacity floating reduction plant and acquired a purse seiner fleet which n o w amounts to eight vessels. A n additional three are under construction in Japan. The government has also built t w o canneries and three cold storages and has arranged the artisanal fisheries into cooperatives. It has licensed both the Taiyo Fishing Company and the Ichiro Company o f Japan to catch cuttlefish and it has a joint venture with the USSR which operates seven SO-metre coastal factory trawlers dedicated mostly to the capture o f deep-water lobster.

The skipjack resources o f the western Indian Ocean region were tested beginning in October 1979 by a 50-metre modern Japanese purse seiner based in Mauritius which fished the waters o f Seychelles, Mauritius. Chagos Archipelago and Somalia. In November 1979. Seychelles took delivery o f the first o f a four-vessel nationally-owned skipjack pole-and-line fleet to be based at Mahé in the Seychelles.

The FAO Bay o f Bengal project sponsored b y Sweden has become active in the region. I t i s a comprehensive programme dedicated to harvesting the resources o f the area by artisanal fisheries. An integrated programme i s being executed for the artisanal fisheries o f Sri Lanka to harvest stocks identified there.

In addition, there are concentrated efforts being made in each country to improve the lot o f the artisanal fishermen by the traditional methods of improving their nets. motors, organizations. processing and distribution.

Wib Chapman’s ghost must be smiling.

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Hot holes in the Red Sea 9

O f all the tales o f the International Indian Ocean Expedition, none i s more wondrous than the story o f the hot holes on the bottom o f the Red Sea. Their discovery was completely unexpected: i t s benefits are almost incalculable. Geophysicists have gained a completely new view o f how oceans are being formed under their very eyes. The prospective economic returns demonstrate the danger of judging pure science on the basis o f immediate payoffs. One never knows what it will find.

The hot holes were explored by ships from several countries over a number o f years. Even before the expedition, oceanographers going through the Red Sea had occasionally observed a puzzling patch o f warm salty water near the bottom which they usually ascribed to faulty thermometers. What the thermometers read ran contrary to all the oceanographers had ever learned: nearly everywhere, the sea becomes colder with depth. The Swedish Albatross Expedition o f 1947-48 logged a temperature increase o f a few degrees at this spot, although it reported that i t s Red Sea cruise was 'uneventful'. In 1958, Woods Hole's old ketch. Atluiztis, found a similar occurrence o f suspiciously warm water and there the matter stood.

With the start of the International Indian Ocean Expedition, the Red Sea became a main highway for research vessels as they left the Suez Canal. Even though i s was not one o f their main objectives, they made routine hydrographic casts there. In 1963, as we have already noted, A tfarztis II and Discovery reported abnormally warm temperatures near the bottom. The following year, Discovery was en route to Aden when her scientists paused for a more thorough investigation. The results were reported in Oceanzn by Swallow:

We were expecting something unusual on Discovery station 5580 on September 1 I. 1964. It was near 2 I O N. in the middle ofthe Red Sea, very close to the place where both the Atlantis in 1958 and Atlantis II in 1963 had found abnormally hot salty water near the bottom. We had anchored a radar buoy in water about 2200 meters deep, and were putting down a closely-spaced cast o f water bottles. Approaching the bottom. the one-second pinger on the wire below the bottles had gone out o f step and then re-synchronized i tsel f with the echo-sounder-a sure sign (with that particular pinger) that it had gone through a sudden change o f temperature. But even then we found it hard to believe the thermometers when the bottles came up. A l l quite normal. around 22 O C . to within 200 meters o f the bottom, then 26 "C. then both thermometers off-scale (over 35 "Cl, then again both protected thermometers off-scale but the unprotected showing 58 "C. And so on. We did a second dip using only 60" unprotected thermometers on the deeper bottles-the only means we had o f measuring the high temperature o f the bottom water, which we found after correction to be about 44.3 O C . This was far in excess of the 25.8 O C found previously and which itself had seemed abnormally high.

