History of Science and Technology Colloquium

The decade of the 1960s in oceanography was characterized by excitement and optimism regarding the possibilities for studying the ocean and for the uses to which the resulting technology and knowledge might be put. The second world war touched off explosive growth of ocean sciences, such that marine sciences and oceanography are among the most generously funded sciences in the United States (and often at the top of this list). Certainly through the Cold War, physical oceanography, funded for its relevance to undersea warfare, dominated scientific study of the ocean. A look through 1960s eyes, however, reveals a different vista. Study of the ocean was expected to encompass human physiology, engineering and underwater archaeology in addition to geology, chemistry, marine biology, and physics. The number of anticipated uses of the ocean environment and its resources proliferated. These new uses, many eagerly anticipated but never realized, included wilderness to explore, farmland to cultivate, battleground, playground, dump site, mine, oil well, construction site, movie set, and human habitat. To live, work, and play on and within the ocean would require new knowledge and technology – which the ocean scientists and engineers of the 1960s eagerly set about creating. Their vision of ocean science was much broader than the version of oceanography that remained by the mid-to-late 1970s. Their version was intended to support a new human relationship with the sea, one akin to plans for that other frontier of the time, outer space