50 Years of Ocean Discovery National Science Foundation 1950-2000 (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Landmark Achievements of Ocean Sciences
Landmark Achievements of Ocean Sciences
Achievements in Biological Oceanography
Pages 9-21
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[andmar Ot \ k A`hievements of an Sciences
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in ocean research, we have been asked "to focus on the landmark achievements in biological oceanography in the past 50 years, the individuals involved, the new technology and ideas that made these achievements possible, how one discovery built on the foundations of earlier ones, discoveries made at the intersections of disciplines, and the role that NSF programs and institutional arrangements had in making these achievements possible." The period addressed, the first 50 years of the National Science Foundation, has been a heady time for biological oceanography, and identification of landmark achievements of this period is a fitting tribute for the 1998 International Year of the Ocean. The pace of biological investigation of the ocean quickened as this period began in the 1950s.
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TWO WONDERFUL ACCIDENTS: VENTS AND OCEAN COLOR We begin with two landmark achievements that more or less fell into the laps of biological oceanographers. Chemosynthetic Hydrothermal Vent Communities (Plate 1)
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Spacebased analysis changed not only our perception of the ocean, but also our ideas of what constitutes good biological oceanography. Of the venous landmark achievements mentioned here, this is one that profoundly affects all biological oceanographers and indeed each citizen of the planet.
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Global Productivity and Productivity RegimesThe Stepchildren of Ocean Color Soon after Steeman-Nielsen (1952) introduced the radioactive carbon tracer method to measure primary productivity, biological oceanographers began to use the new productivity observations to speculate about the existence of differing oceanic productivity regimes and to estimate global productivity (Ryther, 1959~.
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estimated global new production to be about 4 petagrams per year and suggested for the first time that this number approximates the sinking flux of organic carbon and, hence, the rate at which the deep sea sequesters atmospheric carbon dioxide. This number has proved very durable; it is still used in global biogeochemical budgets.
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For the iron issue the nagging question was: Why do excess plant nutrients persist in the surface ocean in certain regions such as the Antarctic, equatorial Pacific, and Northeast Pacific? For 50 years there had been speculation that iron limitation might be a factor, but measurements showed there was abundant iron in seawater.
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It is a revolution still in progress and it appears to be different things to different people (Azam, 1998; Steele, 1998~. In 1974, Larry Pomeroy's paper titled "The Ocean's Food Web: A Changing Paradigm" foretold the microbial revolution by asking a logical sequence of questions: · Do small autotrophs carry out a major portion of oceanic primary production?
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The Biological Oceanography Program at NSF was the major patron of the work that led this revolution. The response of NSF to the 1981 1982 1982 1983 LANDMARK ACHIEVEMENTS OF OCEAN SCIENCES microbial revolution showed that this agency could adapt rapidly to a changing paradigm.
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(1993~. Biological oceanography modeling is at the forefront of modeling in a number of areas: the use of data assimilation, coupled physical-biological models, single-species population models, ecosystem models, and the use of massively parallel supercomputers to simulate biogeochemical pro cesses in general circulation models (Hofmann and Lascara, 1998~.
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We have also failed to cite the work of a series of excep tionally productive biological oceanographers who were multi-faceted leaders. Mikhail Vinogradov, David Cushing, Gotthilf Hempel, Ramon Margalef, Akihiko Hattori, Achim Minas, Andre Morel, and Takahisa Nemoto are individuals whose overarching leadership left an indelible mark on bio
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ACHIEVEMENTS IN BIOLOGICAL OCEANOGRAPHY logical oceanography. These individuals all led expeditions, directed laboratones, made important scholarly contnbutions, and at the same time were mentors to a generation of talented biological oceanographers.
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