Then the salinity turned out to be equally surprising. When water was being drawn from bottles that had been near the bottom, it seemed to run out more slowly than usual, and any that

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Hot holes in the Red Sea

got spilt on deck immediately dried up, leaving a thick white patch o f crystals. The salinometer naturally refused to balance when offered a sample o f the bottom water undiluted; it had to be broken down to one-eighth concentration by volume before the salinometer would come on scale at all. So it looked as if the 'salinity' was about 320 parts per thousand but, o f course, the dilution should properly be calculated by weight instead o f by volume. When that was done, the 'salinity' turned out to be 'only' 27 I parts per thousand (the average surface salinity in the Red Sea i s about 38-40 parts per thousand, while the bottom salinity i s generally about 40.5 parts per thousand).

We brought back a few liters ofthis unusual liquid, and further analyses are going on. It i s s t i l l too early to say how so much salt came to be there, but the most likely process seems to be solution o f a salt deposit on the sea floor.

When the new German Meteor reoccupied that station about two months after the Discovety, Professor G. Dietrich noticed that the boundary between the normal deep Red Sea water and the hot salty water showed up as a reflecting layer on the echo-sounder. On looking at our o w n sounding records to follow up his observations. we found nothing at all in the small basin where we took our samples, but could see three separate reflecting horizons at about the right depth in the other basin. three miles to the north.

So perhaps there i s hot salty water iii both holes and, in the northern one. the changes of density are abrupt enough to give clear reflections. . . . And then it seems possible that th is may be a natural example o f a kind o f convection current described by Messrs. Turner and Stommel, which occurs when water wi th a stable salinity gradient i s heated from below.

Doubtless the Meteor's observations will make the situation much clearer. Already that particular spot in the Red Sea seems to have become a kind o f unofficial reference station. Quite apart from the curiosity o f the water. it makes a useful exercise in putting bottles close to the bottom and an exercise in navigation.

That same issue of Oceanzis carried an article by Paul Fye who added to Discoverj, '~ findings: Since Dr. Swallow's article was written. additional information has been obtained by the Atlantis /I in February [ I9651 e n route to the Indian Ocean with Mr. A. R. Miller as chief scientist.

The results o f this v is i t are even more exciting than before. By now these areas in the middle o f the Red Sea are so interesting scientifically that they are being referred to as the Atlantis II and Discovery Deeps. . . . A t the Atlantis II Deep, accurate measurements o f temperature showed the amazingly high value o f 55.9 OC. . . . The water in both holes i s unusually acid: Atlantis II Deep showed a pH of 5.5. and Discovery Deep a pH o f 6.2 compared to about pH 8 for mean ocean water. Both deeps are anaerobic judged by the absence o f free oxygen and the presence o f heavy metals in their fully reduced stage.

The most interesting information just brought back from the Atlantis II was obtained by sediment cores from the bottom and the sides o f these deeps. The material. . . i s principally composed of iron oxides, anhydrite. and amorphous silica. The X-ray patterns also show small amounts of sphalerite. Samples of water from the lower regions o f these deeps have a chemical content which i s equally informative. Namely, whereas sodium, calcium, potassium and chloride are about ten times the concentration o f ordinary sea water, the magnesium, sulfate and bicarbonate contents are significantly lower than in ocean water. The most important anomaly i s the enrichment in iron, manganese and silica which i s a few hundred to a few thousand times the concentration found in the open ocean.

Basic questions are raised concerning ( 1 ) the origin o f these hot brines; (2) the high concentration o f iron. manganese and silica in the aqueous phase; and ( 3 ) the chemical relationship between the hot waters and the deposition of silica, anhydrite and heavy metals.

Surely this i s a major scientific discovery which has resulted from distinguished cooperation among laboratories o f several nations. N o doubt we wi l l want to return to study this brew of interesting chemicals in the near future.

I t was Miller and Egon Degens aboard Atlantis II who put a corer down on a l ine into the deeps. I t brought up, so Degens and David Ross wrote in Oceantrs, 'a black ooze which, on f i rs t sight, had the physical appearance of tar and was too hot to touch'. When it cooled, they saw that i s was more l ike a f ine black face powder. They wanted to learn more about

89


it, but their shipboard chemical laboratory was equipped to handle only sea water. Expedients had to be used: peroxide from the sick bay, sulphur from the darkroom (hypo contains thiosulphate), a stainless steel cauldron from the galley while the cook wasn't looking. At Aden, the scientists landed and they did a more thorough job o f analysis in the laboratory of a small school.

