Introduction
• Where does oceanography come from?
• What sort of background prepares one to be an oceanographer?
• Do oceanographers all go out to sea?
• What kinds of jobs does a degree in oceanography prepare for?
• What's new in oceanography?
• Does oceanography matter?
• Informative references

Introduction

The oceans are part of the thin, outer shell of the Earth that is the home of all the known life in the Universe. Oceanography is the study of the deep sea and shallow coastal oceans: their biology, chemistry, geology and physics together make oceanography a richly interdisciplinary science. Although they contain most of the Earth's water and carbon and surface heat, and much of its biomass, the oceans do not operate alone. Together with the atmosphere, continents and ice-cover (the 'cryosphere'), they form a working machine, driven mostly by energy from the sun. Lesser amounts of energy derive from tides raised by the moon and sun and planets, and heat from the Earth's interior.

Oceanographers aim their work at both practical problems and basic scientific discovery. In the area of human health, for example, the oceans provide threats: they spawn and energize storms and hurricanes, endangering coastal populations (more than ½ of the world's population live within 50 km of the sea). Yet they also provide a bountiful diversity of food, are the reservoir of our water supply and most of the heat and carbon of the climate system, are the source of roughly ½ the respired oxygen of the biosphere, and contain most of the remaining undiscovered natural pharmaceuticals. Study of ocean life provides models for research in human illness, for example using the giant, accessible neurons of the squid. The physical climate of Earth, its patterns of temperature, cloud and rain, may be described as an 'argument' between the atmosphere and oceans. To understand these, techniques of classical physics are joined with modern instrumentation and computers. Surprisingly, understanding of el Nino works came first from mathematical theory rather than computer models (it is an interaction between the atmosphere and ocean that involves propagation of great waves along the equator). We now can look down on the global ocean from orbiting satellites, measuring fields like sea-surface temperature, color (an indication of biological activity), and winds. The height of the sea surface over large scales can be mapped, revealing the surface current field over the entire globe. el Nino has been unmasked, and can be viewed from space, in its day to day development (see www.pmel.noaa.gov, where the NOAA/UW oceanographers run the largest scientific instrument ever built: the TAO ocean array). Yet many research questions still require extensive ocean voyages, into sometimes hostile ocean regions, to sample the waters beneath the surface.

We call Earth the water planet, seen from space as bright blue with white clouds . It is a singular place in a solar system of otherwise dead planets. The extent and diversity of life here makes it hard to imagine the absence of life elsewhere. Indeed, ideas of evolution of complex life are now inspiring a new thrust at seeking out traces of life outside Earth (and inside it!). Although oceanography is a relatively young science, it is the natural setting to ask fundamental questions about the development of life, and the behavior (or misbehavior) of global climate.

The oceans cover 7/10 of the earth's surface. Together with the atmosphere and the 'fresh-water' sphere they make up 'fluid' Earth. They are thin: a wet basketball would be a scale model of an ocean covered planet. Much of the biomass...the mass of living plants and animals...lives in the oceans, far more than on land. If we were to weigh all the living creatures on Earth, paradoxically, the total weight of microscopic bacteria and plankton far exceeds that of the great animals (just as insects, in total far outweigh human beings). Photosynthesis of the phytoplankton (the 'grass' of the seas) and respiration of zooplankton and larger animals (the 'cows' of the sea) are important to the global chemical balance of our oxygen-rich world. Very roughly ½ of the primary production of oxygen from photosynthesis, by all life on Earth, occurs in the sea. Roughly ½ of that occurs in the productive, shallow ocean near land.

Life in the sea has to cope with the fluid medium...there is little solid ground to anchor on. This makes fluid dynamics an important part of ocean biology. Imagine trying to build a home and raise a family in this 'water-world'. Evolutionary pressure has selectively favored organisms who use the senses of sight and smell acutely, and who adapt and exploit winds, tides and currents to feed and navigate.

Possibly the most important physical property of the oceans, insofar as life is concerned, is the layering of ocean waters, with denser (heavier, colder or saltier) waters lying beneath less dense (lighter, warmer or fresher) layers. This 'density stratification' is important because it prevents easy movement of water upward from the deep. The recipe for most ocean biology is to take water from the nutrient-rich deep sea up to the surface where sunlight provides the energy for growth; but this requires a fluid flow pattern that is just right, and it happens only in select regions determined by the ocean circulation. Life in the sea is not randomly or uniformly distributed. It is organized by this flow of nutrients and availability of sunlight. Paradoxically, some of the most intense biological productivity occurs at high latitude, under weak sunshine. There, the nutrient supply can be very great, the stratification barrier weak, and wind-forced upwelling strong.

