In Our Time - Oceanography

Episode Date: November 22, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the science of Oceanography. In 1870 Jules Verne described the deep ocean in 2,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He wrote: “The sea is an immense desert where man is never alone for he feels life, quivering around him on every side.” This was actually closer to the truth than the science of the time, when ‘Azoic Theory’ held sway and it was believed that nothing could exist below 600 metres. Now we estimate that there are more species in the deep ocean than in the rest of the planet put together, somewhere between 2 million and 100 million different species of organism are living on the ocean floor.Science has dispelled the idea that huge underground tunnels join our oceans together and the notion that giant Kraken lurk in the deep, but our seas still retain much of their mystery and there have been more men on the surface of the moon than at the bottom of the ocean. How should we understand the sea? With Margaret Deacon, visiting Research Fellow at Southampton Oceanography Centre and author of Scientists and the Sea, Tony Rice, Biological Oceanographer and author of Deep Ocean, Simon Schaffer, Reader in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Darwin College.

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or wherever you get your pods. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1870, Jules Verne described the deep ocean in 2000 leagues under the sea. He wrote, The season immense desert where man is never alone,

for he feels life quivering around him on every side. This fiction was actually rather closer to the truth than the signs of the time, when the Azoic theory held sway, and it was believed that nothing could exist below 600 metres. Now we estimate there are more species in the deep ocean than in the rest of the planet put together. Somewhere between 2 million and 100 million different species of organism are living on the ocean floor.

Science has dispelled the old idea that huge underground tunnels join our oceans together, and even older ocean the giant Krakens look in the deep, but our seas still retain much of their mystery, and there have been more men on the surface of the moon than at the bottom of the ocean. So how should we understand the sea, the lonely sea and the sky? With me to discuss the science that is attempted to plummet as the historian of oceanography,

Margaret Deacon, until recently visiting research fellow at Southampton Oceanography Centre, and author of Scientists and the Sea. Also with us is Tony Rice, biological oceanographer and author of Deep Ocean, and Simon Schaffer, reader in history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Darwin College. Simon Schaffer, the Royal Society, was set up to investigate questions of science under Charles II's patronage in 1620. How important a part of that society's business was it to understand the sea?

I think the sea plays enormously significant role in the work of the early Royal Society, right through from its foundation in the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 17th century. And one obvious reason for that is just how important maritime affairs were for the welfare of the kingdom. so that if you look at what fellows of the Royal Society were doing, their interests range right across military, commercial, and what we might now call more properly scientific interests, the movements of fish, of tides, of how to improve navigation, how to design ships better.

One fellow of the Royal Society even proposed building catamaranes because they sail better even in the English Channel. And he named one of these catamaran's, HMS experiment in honour of the link between the Navy and science. What's interesting, too, is the way in which the work of the early fellows of the Royal Society on maritime affairs played such an important role in what I suppose we could call their advertising campaign. Fellows could point to improvements in navigation and mapping as palpable examples of how the cultivation of natural knowledge could actually aid commerce and war.

So it was a very early example, or quite an early example, and a very effective one at the start, I'll say it seemed to be, of the establishment getting in, and for practical reasons, which are based on commerce and military reasons, actually finding that science was a handmaiden and an enabler, that conjunction, because James I first, sorry, James the second, was deeply interested in matters of the sea, the top scientists were called in the top scientists of the day,

and they were driving it forward. But that was a very neat combination, wasn't it? Yes, I mean, as usual, there were many anxieties about whether this was more apparent than real. It wasn't immediately obvious in the 17th century whether or not all these schemes would actually pay off. There was already an enormous amount of practical experience and lore in how better to sail ships, how better to navigate, how the tides move. there's also a sense then of natural philosophers and astronomers catching up with what practical folk already knew. And I think that's also an important theme in the history of marine science.

Sailors and fishermen often know more and better than self-styled experts. And one of the keys to the history of marine science, I suspect, is how better to ally different kinds. kinds of expertise together. But it's still interesting, just to pursue this point, that for commercial and military reasons, science was driven and to, in a sense, what could say, using the 1066th language, to a good end, really, wasn't it? Yes, that's surely right.

I mean, it's been argued by some historians of oceanography, that oceanography, almost of all science, has been most closely allied to the interests and patronage of the state, and I think that's a very interesting point. Margaret Dickett, what kind of assumptions about the sea was the Royal Society trying to challenge your supplement, or what gap did it discover? Well, there was very little in scientific literature when they began their experiments and observations. As Simon said, they learnt from seafarers, and some of their early research programs are based on suggestions made by navigators.

for example, the very interesting question, was there a current in the strait of Gibraltar? It had been known for a very long time that there is a perpetual current from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean, and also a lot of rivers flow into the Mediterranean through the Black Sea and the Nile, and there was no visible outflow.

So where did all this water go? I mean, this was a very interesting philosophical question, which had been described and attacked for a long time, but not in a particularly scientific way. sort of speculated about. A lot of these debates go back to the Middle Ages and quite possibly beyond. And another thing that

they learnt was that sailors, and this was the practical people, had discovered or thought they had discovered and had evidence for the existence of an undercurrent, which was actually carrying water out of the Mediterranean. But the scientists

didn't like this idea. They thought, no, we can't explain an undercurrent. It's against nature. There must be other explanations, you know, perhaps it's evaporation by the sun. It's in a hot part of the world. So perhaps the excess water disappears that way. Or perhaps it disappears through one of these tunnels in the floor that you were referring to earlier.