In 1966, the National Science Foundation gave Woods Hole a grant o f $1 67,000 to study the hot holes thoroughly, not jus t as a stopover on the way to the Indian Ocean. That autumn, one o f the institution's ships, Chain, criss-crossed the area dozens o f times. taking sixty cores. On board were American, British, German and Swedish scientists. John Hunt, a chemist at Woods Hole, was Co-chief scientist for part of the cruise. 'People kept working until they dropped into bed', he once said. 'We knew this was our only chance. W e weren't off Cape Cod'. Chain discovered and gave her name to another hot hole but spent most of her time over the Atlantis II Deep. the largest o f the three that had been found. It i s thirteen kilometres long and five kilometres wide.

Cores taken on that cruise bore no resemblance to the usual drab mud that geologists bring up from the bottom. Degens and Ross thought they were among the most colourful sediments sediments that had ever emerged from the sea. In Oceanus, they wrote:

The individual layers are well-defined even down to layers o f less than one millimeter. The color variation i s fantastic; all shades of white, black, red. green. blue or yellow can be observed. Perhaps some o f the more colorfiil Indian sand paintings and Mexican rugs faintly match these sediments in the variation and intensity of their colors.

The sediments, once they had been dried, were found to consist of 'approximately 90 per cent of heavy metal oxides and sulphides, o f which the most abundant ones are those of iron. manganese, zinc and copper'. Eight o f the samples cored by Chain were analysed by F. T. Manheim o f the United States Geological Survey and J. L. Bischoff at Woods Hole for their economic value. This was estimated in 1968 dollars at a total $2.3 billion, including $780 million in zinc, $I,] O0 million in copper. $280 million in silver and $50 million in gold. While the figures are conservative in terms o f present-day values, they do not cover the cost o f raising and refining the sediments.

Curiosity drove Woods Hole back to the Red Sea. In 1 97 1, Chain surveyed the area of the hot holes again. Ross reported in Science that the temperature o f the lower layer in the Atlantis II Deep had risen from 56.5 to 59.2 O C during the fifty-two months between the two investigations. The thickness o f this layer had increased by 7 metres which, Ross calculated, represented an incoming f low o f hot salty water at the rate o f 2.6 cubic metres per second, 200 times the discharge o f Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park in the United States. Where the water was coming from was sti l l a matter of speculation. Ross discounted one theory that the brine originated some 1,000 kilometres to the south at the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, for this would mean a 'complicated plumbing system for it to bypass or transit the numerous fracture zones between the strait and the known brine areas'. On the contrary, he assumed a more local source and stated: 'The relationship of the hot brine deposits to recent sea-floor spreading in the Red Sea i s compelling.'

In 1972, the drillship Glomar Challenger worked around the hot holes and found thick layers of salt deposits underlying the Red Sea. This led Ross and h is co-workers on board to conclude that other brine areas should be present in the Red Sea and, in fact, three more were discovered. One was named Glomar Challenger Deep; the two others were found by Valdivia, a German research vessel working in the Red Sea under contract to the Preussag Mining Company. She was using sophisticated navigation and echo sounding systems to detect brine layers by acoustic reflection and she had located Valdivia Deep and Suakin Deep. Valdivia was to find thirteen new brine pools near the central rift valley in the Red Sea. Writing in Oceanus in 1979, Ross was able to explain their origin at last:

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Hot holes in the Red Seti

In general. the pools result from hot. very salty (therefore dense) water being discharged onto the sea floor: if they enter into a closed depression, the waters can accumulate, forming a pool. The process i s similar to the discoveries o f hot waters coming from the central rift o f the East Pacific Rise near the Galapagos and of f Mexico. The key difference i s that the Red Sea water i s denser than sea water and thus accumulates along the bottom, whereas in the Pacific the water dissipates due to mixing because it i s less dense than normal sea water.