The shallow ocean near land is also very productive, for a complex number of reasons. Ocean currents can be driven off-shore by winds, and the replenishing water must upwell from deeper layers. In ocean estuaries, river-flow provides a buoyant forcing that drives an overturning circulation. Paradoxically the volume involved in this inward flow of nutrient rich ocean water, and outward flow of low-salinity water, can be many times greater than the river flow itself. Coastal oceanography is of great importance, more so than the relatively small area of the continental shelves would suggest. About 25% of global primary productivity (photosynthesis by plant life) occurs in the ocean near the coasts, and that is about one-half of the total productivity of the world ocean. 80 to 90% of the world fish catch occurs in the coastal ocean.

Today these shallow-water ocean regions are under great stress. Human population pressure is increasing, with fishing, shipping and recreation crowding into regions of abundant shell-fish and migration routes of deep water fish. Global climate change is felt in the smaller coastal regions, typically with waters warming. In the Pacific, el Nino signals its presence by sending warm water and changes in sea level poleward along North and South America. It is using what we call the 'potential vorticity guideway' formed by the continental shelf topography. In addition to population increase and climate change, there is a very serious invasion of 'alien' species of microscopic plankton in these regions. They are carried by ships, which have ballast tanks full of seawater (they do this to trim the ship properly when it has no cargo). The seawater is taken in at one port and dumped out at the next. This simple operation mixes the biology of the oceans very greatly. In some cases the new, colonizing species eliminates everything else in sight (as in San Francisco Bay, which is full of Asian clams and little else). As the ocean heats up, and is stirred up in this way, we are seeing great increases in poisonous algae ('red tides'). Evolution has a way of working to change viruses and bacteria, as well as humans. The principal difference is that evolution is much faster for microscopic life. Natural systems under this new kind of stress may evolve in ways that do not please us!

Where does oceanography come from?

The scientific ancestors of oceanographers range widely. Physical oceanographers hark back to the polar explorers of the 19th Century and the physicists who developed the study of flowing fluids. While it may seem that the climate of the Earth is an affair of the atmosphere, it is actually a strongly coupled system, with the ocean providing great 'thermal memory' for the atmosphere, as well as having its own internal dynamical oscillations. Ocean waves, circulation and turbulent motions are remarkable forms of 'out-door' physics, and indeed the research approach has much in common with physics. Techniques of physics and applied mathmeatics are used by physical oceanographers for the study of the physical ocean and climate. In addition, understanding of physics has yielded significant contributions to biology, chemistry and geophysics, where understanding at the molecular level is sometimes the key to discovery.

Early biological oceanographers were naturalists cataloguing the life-forms of the sea. They looked upon the sea as a 'laboratory' for the evolution of life; modern biological oceanography is so intertwined with molecular biology and genetics that it is hard to separate them. Just as molecular biology has become such a powerful field relating to human health, its techniques are equally effective in studying the global biosphere, and the origin of life on Earth. More practically, infectious diseases like cholera can be harbored in the oceans where it can flare up in shellfish toxins, and reach into coastal human populations.

The geology and geophysics of the ocean owes much to ideas of plate tectonics, verified 'at sea' by the magnetic striping of seafloor that emerges from spreading center ridges, as recently as the 1960s. This is surely one of the great discoveries of natural science of the 20th Century. The solid-rock Earth actually behaves as a fluid, propelling drifting continents by deep-rooted convection cells in the mantle. Geophysicists went to sea in part because of the thinness of the crust there, for many years making basic mapping of topography, gravity and magnetic fields; yet many aspects of geology transcend oceans and continents. Seismologists for example have global networks of sensors listening to local and global oscillations. There is also a separate emphasis on the dynamics of oceanic sediments, the 'decorating and plastering' of the solid Earth. It is surprising to learn that beneath the Hatteras abyssal plain, a flat and level plain in the western North Atlantic, many kilometers of sediment overlay the hard rock basement, and that many features of the sea-bed topography are mobile dunes shaped by the ocean circulation. Dynamics of beaches and morphology of the coasts came early to the attention of natural scientists, and this is now a part of marine geology and geophysics.

