The Progressive Exploration of Oceanic and Shelf Ecosystems
3
There followed a period of maturation and digestion of observations, marked by the
steady increase in the capability of the instruments used for measurements at sea, and
the progressive sophistication of shipboard experimental methods. Rather than exploring
species distributions, the objective of large-scale and multiship expeditions during this
period was to quantify the rate constants for physiological processes across a wide range
of oceanographic conditions. The catalyst for this change of emphasis was surely the
development of solid-state electronics for underwater sensors, for shipboard laboratory
equipment, and for data processing.
During the last 25 years of the century, and parallel with equivalent progress in the
other branches of oceanography, these instruments delivered nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of ecological dynamics in the oceans. Almost as important was
the development of a novel ability to archive and process vary large quantities of numerical data, especially concerning the physical environment of the pelagic biota. Those who
did not go to sea prior to the arrival of the personal computers that now dominate
shipboard laboratories must find it hard to realize how little information we could take
ashore with us. Instruments were read by eye, and data were recorded into deck logbooks.
One technological innovation that was progressively developed during the 1990s is,
I believe, so important and brought such revolutionary new possibilities to biological
oceanography, and the analysis of the functioning of marine ecosystems, that I must
discuss it in a separate section later. I refer, of course, to the availability of images of
various properties of the sea surface obtained by earth-orbiting satellites, after the brief
proof-of-concept SeaSat mission flown in 1978.
But instrumentation and technical methods are not science, they only enable it to be
done. In fact, the most fertile developments in biological oceanography toward the end
of the century arose once the observations of the ’60s and ’70s were sufficiently digested
as to permit the formulation of important questions that could be answered only by
carefully planned work at sea. We are only now reaping the full benefits of this revolution
in oceanography that was forced by (or fed upon, depending on your point of view)
three public concerns: environmental pollution, the depletion of fish stocks, and climate
change.
All this has been accomplished by an alphabet soup of national and international
agencies and research programs, with which it is difficult to keep up. Many, indeed most,
of the programs were process-oriented, but regionally based, so that we now have a series
of studies that are of great assistance in assembling an ecological geography of the oceans
at the global scale. You will, however, certainly have noticed that this has been almost
entirely a revolution in our understanding of the pelagic ecosystem because most of the
initiatives had to do with the open ocean, where the epipelagic ecosystems lie above and
interact with, not a benthic ecosystem, but the bathypelagic biome of the interior of the
ocean. There have been few cooperative investigations of the dynamics of the benthic
ecosystem that are intellectually comparable to (or as innovative as) those concerned with
the pelagos. For the benthos, we shall just have to do the best we can with what we have.
Two initiatives in physical oceanography have provided us with a hitherto-unmatched
library of observations, from which to generate the regional analyses of circulation patterns required to interpret regional ecological processes. These initiatives were, of course,
the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and the Tropical Ocean/Global Atmosphere (TOGA) program. Oceanographers from 30 nations participated in WOCE, a
component of the World Climate Research Programme, and worked at sea from 1990
to 1998 on a logically spaced grid of sections that very adequately covered all four ocean
basins. These were arranged as a “One-time Survey” to give a snapshot of the entire ocean
circulation, and as a series of “Repeated Hydrography” sections to achieve seasonal and
decadal variability. Together with additional Time Series stations, and the deployment of
expendable bathythermographs (XBTs), of acoustic doppler current profilers (ADCPs),
3
There followed a period of maturation and digestion of observations, marked by the
steady increase in the capability of the instruments used for measurements at sea, and
the progressive sophistication of shipboard experimental methods. Rather than exploring
species distributions, the objective of large-scale and multiship expeditions during this
period was to quantify the rate constants for physiological processes across a wide range
of oceanographic conditions. The catalyst for this change of emphasis was surely the
development of solid-state electronics for underwater sensors, for shipboard laboratory
equipment, and for data processing.
During the last 25 years of the century, and parallel with equivalent progress in the
other branches of oceanography, these instruments delivered nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of ecological dynamics in the oceans. Almost as important was
the development of a novel ability to archive and process vary large quantities of numerical data, especially concerning the physical environment of the pelagic biota. Those who
did not go to sea prior to the arrival of the personal computers that now dominate
shipboard laboratories must find it hard to realize how little information we could take
ashore with us. Instruments were read by eye, and data were recorded into deck logbooks.
One technological innovation that was progressively developed during the 1990s is,
I believe, so important and brought such revolutionary new possibilities to biological
oceanography, and the analysis of the functioning of marine ecosystems, that I must
discuss it in a separate section later. I refer, of course, to the availability of images of
various properties of the sea surface obtained by earth-orbiting satellites, after the brief
proof-of-concept SeaSat mission flown in 1978.
But instrumentation and technical methods are not science, they only enable it to be
done. In fact, the most fertile developments in biological oceanography toward the end
of the century arose once the observations of the ’60s and ’70s were sufficiently digested
as to permit the formulation of important questions that could be answered only by
carefully planned work at sea. We are only now reaping the full benefits of this revolution
in oceanography that was forced by (or fed upon, depending on your point of view)
three public concerns: environmental pollution, the depletion of fish stocks, and climate
change.
All this has been accomplished by an alphabet soup of national and international
agencies and research programs, with which it is difficult to keep up. Many, indeed most,
of the programs were process-oriented, but regionally based, so that we now have a series
of studies that are of great assistance in assembling an ecological geography of the oceans
at the global scale. You will, however, certainly have noticed that this has been almost
entirely a revolution in our understanding of the pelagic ecosystem because most of the
initiatives had to do with the open ocean, where the epipelagic ecosystems lie above and
interact with, not a benthic ecosystem, but the bathypelagic biome of the interior of the
ocean. There have been few cooperative investigations of the dynamics of the benthic
ecosystem that are intellectually comparable to (or as innovative as) those concerned with
the pelagos. For the benthos, we shall just have to do the best we can with what we have.
Two initiatives in physical oceanography have provided us with a hitherto-unmatched
library of observations, from which to generate the regional analyses of circulation patterns required to interpret regional ecological processes. These initiatives were, of course,
the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and the Tropical Ocean/Global Atmosphere (TOGA) program. Oceanographers from 30 nations participated in WOCE, a
component of the World Climate Research Programme, and worked at sea from 1990
to 1998 on a logically spaced grid of sections that very adequately covered all four ocean
basins. These were arranged as a “One-time Survey” to give a snapshot of the entire ocean
circulation, and as a series of “Repeated Hydrography” sections to achieve seasonal and
decadal variability. Together with additional Time Series stations, and the deployment of
expendable bathythermographs (XBTs), of acoustic doppler current profilers (ADCPs),