Ross remarked that the water in the At lant is Il Deep is eight t imes m o r e saline than sea water but this i s not what the oceanographer calls 'salinity' because the ratio of the major ions in the hot brines is not the same as sea water. A s far as the temperature i s concerned, it is sti l i r is ing but not as fast as in the ear ly 1970s. Ross w e n t back to the At lant is II Deep in 1 977, his fourth trip there in eleven years and found the temperature of the l o w e r layer to be 6 1.3 "C. instead of the 64 "C. that would have been observed if the temperature had gone on r is ing at the old rate. T h e height of the l o w e r layer w e n t up twenty-f ive metres in ninety-seven months. a m u c h jasfer increase than previously seen. This led Ross to conclude that n e w water is coming into the deep at tw ice the previous rate but at a l o w e r temperature. only 6 9 "C instead of 104 "C. H e also th inks that water from the At lant is II Deep has over f lowed its s i l l to spread into the nearby Chain and Discovery Deeps.

T h e R e d Sea hot holes studies lent weight to a theory that hot springs m i g h t be detected in other mid-ocean r i f ts where spreading is taking place. In 1 977. plumes of water at 20 O C were found 2.500 metres down on the Galapagos Ridge in the Pacific and a w ide range of un ique mar ine animals was seen to be thriving there by observers in Alvin. W o o d s Hole's research submersible. Then, in 1979, the search m o v e d to the East Pacific Rise, a spreading centre near the mouth of the Gulf of California. There, in the words of Susan West, a Science Neii1s wr i ter , oceanographers found 'angry- looking superheated geysers-called smokers-that made the Galapagos Rift vents look l i ke tepid sprinklers. Not only was the gushing water about 300 "C hotter (the first attempt to measure the water temperature melted Alvin's heat probe), but around the chimneys lay mounds of minerals inc lud ing copper, iron, zinc and sulphur with lesser amounts of cobalt, lead. silver and cadmium'. And so, investigations continue along the l i ne that began w h e n Swal low opened h i s Nansen bottle on the deck of Discover-v and the water that ran out dr ied into th ick wh i te crystals.

T h e economic aspects may be equal ly far-reaching. As Ross points out in his Oceanus article, the deposit of metal-r ich sediments lies almost equidistant from Saudi Arabia and Sudan and the two countries have fo rmed a Joint R e d Sea Commiss ion to explore and work them. It was this commission that contracted with Preussag to survey the reg ion with Valdivia.

Accord ing to Ross, recent reports in trade publications indicate that the mining of these deposits may occur in the very near fu ture and, in fact, the Arab Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization has already expressed concern about the effect of mining waste on R e d Sea mar ine l ife. Ross states that two companies in the Federal Republic of Germany

have recently developed and tested a system that could be used to recover the heavy-metal r ich sediments from the Atlantis 11 Deep. . . . Their system uses a drill string with a head containing a vibrating sieve and three high-pressure water jets. When it i s in place, the sediment will be loosened by the vibration of the sieve and the water jets. The 'fluidized' sediment i s then sucked up through the sieve to the surface ship.

This system has been successfully tested in several shallow water environments and plans apparently are to use it in the Red Sea in the near future. It n o w looks like the Red Sea heavy metal deposit may be the f i rst deposit to be mined from the deep sea-even before the fabled manganese nodules.

91

A n e w scientific seapower 10

The value of these deposits, if they are ever fully exploited, would cover the cost of the International Indian Ocean Expedition many times over, although it would be far-fetched to count such a speculation among the expedition’s results. These are much harder to quantify by the standards of the marketplace. In the main, they represent contributions to the store of knowledge in the marine sciences, whether through the atlases already mentioned, the symposia conducted to discuss i t s findings, or the eight volumes of collected reprints of papers arising from the expedition (these have been published by Unesco with an index compiled by the German Hydrographic Institute in Hamburg). Some of the findings in these papers were based on extraordinary insights and blazed a trail that has led far beyond the expedition’s original aims; others might be of lesser importance.