Chemical oceanography developed in part as a service to biology: through analyses of nutrients and dissolved gases relating to life in the sea. As ideas of global geochemistry developed (for example, the importance of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect by Svante Arhennius in the 1896) the cycling of carbon through the atmosphere into the sea became apparent, along with its relationship to the biosphere and global warming. Ocean sediments hold most of the carbon residing near the Earth's surface...many thousands of times more than is found in land soils and plants. Global warming, which threatens the very integrity of our global fluid environment, has origins in chemistry, radiation, physical circulation and biological interactions and is now under intense study in oceanography. Chemistry in oceanography also developed through simple curiosity about the circulation: trace chemicals (dissolved gases, natural nutrients, radioactive products of nuclear weapons testing, trace metals) are transported with the ocean circulation and exchanged with seabed and atmosphere. They are a science in their own right, and also provide a detailed picture of the ocean circulation that cannot be obtained from direct measurement of currents. Finally, the discovery of the Ice Age cycles that have dominated Earth's climate over the past few million years spurred activity in core sampling of the sea-floor sediments. Slowly deposited over time, the sediments provide many indices of climate change neatly laid down over millions of years. Paleoclimate studies in oceanography involve all its subdisciplines.

Great science simplifies an outwardly complex situation into something that can be understood, and provides new principles relating seemingly distant events: for example, plate tectonics has 'cast its shadow' on the evolution of life, which proceeded in isolation as land masses like Australia and New Zealand became isolated by continental drift. Some of the greatest research challenges in all of science involve oceanography: questions of the past...like the evolution of life ('why are we here?') and questions of the future....like changes to global climate that may occur due to human activity, and the response of the biosphere ('will the ocean slow down global warming? Will snow and ice dissapear from the Earth? Will suitable habitats move poleward faster than ecosystems can follow?'). Perhaps the grandest view of evolution on Earth is James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which argues that over very long times the biological activity on Earth has had a strong impact on its temperature, chemistry and 'habitability', and that evolutionary principles can be at work in which biology, physics, chemistry and biology all interact to define and perhaps stabilize the Earth system. Oceanography is a natural 'home' in which to ask such questions, with inhabitants from each of the four principal disciplines.

What sort of background prepares one to be an oceanographer?

Despite all the visibility of ocean science in print and video media, it is still off the beaten track of undergraduate education. Back in 5th grade, you will find a lot of would-be oceanographers, but whales, dolphins, waves and storms are often forgotten by high-school. The fact that there is no easy and obvious way into the field has determined that oceanographers are unusual (tenacious, determined, imaginative) people.

Some of our greatest oceanographers never saw the inside of a university. Fritz Fuglister was an unemployed artist in the Great Depression, and happened on a job painting a mural in the police station at Falmouth, Massachusetts. Even murals come to an end, and he afterward secured a job plotting graphical data at the young Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The dot-plots began to tell him something, though it wasn't his job to examine them; he went to sea, at first on the auxiliary sailing ketch Atlantis, and eventually became one of the select few blue-water hydrographers in our field. More than anyone else he discovered the wild behavior of the Gulf Stream, its meanders and rings.

Sometimes oceanographers are produced for devious reasons, for example to dignify a fascination for the sea, and turn it to a profit. Columbus Iselin founded WHOI in 1930 possibly for his love of sailing.

A background in one of the following classical sciences...physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, geology...is ideal preparation for graduate school in oceanography IF it is coupled with an intense curiosity about the natural world. A good engineering-science background can also prepare one with fluid dynamics, instrument development skills, and computing skills that are also of great value. Undergraduate programs in oceanography exist as well (including ours at UW), and in combination with strong classical science courses, can provide good preparation for a research/teaching career. An effective strategy as an undergraduate is to do a double-major, oceanography and a classical science; this will provide the tools that will be needed for advanced work, which often cannot be supplied in an oceanography major, by itself.

In most graduate programs in oceanography, the student commits to one of the four 'options' as a major. This commits him or her to a series of core lecture and lab courses, tailored to the individual option. Almost as a general rule, great research advances break down barriers such as those between the 4 options, and we encourage such exploration by including core-course requirements outside ones own option. While great scientists have always understood the need for a holistic view of the natural world, this interweaving of sciences is now becoming particularly visible and active in oceanography.

Do oceanographers all go out to sea?

