A Historical Perspective

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A Historical Perspective

• Some noted mariners of Prince Henrys school.
• 1487 Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape Of Good
  Hope
  

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A Historical Perspective

• In 1492 a master mariner Christopher Columbus,
  discovered the New World by accident, about 500
  years after the Vikings had.
  
• 1499 Vasco de Gama found a trade rout from
  Portugal to India.
  

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A Historical Perspective

• 1513 Vasco de Balboa explored the coast of
  Brazil. Looking west from the Isthmus of Panama
  he was the first European to see the Pacific
  Ocean.
• 1522 One of Ferdinand Magellans ships was the
  first to complete a circumnavigation of the world

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A Historical Perspective

• It is important to remember the purpose of these
  voyages of discovery.
  
• They were all to find riches, world treasured
  commodities and bring them back to Europe.

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A Historical Perspective

• Scientific Voyages
• Captain James Cook commanded three voyages
  between 1768 and 1799. He is credited with being
  the first to take a scientist on a voyage for the
  sole purpose of making observations and
  collecting data on natural phenomena.

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A Historical Perspective

• The purpose of this voyage was to observe the
  transit of the planet Venus across the disk of
  the sun by members of the British Royal Society.
  
• It had been determined that the best place to
  make these observations was from Tahiti.

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A Historical Perspective

• Captain Cook also solved the scurvy problem and
  helped solve the problem of determining
  longitude.
  
• Actually, it was a reliable chronometer carried
  on board one of Cooks voyages made by the son of
  a British Cabinet maker, John Harrison, that
  solved the longitude problem.

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A Historical Perspective

• All four of the chronometers made by Harrison are
  functioning in the British National Maritime
  Museum in Greenwich. The site of the prime
  meridian of longitude.

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A Historical Perspective

• Other noteworthy individuals
• Sir John Ross and Sir James Clark Ross developed
  equipment for retrieving deep water samples of
  sediments and benthic organisms.
  
• The Roses also obtained soundings of 4,433 meters
  in the area of Antarctica, and 4,893 meters in
  the South Atlantic.

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A Historical Perspective

• In the 1840s Matthew Fountain Maury, considered
  the Father of Oceanography, discovered the
  mid-Atlantic Ridge using a long lightweight line
  and lead weights.
• Fridtjof Nansen studied the movement of Arctic
  surface water masses during the Fram Expedition
  (1893-1896)

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A Historical Perspective

• Benjamin Franklin, Postmaster General of the
  American Colonies was the first to publish a map
  of the Gulf Stream.
  
• Charles Darwin (1809-1882) proposed a theory on
  the origin and development of Atolls (circular
  reefs) in the Pacific. His theory was later
  validated by the Deep Sea Drilling Project.

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A Historical Perspective

• The Challenger Expedition (1872-1876)
• The British Royal Society sponsored the first
  truly scientific expedition.
  
• The mission of the Challenge Expedition was to
  investigate everything about the sea.

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A historical Perspective

• The Challenger traveled 109,000 kilometers
  (68,000 miles).
  
• All ocean basins except the Arctic were sampled.
• The Challenger Expedition brought back data that
  eventually filled 50 large volumes.

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A Historical Perspective

• The data and samples included 133 dredge halls of
  rock and sediment, 492 soundings, 263 water
  temperature observations and the discovery of
  4,717 new species of organisms in the oceans
• It took 23 years to write the report from the
  Challenger Expedition.

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A Historical Perspective

• Oceanographic Institutions
• The first of these was founded by Prince Albert
  I of Monaco. The most famous alumnus of
  Alberts Musee Oceanographique is Jacques
  Cousteau.
• The Musee became known as the Internationall
  Hydrographic Bureau in 1921

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A Historical Perspective

• There are three preeminent oceanographic
  institutions
  
• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution founded in
  1930 associated with the Marine Biological
  Laboratory of Massachusetts Institute of
  Technology founded in 1888.

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A Historical Perspective

• The Scripps Institution of Oceanography founded
  in La Jolla, California in 1912.
  
• And Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia
  University founded in 1949
  
• The United States Government agency responsible
  for Oceanic and Atmospheric study is NOAA.

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A Historical Perspective

• THE END