What is least debatable is the progress the expedition made towards one of i ts f i rs t goals: the spread of oceanography in the area where it worked. Thailand and Indonesia on the eastern rim of the Indian Ocean took part and now have set up their own institutions to carry on marine research. This was the course followed by Pakistan where oceanographic studies began at the University of Karachi in 1959. The following year, Zulfiquar, on assignment from the Pakistan Navy. went on her f irst cruise from Karachi to the Bay of Bengal with S. M. Haq as chief scientist. She worked throughout the expedition: data came in as well from foreign ships and from Pakistanis who sailed as Unesco Shipboard Fellows on several of these ships. Thus began a process that led in 1971 to the establishment under Haq at Karachi of the Federal Institute of Marine Biology as a centre of excellence for scientists working toward their Ph.D. degrees. Seeking to promote fundamental advanced research in the northern Arabian Sea, it has also taken on such practical matters as the fouling by marine organisms of the cooling system of a nuclear power plant at Karachi. Other branches of oceanography have moved ahead, particularly fisheries research with the help of two new survey vessels built in Pakistan. and plans are being made for a national institute of oceanography.

As might be expected because of i t s size and considerable involvement in the expedition, India soon made a commitment to the marine sciences. The National Institute of Oceanography opened there in 1966 in Delhi with N. K. Panikkar as i t s f i rst director. Since 1969, it has been located at Dona Paula, seven kilometres from Panaji, the capital of Goa on the west coast of India. I t s total staff under Qasim‘s direction numbers 450: 300 in Goa and the others at regional centres in Cochin. Bombay and Waltair.

The institute operates Gaidzani, India’s f i rs t oceanographic research vessel and one of the biggest of her type stationed permanently in the Indian Ocean. Built in Scotland in

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A new scientific seapower

1965 as a hopper barge for dredging work. she was converted for research in india f ive years later and turned over to the institute in 1976. She displaces 1.900 tons and can accommodate nineteen scientists and a c rew of forty-five. On board, she has four laboratories. In an in terv iew with a Unesco wri ter . Pierrette Posmowski, Qasim remarked in I980 that the ship had spent 850 days at sea during the previous four years.

She has been a great help to us in collecting data from all over the region. She has also done some sponsored work for the Oil and Natural Gas Commission in India to survey pipeline routes and develop offshore oilfields. We not only look after the ship as a custodian but we provide opportunities for about twenty other Indian organizations to come and make use o f her. During those four years, thousands o f scientists have worked on board.

Besides Gclveslzani, whose name means ‘investigator’ in Sanskrit, the institute has three smaller boats for surveys inshore and on estuaries. M u c h of i ts activity i s concerned with coastal development programmes, not a surprising emphasis in a count ry industr ia l iz ing at India‘s pace. The institute has been consulted in the building of offshore oil terminals, the laying of pipelines for oil and sewage, the improvement of navigation in estuaries and a feasibility study for a nuclear p o w e r station 011 the coast. Dr. V. V. R. Varadachari. i ts deputy director and head of i ts physical oceanography division, told of requests from industries along the Indian coastline:

They want help l o determine suitable discharge points for treated effluents from their factories. What we do i s study the nearshore currents and the dispersion pattern. then suggest a suitable area very close to the coast where the material discharged will be quickly dispersed so that there will not be any long-term effects.

Varadachari mentioned studies of beach erosion along the Kerala coast near Cochin, another economic factor but not near ly as important as the sponsored research that the institute does for the Oil and Natural Gas Commission. H e explained:

This i s not prospecting. The commission required several studies in laying their pipelines to bring oi l from the drill ing areas to the coast. One o f these i s Bombay High. about one hundred and sixty kilometres from Bombay. There, the coinmission needed to know physical oceanographic factors l ike currents. waves and temperature distribution. It also had to learn the chemical nature of the waters. the type o f sea bottom, sediment conditions. the engineering properties of the sediments. . . . This i s teamwork, involving physical oceanography. engineering and chemistry.