We encourage (but do not require) all our students to participate in seagoing field work, even if the main thrust of their research is, say, modelling the ocean with a computer. The University of Washington funds 45 days each year on the R/V Thomas G. Thompson, for student cruises. The sea is the last great wilderness on Earth, and some of the ports of call that you will experience as a student are remarkable, remote and exotic. Sailing the tropical oceans or even the challenge of a cruise to the cold oceans at high latitude, are memorable experiences. Oceanographers also get to see exciting weather and waves, though they are usually able to avoid the 'perfect storm'. Those of us who have spent our life in oceanography would not trade it for anything else.

One thing to remember: oceanography is still a small and relatively friendly science. This means that you can lead several lives as an oceanographer, rather than just one. It is not at all unusual to work on a computer model of the ocean one day, do a lab experiment or mathematical theory the next, and then fly off to Iceland to join an expedition to the sub-Arctic. This simply cannot be done in most sciences, or in most jobs in the world of business.

What kinds of jobs does a degree in oceanography prepare for?

Oceanographic work is carried out in research laboratories, universities, and in industry. Most of our Ph.D. graduates work in academia, or the research labs which are really a part of academia. This is changing, with a broader spectrum of employment for highly skilled environmental scientists...even as far as the profession of science reporting and writing. A vast majority of our undergraduates use their oceanographic training in some way, yet less likely in academic research. Environmental science training can contribute strongly to work in economics, politics, governmental regulatory practice and law. Understanding the 'scientific method' of observation, experimentation and inference is an important part of our program, and is a rare commodity in these professions. Computing skills are intensively developed in oceanography, and these of course can be applied very widely in technical and business-oriented jobs.

Perhaps the most important observation is that oceanography gives you a world view...an understanding of the global system that is our environment...which can inspire your work, wherever it leads.

What's new in oceanography?

Until the 1970s the normal oceanographic expedition involved very simple measurements: reversing thermometers (beautifully intricate, hand-made) and Nansen bottles lowered on steel cables, and triggered by dropping a weight (the 'messenger') down the wire; plankton tows in simple mesh nets; small coring devices and bottom dredges. There was virtually no electronics involved. Today, we still need to bring back samples of water from the deep ocean for analysis, but many of our measurements are now electronic; and there are many more things we can measure. Physical variables like temperature and salinity are observed in this way, and there are new probes being designed that will allow electronic measurement of many chemical and biological variables.

Not all oceanography is done from ships. Seismology and sub-seabed geophysics are being explored using 'underwater observatories'. Moorings, with steel or Kevlar cable extending from near the ocean surface to its bottom, are laced with instruments that record observations internally, and perhaps relay them to a satellite. And, increasingly, autonomous undersea vehicles (AUVs) propel themselves or drift with currents for years at a time. One of these devices, designed in the School of Oceanography, glides for some 10,000 km across the sea, making measurements on a 'saw-tooth' shaped path and phoning home via satellite each time it reaches the sea-surface. The satellites themselves can be equipped with remarkable high-technology sensors. They give us global observations where previously oceanographers tried to piece together a picture of the ocean as if it were a mosaic, from many years of ship-borne observations. Satellite oceanography is combined with other observations and with computer modelling of ocean/atmosphere circulation to give a 'best-fit' assimilation of the complete circulation.

Our Arctic oceanographers also have a novel way of doing research: in ice camps near the North Pole. Icebreakers are sometimes involved, but often it is a matter of boring holes in the ice and using helicopters and ski-equipped airplanes to do 'sections' across the Arctic, or to set moorings and autonomous vehicles into action. The Arctic Ocean is an important part of the climate system, and it is now rapidly changing; it is predicted to lead the world in global warming. Our faculty have been involved in the dramatic discovery of thinning of the ice, and melt-back of the ice edge, which may become a dramatic verification of global warming. Doing research there one is unlikely to get seasick, but one must be wary of polar bears.

In the environmentally sensitive coastal ocean and estuaries, we can do "cat-scans" using fast, small boats towing instruments that 'fly' through the water on a carefully controlled course. Meanwhile, acoustic waves are sent down through the water column, and their reflections off small particles in the water give a complete profile of the ocean velocity, from top to bottom. We visualize fleets of small boats deployed to observe the coastal ocean in three dimensions and time, complementing sophisticated profiling moorings and AUVs.

