Why does Oceanography matter?

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.

 

Outward signs of the urgency of oceanographic research are becoming more apparent, from the frequency and intensity of hurricanes in the Caribbean or prolonged destructive monsoons in Bangladesh to an increase in shellfish poisoning and diminishing numbers in the return of salmon to streams in the northwestern US. There has been a 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). In the developed world, hurricanes cause enormous financial and human loss.

 

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.