Here, perhaps. the inf luence of the expedi t ion has been felt. As Qasim put i t

We started our oceanography in an organized way in 1962 when the International Indian Ocean Expedition was in i ts beginnings. It ended in 1965 and, in 1966, this institute came into existence. I think our major achievement has been the forming o f a team o f trained personnel. scientists who can do different jobs at sea. This has not been very easy because one must have ships, one must have proper equipment. one must acquire expertise. Once this expertise i s established and the technology developed, then w e can use this technology for the welfare of the people.

Th is would seem to be the case of the institute’s chemistry division. Besides the usual study of nutrients in the sea and the chemical aspects of pollution, it is seeking to develop n e w drugs. Varadachari explained:

W e have been trying to learn the potential for drugs by studying various forms o f plankton l i fe and other organisms to see if they are toxic. W e have been looking mainly at sponges. corals, seaweeds and plankton. From corals, w e can get some components which can be used in the preparation o f anti-fertility drugs. In the seaweeds. there are compounds that can be used as analgesics and to treat hypertension.

Occupied though it may be with applied research, the institute has been able to join large internat ional efforts. In 1 973. its scientists participated in ISMEX, the Indo-Soviet

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monsoon experiment and, six years later, it made a contribution to MONEX, the Monsoon Experiment, for which India budgeted 250 million rupees. Varadachari took a great deal of satisfaction in this work. H e considers that one of the principal achievements of the International Indian Ocean Expedition was the relationship it established between the upwelling of very cold water off the Somali coast to chill the air over the northern Arabian Sea and the variations from year to year in the strength of the monsoon. The institute takes part in the world flow of information about these and other marine phenomena. It has published some 1,000 papers, reports, charts and books and it issues a quarterly journal. A t the same time, i t s library receives 300 journals every year.

The institute i s kept busy with the problems that arise along India's 6,000 kilometres of coastline. Oil pollution i s one, especially in the Arabian Sea on the tanker route from the Gulf to Eastern Asia and Japan. Qasim remarked that the institute monitors that area and contributes i t s data to the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in Paris which i s trying to put together a world picture of oil pollution. The situation became acute in I 976 and 1977 when many beaches were covered with tar washed up fromthe sea. Since then, there has been less tar on the beaches and Qasim thinks the improvement i s the result of the institute's efforts that had led to warnings by the Indian Government.

Every division at the institute leans toward applications of oceanography. Ram Barghava, who heads i t s planning and data division. started as a biologist aboard Kistna, the Indian Navy frigate that worked in the expedition. H e now has data from 1 1,000 stations in the Indian Ocean and an Indian-built computer to process the information and help get it out to users. On Kistna, he was among those who worked with the Indian Ocean Standard N e t to collect zooplankton samples for the biological centre at Cochin. During the expedition, a large number of fish eggs and larvae was found in the Bay of Bengal, previously considered much poorer than the Arabian Sea, and recent surveys indicate good fishing grounds there. They fit into the study of the food chain in the sea by the biology division at the institute. Barghava said:

W e look at the marine food chain from the production o f l iving matter up to the tertiary level, that is, the fish. We are trying to locate new fishing grounds, to learn when and where fish are available. W e have been able to find some areas that look promising for fisheries near Pondicherry. then near the Laccadive Islands and of f Gujurat on the west coast.

Whatever w e get from the sea i s not enough for our purposes. Recently. we have taken up aquaculture to augment our supply o f marine food and we have developed techniques for the rope culture o f mussels. We anchor rafts and hang ropes from them. Then we collect the spats of the mussels from their natural grounds and attach them to the ropes. These experiments have been done near Dona Paula in Goa where we have been able to control the environment. and particularly the water temperature to some extent. With this technique, we have been able to get a very good yield o f mussels.

At Cochin, marine scientists have examined the local practice of growing rice with f ish or shrimp in the same field. As Barghava explained, a crop of rice i s grown in the paddy fields which are then used to raise f ish or shrimp until the next crop i s planted. On high tide, water i s le t into the fields; with it comes the spawn of the shrimp. The animal thrive on the nutrients lef t over from the paddy.

W e have tried to improve the traditional paddy cum fish culture by different techniques, whether by sorting the young ones, by feeding or by regulating the currents and tides in the paddy fields. W e have been able to sort at the appropriate times so that w e can get an animal o f our choice in good yield.