Theoretical work in oceanography has the flavor of classical physics, and indeed discoveries by ocean/atmosphere scientists have kindled many sub-fields of physics: for example the science of 'chaos', which involves the complex behavior of seemingly simple physical systems, arose largely from a simple model of the atmospheric circulation. The 'soliton', a fundamental, nonlinear wave that propagates undistorted over great distances, was discovered in oceanography and now is found in fiber-optics cables, and many physical systems. As homage to this idea, we designed one wall of the newest building of the School of Oceanography as a glass 'wave', a train of solitons. The role of theory is to simplify complex problems, and provide a basis for new observations; it plays a game of 'leap-frog' with observational oceanography. Some quite general theories of wave propagation, fluid instability, the production of general circulation by waves and turbulent flow have arisen in recent years, and are just now being tested for the first time and being extended.

Computers play an intense role in physical oceanography, giving us simulations of waves and circulation based on Newtonian dynamics. Ocean and atmosphere are coupled together in 'climate models' and 'circulation models'; the computer models become the meeting point for observations, theory and prediction. While there are still many inaccuracies to be dealt with, computer modelling accounts for a growing part of our activity. Observations are 'assimilated' into the models, which then interpolate and extrapolate into the future. Computer simulation is also carried out more rigorously in simple, idealized experiments which are closely related to theory. It should be stressed, however, that unlike meterologists, we are not so concerned with day-to-day prediction. Understanding of fundamental dynamical processes, mapping of the state of the ocean today, observing and modelling atmosphere/ocean interaction, and assessment of the health of oceanic ecosystems are more pressing goals than predicting the path of an ocean current. At the same time, approximate models of biological communities are being incorporated into computer models, as are the spreading and mixing of chemical tracers and the components of the carbon cycle.

Physical oceanography is involved in many facets of global climate research, and recent observations carried out by UW oceanographers in the Arctic and sub-Arctic are shedding new light on global warming. The intensification of the fresh-water movement in the atmosphere, land and ocean due to global warming may be driving major changes in ocean circulation (to the point where some computer models predict a major slow-down of the global meridional overturning circulation).

Techniques of molecular biology are giving us the power to profile the genetics of oceanic biological communities, and explore their evolutionary history. New applications of ocean biology relate to transmission of disease, and fundamental questions about the oceanic food web. The search for extra-terrestrial life, the origins of life on Earth, and general questions about life in extreme environments, are being explored by a diverse population of scientists at UW, involving significantly oceanography.

In ocean geophysics the time development of seafloor processes is being studied with recording instruments, and there are plans to 'wire' the seabed with fiber-optics cable, to provide a permanent observational network that may one day span the entire globe. Seismic waves from earthquakes and test explosions probe the structure of the solid Earth, including the special hot spots along mid-ocean ridges where upwelling of heat and magma occurs. Discovery of a large biomass living in hydrothermal systems beneath the sea-bed has suggested new modes for evolution of life on Earth, and produced a study of life in 'extreme enviroments', from deep-sea vent waters with temperature ~ 400C, to Arctic algae living in extreme cold, to possible life beneath the icy shell of Europa, one of the many moons of Jupiter. This subject cuts across all the sub-fields of traditional oceanography.

Chemical investigations into the carbon cycle are central to climate research; the fate of carbon dioxide, methane and other trace gases added to the system by human activity, involves exchange across the sea surface and in river outflows. By examining the stratified sediments of the seafloor, and stratified ice layers in Greenland and Antarctica, paleoclimatologists can trace millions of years of climate evolution. Bubbles trapped in the ice give us a 'whiff' of ancient air, and a surprisingly varied and convincing picture of trace gases present. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were greatly reduced during each glaciation, though we do not yet know whether this is a cause or an effect of ice sheets.

There is particular focus in all these disciplines on the coastal ocean, for it is close to much human activity, and is under great stress. The newly developed sensors and vehicles make it possible to observe the ocean in all three of its dimensions (and in the fourth: time). There is a pressing need to get out and do it, as the rising exponential curves of global change are erasing the system as it once was.

In summary, it is a very exciting time to be an oceanographer. All of the resources of the 4 disciplines of oceanography will be called upon in the near future, to respond to the large and unpredictable, changing environment, upon which we stake our future.

Does oceanography matter?

