Introduction to Oceanography

Look at a globe, and what do you see? Most of the surface is covered in oceans. At one time, mankind treated oceans as infinitely adaptable. The presumption was they could handle our garbage dumping, sewage flows, oil slicks, overfishing, and other disregard with no problem. But as once plentiful species of fish have now become scarce, only the delusional still believe that.

The damage from man's activities has defined the focus of oceanographic study today. Yet, other aspects of oceanography are quite active. Oceanographers are still cataloging new (to us) species, charting ocean floor structures, exploring trenches, and following currents. And NASA has been observing the oceans from space since the 1980s.

Oceanographers have their own professional society, named aptly enough The Oceanography Society. This society's magazine "promotes and chronicles all aspects of ocean science and its applications."

Interestingly, oceanographers generally don't go to school for an oceanography degree. They get their degree in a science that's applied in oceanography. As with many of the sciences, oceanography doesn't have clear boundaries and is a mix of related disciplines. These include biology, geology, chemistry, metrology, geology, and physics. An oceanography team may well have a statistician, electrical engineer, and mechanical engineer. And, as you may have guessed, many oceanographers are divers and qualified sailors.

Oceanographers generally specialize in one of these sub-disciplines:

• Biological oceanography. The study of the oceans' plants, animals, and microbes.  It's also called marine biology. There's typically a focus on how these organisms are affected by man's activities, how they interact with each other, and how they interact with the ocean ecology.
• Chemical oceanography. The study of ocean chemistry and how the oceans chemically interact with the atmosphere. It's also called marine chemistry.
• Geological oceanography. The study of the geology of the ocean floor. This includes paleoceanography (think "history") and plate tectonics. It's also called marine geology.
• Physical oceanography. The study of the ocean's physical attributes. It's also called marine physics. The attributes include tides, currents, waves, mixing, and temperature-salinity structure.

While you've probably enjoyed a good documentary or two produced by or about oceanographers, they do much more than float around making movies. They collect vast amounts of data, analyze, predict, and recommend. It's because of oceanographers that harbors can be maintained, ships can plan the best routes, and oil companies can build the oil rigs that keep our cars and trucks running. Actually, if you were to make a list of how oceanographic data are used, it would be a pretty long list with some surprising entries on it.

If oceanography interests you, make sure to spend time on the site of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

From NASA comes this interesting list of oceanographic facts:

• Ninety percent of all volcanic activity occurs in the oceans. In 1993, scientists located the largest known concentration of active volcanoes on the sea floor in the South Pacific. This area, the size of New York state, hosts 1,133 volcanic cones and sea mounts. Two or three could erupt at any moment.
• The highest tides in the world are at the Bay of Fundy, which separates New Brunswick from Nova Scotia. At some times of the year the difference between high and low tide is 53 feet 6 inches, the equivalent of a three-story building.
• The oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth's surface and contain 97 percent of the Earth's water. Less than 1 percent is fresh water, and 2-3 percent is contained in glaciers and ice caps.
• Earth's longest mountain range is the Mid-Ocean Ridge, which winds around the globe from the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic, skirting Africa, Asia and Australia, and crossing the Pacific to the west coast of North America. It is four times longer than the Andes, Rockies, and Himalayas combined.
• Canada has the longest coastline of any country, at 56,453 miles or around 15 percent of the world's 372,384 miles of coastlines.

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