History of Marine Science

Unit 2

Voyaging

• Traveling for a specific purpose• First navigation was by celestial navigation-

finding one’s position in reference to heavenly bodies.

• First Voyages– 4000 BC Egyptians organize commerce on Nile– 800 BC first cartographers make ocean charts

Library at Alexandria in Egypt• First university• Housed scrolls copied by law off ships that harbored.• Eratosthenes

– Librarian whom calculated circumference of Earth.– Realized if the sun was directly over one place (shining straight down), and

over another place (shining at an angle) then the Earth must be curved– Estimated Earth size within 8% of true value.– Developed longitude and latitude

• present day longitude and latitude was developed by Hipparchus in 120 BC • Hypatia

– Last librarian– First woman recognized as mathematician, philosopher, and scientist – Murdered– library burned because of religious opposition to knowledge-Incalculable loss

Research Vessels• Submersibles

– small underwater vehicles• ROV

– remotely operated vehicle• Bathysphere

–lowered by a cable from a ship• Drilling ships

– take sediment cores• Floating and Fixed platforms (FLIP – floating

instrument platform) -gather data like temperature, salinity, density, and

weather patterns

bathysphere

ROV

submersible

Drilling shipFixed platform

Floating platform

Other Research Instruments

• Airplanes• Satellites

– SEASAT: 1st satellite dedicated to ocean studies

• Echosounding• Underwater cameras• Side scan sonar

– great for sunken ships

Egyptian Technology• The Egyptians established sea trade throughout the

Indian Ocean as early as 2300 B.C.

• ca 1938 - 1756 B.C. built the canal, the Isthmus of Suez, to navigate ships across land.

• It operated until 775 A.D.

http://search.eb.com.ezproxy.uhd.edu/eb/article-22787

The Phoenicians• Phoenicians: (from the Middle East)

– Sailed around Africa in 590 B.C.

A stone carving from the 1st century AD shows the kind of ship that the Phoenicians used on the Mediterranean Sea

The Greeks• Greeks

– Developed trade routes throughout the Mediterranean and expanded their empire under Alexander the Great

• Herodotus (a Greek)– published accurate map of Mediterranean region, ca 450 B.C.– Alexander the Great, 336 B.C.

http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/Ancientimages/109.JPEG

The Arabs• ca 200 B.C Islamic and Arab Merchants

– Experienced sailors– traded throughout the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans.

• They are believed to have invented the lateen sail– triangular sail important in early navigation.

http://search.eb.com

.ezproxy.uhd.edu/eb/art-12539/A-

lateen-rigged-ship-used-by-Arab-merchants

The Greeks• 200 B.C. Eratosthenes

– mathematically calculated the circumference of the Earth to be 40,000 km.

• It actually is 40,032 km.• 2,200 years ago his math was good enough to be off only

32 km!•Eratosthenes knew that at noon on the summer solstice the Sun is directly overhead at Syene (a city)•He also knew the distance between Syene and Alexandria (another city)•combined with his measurement of the solar angle a between the Sun and the vertical, he was able to calculate Earth's circumference.

From Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Science Voyaging: Middle Ages

• 900 A.D. The Vikings crossed the North Atlantic to colonize Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland– using the North Star to determine latitude

Exhumed Viking ship; Viking Ship Museum, Oslo, Norway.

Science Voyaging: 15th and 16th Centuries

• Chinese– Sailed to influence and impress their neighbors.

• 1492 Columbus– Sailing for Spain, sailed the Atlantic and “discovered” the America’s.

• 1497 Vasco da Gama– Sailing for Portugal, sailed around Africa from Portugal to India to

establish trade routes.

• Europeans searched for the Northwest passage through northern Canada to trade with Asia; explored the Artic.

Science Voyaging16th Century• 1519 - Portuguese explorer

Ferdinand Magellan– the 1st European expedition

to circumnavigate the world.– 237 men began the voyage;

18 returned. – Magellan actually died

before the journey was finished, but his crew returned in 1522.

http://www.solarnavigator.net/history/explorers_history/ferdinand_magellan_charcoal_fur_robe.jpg

Science Voyaging 18th Century

• John Harrison in 1728 developed the first chonometer. – This was a timepiece governed by a spring instead of a

pendulum– allowed longitude to be known– 4 are still located in Greenwich, England, which is the 0

meridian. – If your noon is before Greenwich noon then you are to the

east, if your noon is after Greenwich then you are to the west.

– Earth rotates 15 / hr (3 hours would be a 45 ). – Latitude can be known by stars (angle between your eyes,

horizon and north star).

• 1762 American Ben Franklin– created a chart of the Gulf

Stream.– The Gulf Stream gives the US

its warm climate, bringing warm water north from the equator.

Science Voyaging 18th Century

• 1768 James Cook of the British Royal Navy

– First marine scientist – charted New Zealand, many islands,

and the Great Barrier Reef of Australia sailing upon the HMS Endeavor.