As we start a new century, mankind is faced with a broad spectrum of environmental challenges. In many ways these underlie the deep unrest felt between underdeveloped and developed countries.  Energy supplies, traditionally the environmental issue of greatest concern, are now joined by other, equally pressing, changes. The global supply of fresh water, arable land, fish in the sea, and pleasant (often coastal-) climate are no longer unlimited. In an over-populated world, these aspects of life are suddenly 'on the edge'. Under the stress of a climate changing due to human output of greenhouse gases, and with human activity altering ocean habitats in many ways, the fundamentals of ocean biology and physics are changing: so rapidly that they may 'run away' before we have had the chance to observe them in their earlier pristine state.

Outward signs of the urgency of oceanographic research are still just occasional: a particularly bad tropical cyclone or prolonged destructive monsoon in Bangladesh; an increase in shellfish poisoning; the appearance of surprising new or newly prominent destructive plankton species like Pfisteria piscicida; wild variations in the return of salmon to streams in the northwestern US; the decrease in the total world fish-catch since 1995. A cholera epidemic in South America, beginning in 1991, appears to have emerged from the ocean (where it lies dormant). The epidemic has since spread gradually throughout the continent. By 1994 it had killed about ten thousand people in South American; yet how can this compare with the 22 million deaths suffered from AIDS (as of January 2001)? In a single day in November 1971, between 250,000 and 500,000 people died in Bangladesh as a violent tropical cyclone drove the ocean ashore, covering the low-lying Ganges/Brahmaputra River delta. As terrible as this ocean/atmosphere event was, in the same year roughly 2 million people died in the country's struggle for independence from Pakistan. In the developed world, hurricanes cause enormous financial loss (a direct hit of hurricane Andrew on Miami might have cost $100 billion, instead of the $37 billion of damage it actually did, as it veered south of the city). In the under-developed world these same storms instead cost lives, both immediately and through long-term loss of infra-structure and jobs.

Oceanography is more important than these numbers would suggest. Roger Revelle, an oceanographer who was one of the first to alert the world to the seriousness of greenhouse-gas warming of the Earth, took the view that, though we cannot predict the outcome very well, we are embarking on a very dangerous experiment. Man has always tampered with his environment, locally, often manipulating it to advantage. Yet never before have we done a global environmental experiment like this one. And it is accompanied by a host of other, perhaps more dangerous experiments. We transport biological communities across entire oceans in ships' ballast tanks, and colonize new coastal regions. In the case of the dinoflagellate Gymnodinium catenatum, the impact on an Australian estuary has been severe. The process of warming and stirring the world's ecosystems together can be likened to turning up the heat to speed up a chemical reaction: there is a predicted impact even on the virulence of infectious diseases, which tend to become dangerously severe when viruses or bacteria are transmitted more rapidly between hosts. This is an idea about evolution, arguing that microbes adapt their virulence to their hosts so as to maximize their own transmission (or 'survival').

The basic-research side of oceanography is also of great importance. In addressing life in extreme environments, the origins and evolution of life on Earth, the general theory of turbulent fluid circulations on Earth and the other planets, the nature of convection in the Earth's mantle and core, and the chemical evolution of the atmosphere/ocean/land system, oceanographers are taking their place in 'high science', the questions that give an extra dimension to human activity.

Oceanography is small: a few thousand people among 6 billion inhabitants of Earth. The importance of the oceans to physical climate, food supplies and biological stability will be felt more strongly in the future...the near future. It is this appeal to the long-term habitability of Earth that gives oceanography its importance.

The feelings experienced as an oceanographer lie somewhere between those of the students chasing tornados in the movie 'Twister' and the physics students in James Gleick's book 'Chaos', and, the young Midshipman Byam in 'Mutiny on the Bounty'.

A few references to inform you:

• Oceanography, An Illustrated Guide,  Wiley & Sons, New York. edited by Colin Summerhayes and Stephen Thorpe, Eds. 1998
• Science and the Seven Seas: a history of Oceanography, 1650-1900, Margaret Deacon, Academic Press, 1971.
• Why We Are Oceanographers, in Collected Works of Henry M. Stommel, Amer. Meteorological Soc. Press, 1995 (reprinted from Oceanography, vol 2, pp 48-54, 1989)
• New Eyes on the Oceans, Jennifer Ackerman, National Geographic Magazine, October 2000
• Ocean Sciences At the New Millenium, National Science Foundation, March 2001.

one to inspire the artist in you:

• Water, Light, Time by David Doubillet, Phaidon Press, 2000.