Washington Post The Mars Beneath the Waves By Robert B. Gagosian Saturday, February 14, 2004; Page A29 As
an oceanographer, I confess that when I want a break from the blitz of
election reporting, I point my Web browser to NASA to check that, 35
million miles from any primary or caucus, Opportunity is still sending
pictures from a peaceful, still world. When I look at the
rover's photographs of the Martian surface, I feel pride and awe at the
engineering feat of visiting another world. I feel humbled by the sense
of infinite time. And I feel the same excitement of discovery that I
felt in dives in the submersible Alvin, when I saw at the bottom of the
sea what no other human had ever seen before. I also feel a
nagging frustration -- like that of a father whose son has just decided
to go to the Himalayas to "find himself" when he can't find his socks
in his own dresser drawer. Not that he won't learn something in the
mountains, but I wish he could see that frontiers at home are also
worthy of his devotion. They are frontiers he will need to confront
sooner or later. Which brings me to oceanography. Except for
the fact that one looks up and the other looks down, oceanographers are
basically space explorers who get wet. Both work in terrifically
hostile environments. Both go where no one has gone before. Both seek
to understand nature and spin off technologies and discoveries that
benefit society. Both get most of their support from public funds. The
big difference is that oceanographers work where they live -- on a
planet that is 70 percent water, which is the wellspring of our
survival. Why is oceanography a valuable pursuit? Despite
100 years of ship-based ocean science, less than 5 percent of the ocean
floor has been explored. Our biologists discover new species
practically every time they go to sea. Our knowledge of the oceans is
still characterized mainly by what we don't know. Today we have an
unprecedented chance to change this. Miniaturization of sensors
and telemetry technology has created a new generation of ocean
observatories that enable us to learn more at less cost. We needn't
rely only on ships for exploration. Flotillas of battery- and
solar-powered observatories, some as small as a soccer ball, can report
back measurements 24 hours a day from anywhere on Earth, regardless of
weather. Some are anchored in place or flow with ocean currents; some
are autonomous robots that swim on a programmed path for months at a
time; some are installed on the sea floor, some on the coast, some at
the sea surface and some part way down in "mid water." We are
in a new age of oceanography, one in which giving the ocean its own
instrumentation has become an economic and technical possibility. The
cost of building a network of hundreds of sensors to wire the oceans:
about $1 billion over 10 years, a little more than the cost of the two
Mars rovers. What's the payback? The oceans affect
climate and weather, and thus the human condition, around the world.
Ocean observatories can reveal conditions that affect fisheries, shifts
in weather and long-term climate change. They can illuminate the
migratory patterns of marine mammals, the reasons for drought or
floods, and the fate and long-term effects of pollutants. They can
detect in real time tsunamis, undersea earthquakes, volcanoes and
extreme weather at sea, improving prediction of their devastating
effects at sea and ashore. Figures we have come up with show that
better predictions of ocean conditions could produce $1 billion in
annual savings from better mitigation or prevention of damages. When
Henry David Thoreau wrote in "Walden" that "in wildness is the
preservation of the world," he probably meant that we have a spiritual
need for untamed territory. We also have a need to understand the
unknown. Indeed, our survival may lie in the uncharted, watery
frontiers of our own planet. Oceanographers try to understand
the water wilderness that covers most of our planet, which generates
most of the oxygen on Earth, controls our climate and makes Earth
habitable. They convey what they learn so that we all may help in the
preservation of our world. I encourage us to follow in the
footsteps of Thoreau, a great homebody who realized that the answers to
who we are and what we need to know are hidden in our own backyard. The writer is president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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