– Recorded and successfully interpreted natural history, anthropology, and oceanography with accuracy and thoroughness.

– Insisted on cleanliness and made his men eat limes to ward off scurvy (Vitamin C deficiency)

Science Voyaging 18th Century

• 1831 Charles Darwin – HMS Beagle • Explored Galopagos

Islands• led to the origin of

species and the modern theories of evolution.

http://uk.gizmodo.com/charles_darwin_l.jpg

Science Voyaging 19th Century

• 1838 US began the US Exploring Expedition with the unpopular Lt. Charles Wilkes– Expedition was to gain knowledge and disprove

theory that Earth was hollow and there were holes in the poles.

– Information obtained made up 19 volumes of maps, text, and illustrations.

• 1840 Matthew Maury of US Navy – Father of Oceanography– used sounding with a weighted line to discover

the MidAtlantic Ridge, a hidden range of underwater mountains

– Made charts and sailing directions– 1855 published the Physical Geography of the

Sea– Monument in Richmond, VA

Science Voyaging 19th Century

Science Voyaging19th Century

• 1872-1876 Charles Wyville Thomson and John Murray (who coined the term oceanography) – set out on famous HMS Challenger Expedition for British– Took samples and disproved theory that there were no organisms

below 1,800 feet due to pressure and lack of light. – Discovered 4,727 new species, tested water, made soundings, 151

trawls, currents, meteorology, sediments, and charted reefs. – The first pure oceanographic investigation that stimulated the

science of marine biology. – Complied a 50 volume set of information still used today

• gathered more data in its time than all other data to date.– Expedition is also still ongoing today and is considered the first

“only for science expedition”– this voyage that discovered the world’s deepest ocean

trench, the Marianas Trench, now sometimes called the Challenger Deep.

Science Voyaging19th Century

• The map below shows the route of HMS Challenger (in red); the expedition lasted 1,000 days and covered more than 68,000 nautical miles.

• 1895 Fridtjof Nansen – studied the polar oceans aboard the Fram, a ship

built to withstand crushing ice – confirmed the relationship between whales and

plankton- from a whaling stand point

Science Voyaging20th Century

• 1898 John Holland invents 1st gas engine/battery powered submarine – bought by US government in 1900. – The world wars were the catalyst for

US oceanographic research

• Development of technology including electronic equipment, deep sea drilling programs, (1916) SONAR, use of GPS (global positioning system) and satellites.

Science Voyaging20th Century

• 1914 British explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton aboard the Endurance– pursues a dream of crossing Antarctica on foot by way

of the South Pole. • 1925 German Meteor Expedition

– the first to use echo sounding (depth and contour) to discover that the ocean was rugged, not flat as thought.

• 1943 Jacque Cousteau and Emil Gagnan – invent the “aqualung”

Science Voyaging20th Century

• 1960 Jacque Piccard and Don Walsch in the US Trieste bathyscaphe (small submarine)– descend 35,801 ft. into the

deepest part of the ocean within the Marianas trench

– NO ONE HAS BEEN BACK SINCE!

".... I saw a wonderful thing. Lying on the bottom just beneath us was some type of flatfish… Even as I saw him, his two round eyes on top of his head spied us … Why should he have eyes? Merely to see phosphorescence?...Here, in an instant, was the answer that biologists had asked for the decades. Could life exist in the greatest depths of the ocean? It could!” - J. Picard

Science Voyaging20th Century

• 1962 Alvin – Designed by Woods Hole

Oceanographic Institute – has traveled around the

world completing 4,162 dives.

– has mechanical arms and in 1966 helped to locate a H-bomb that was lost in the Mediterranean Sea.

– In 1979 discovered black smokers on the sea floor.

• “Black Smokers" are named for the soot-like appearance of the ejected material billowing out of the "chimneys".

• Super-heated water from the Earth’s crust with very high concentrations of dissolved minerals. • As the super-heated water meets the very cold ocean-bottom water, the dissolved minerals

precipitate out and settle onto the rock around them.• This causes the chimneys to grow in height over time.

Science Voyaging20th Century

• 1968 Glomar Challenger – confirmed evidence of seafloor spreading and

plate tectonics from core drilling samples.

Science Voyaging20th Century

• 1985 JASON (a satellite)– found and documented

the wreck of the Titanic.• 1989 - Japan launched

the Shinkai 6500 - can carry a crew without a

tether (rope) up to 21,414 ft deep into the ocean (a world record).

Science Voyaging21st Century

• In 2006, a Chinese mineral company (COMRA) designed a craft to reach 23,000 ft

Conclusion• The ocean represents the Earth’s

last frontier for exploration and the key to understanding the future of our planet.

• The human race depends on the life and sustainability of the ocean for economic, biological, and environmental stability.

• The world of Aquatic science is ever reaching for new discoveries in this blue realm.