Geologists at the institute, looking for new resources, have covered the continental shelf along the Indian coast, bringing certain areas into detailed focus. A t one of these sites off Ratnagiri, rich deposits of iron and ilmenite, a source of titanium, have been found.

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A new scientific seapower

Qasim thinks that, in the future, h is inst i tute will put more emphasis on geophysical surveys o f the continental shelf:

We are making a very intensive effort to find offshore o i l deposits and we have been successfd. The other major area o f thrust would be in ocean engineering: the development o f technology for offshore o i l platforms, laying submarine pipelines and improving harbour oil terminals. I think, too. that there will be greater stress on indigenous instrumentation so that we can develop our o w n instrun~ents specific to our needs which we can repair very easily.

The National Institute o f Oceanography at Goa illustrates how, by a very roundabout route, the International Indian Ocean Expedition finally did succeed in helping the populations around the shores o f the Indian Ocean or, at least, in giving them a chance to help themselves. Bob Fisher at Scripps recalls how, in 1966. he helped teach a four-week Unesco training course in Bombay:

Among the twenty-five or so Indian, Malaysian, Pakistani and Indonesian students were the people who today hold considerable power in their countries' marine agencies and institutions. Several of them attended the U.S.-India Workshop at Goa in November 1978. I encountered another. an Indonesian, in the Santiago airport not long ago: he was in Chile for a tsunami conference. As a plank-holder in the expedition, I have no apologies for i t s effects. Certainly it 's true that we happy few went adventuring: it i s also true that w e did so responsibly.

None o f th is was planned, but strict adherence to rigid plans prepared in advance had never been the wish or the intention of t h e expedition's organizers. It was an extraordinary chapter in the annals of exploratory oceanography. Hindsight shows that the expedition drew the curtain on an era when research ships could range over huge expanses o f the sea on what were still voyages o f discovery. Since then, and almost immediately after the expedition's close, other major international undertakings have been oriented much more towards the study of specific phenomena or the carrying out of clearly defined experiments, such as the Somali Current operation during MONEX in 1979.

Times have changed. Oceanographic institutions have not escaped the general shrinking o f budgets for science. Their directors can only look back wistfLdly on how their predecessors were able to use the expedition to get funds and ships. The expedition came at a time when governments quite unjustifiably expected immediate short-term results from science; since then, they have realized that this cannot be, so administrators are required to keep a much tighter hand on the purse strings.

The ocean i s not the same politically. For reasons that are not difficult to understand. economic boundaries have been drawn far outside the old three-mile limit beyond which freedom o f the seas had reigned. In some cases, research suffers: in others. territorial restrictions have led to mutually beneficial arrangements between oceanographers and countries in whose waters they are working. The establishment o f new research institutions should bring on more such arrangements. The expedition showed that the oceans are indivisible from the scientist's viewpoint and that research work there cannot take note o f political boundaries if it i s to be meaningful. I t also demonstrated how coastal states can take action to share some of the benefits of marine science once reserved to the handful o f countries conducting research.

Nevertheless, it i s no longer possible for a small number of scientists endowed with a large amount of imagination to mount an international enterprise on the scale o f the expedition. That has been one o f our main purposes: to show how. at a singular moment, such a group was able to get the International Indian Ocean Expedition out to sea. At the same time, we have tried to describe the differences that arose with the interplay of scientific interests. Often, these differences were resolved or, at any rate, smoothed over

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by the work that was later performed. Finally, we have sought to give the reader an image o f how oceanographers worked at sea at the t ime of the expedition.

This book does not purport to be a full history o f the expedition for only a sampling could be made of those who participated. Since, by design, there was no centralized management body, after i t s initial stages, but only loose co-ordination from the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in Paris, the traces of the expedition are not to be found at a single source but l i e scattered in the archives of institutions the world over. I t i s hoped the reader will forgive these failings. Somehow, the story of the International Indian Ocean Expedition had to be related before all i t s living memories faded. There will never be another one.

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[I ] SC.SO/D.l 13/..\

assault on the largest unknown; the international...

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