Simon suggested, and so did you, and as I've read for this programme, that there was, as we would all say, from Ulysses onwards or before Ulysses, their local law intensely known by people whose lives, as well as livelihoods depended on knowing what the currents were around the coast where they fished or where they set off for war and that sort of thing. That must have been intense local knowledge. One must imagine very accurate indeed.

Now, was there a sense in which the Royal Society acknowledges that and collected that? Well, how they went about it was not so much in this particular area to collect existing law. They also went back to ideas that they could find in the classical texts and people like Aristotle, there were assumptions about, for example, what causes the sea to be sold. And so they were looking at these ideas. They were trying to collect information, but how they did this was to actually prepare questionnaires.

And they did these for travellers generally going to different countries so that they could get information about the countries, about their politics, their natural resources and customs. And they also did it for the sea. and they issued these to travellers who are going to different places by ship, people who are leading naval expeditions. They were particularly interested, as Simon said, in tides.

And so they would encourage individual members or the wider scientific community, people who weren't necessarily FRS's, but who were interested in this new movement. I've got to bring in Turner, I saw people won't think he's here at all. We'll come back to that if I may. Why did you think the sea seems to be very important, as Simon Schaever said at the top of the program,

for the enlightenment mindset, if we can use that word? Can we just rummage around that a little bit more? Yeah, well, not being an expert on the 17th century, I have to be pretty careful here, but on the other hand, I think one of the things that Simon said, is business of the sort of juxtaposition of commercial interest with scientific interest is an interesting one. My impression was that one of the things that prompted some of the early men, members of the Royal Society, to be particularly interesting in the city,

was that the study of such phenomena as tides would actually help them to understand cosmology, understand the system as a whole, not just our system. So that was another reason that was very valid. Coming back to your point about the use of amateurs, if you like, that's not past. That's still going on today,

and certainly was very important in the middle years of the last century in understanding, certainly shallow water, I'm not talking about the deep sea now, but understanding, for example, aspects of fisheries which are extremely important and always have been. So the knowledge of people who earn their living in that medium, but not as scientists, is still, and I suspect always will be extremely important.

Can we just talk, Simon, about the importance of tides, which are obviously very... Why do you think they were so important? And one of the things that is it that is amusing is that when Newton's great book came out, Prinkiaaa, probably the thing that were most excited about, was that it might give them the solution to tides. It didn't give them solutions they wanted, but it might do that.

But why was, can you say why they thought it was so important in the beginning of the Royal Society? Yes, I mean, I think it's absolutely true. Tides matter to the cosmos. It wasn't obvious to everybody in the 17th century that that was true. So that, for example, when Galileo in the start of the 17th century first encountered the idea that some people already had that the moon might be called, causing the tides. Galileo thought that was old-fashioned astrology and completely rejected the idea because it looked like magic. So the cosmic significance of the motion of all the seas on

the earth was absolutely obvious already in the 17th century. And what Newton proposes as a research project to himself is can one show how the behavior of a globe would be if it was entire, covered with water. Newton understood pretty well that it was rather unfortunate that not all the earth was covered with water and therefore it was much more difficult to do the calculations, or at least to match his theory of universal gravitation to the actual behavior of the tides themselves. Newton, of course, never saw the sea. He was from Lincolnshire. He went to college in Cambridge. He lived in London. He was never on an ocean-going vessel, and he was probably never on the beach, despite the famous remark about picking up pebbles.

And it's a demonstration in that sense of the power of analytical mechanics and mathematics to say useful and important things. But the most important thing about Newton's theory of the tides is that it shows so well the problems of trusting other folks' data. There is some phenomena that Newton's tidal theory seeks to explain, which aren't actually phenomena at all, but which were widely reported stories in London taverns, presumably, that Newton incorporated into his theory. That would be such as?

Well, for example, the extraordinary behaviour of the sea around the Straits of McGillen, which was widely exaggerated, that's the straits at the southern end of South America, which was widely exaggerated, Traveller's Tales, so that Newton was quite often forced to derive numbers where the numbers were being given to him by folk that maybe he shouldn't have trusted. In this development, Margaret Deacon, the idea of longitude has been well discussed in this country over the last two, three years because of the very successful book on the subject in Harrison's invention.

But that we can't not refer to it. So briefly, how did that invention of that sea-going chronometer affect shenography? Well, there were two methods of measuring longitude. There was the lunar distance one, which really sort of came. They came pretty well at the same time, and then chronometers were more successful and easier. And these methods were first used widely by Captain Cook, who's the name most associated with the development.

There was a whole range of circumstances. It wasn't just longitude, put in crude terms, before the middle of the 18th century and Cook's voyages which came in the latter part of that century any voyage encountered an enormous range of hazards and part of them were to do with navigation

that you literally, once you were out of sight of land, didn't know where you were because you couldn't measure time accurately on a ship and the astronomical methods were fine as long as you were sailing along a latitude sort of going east-west or west-east, but north-south, sorry, other way around, north-south, it was okay. You could measure the altitude of stars and somethings like that. East-west, it was very difficult.

Terrible things happened in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, you know, sort of ships, whole fleets were wrecked. In the Pacific, which has a huge ocean, was very little in the way of natural features, tiny islands, which if your navigation isn't spot on, you may sail right past without seeing because they're low in the water. So you get these early 18th century expeditions, both naval and exploratory, suffering terrible hazards of starvation, illnesses caused by nutritional deficiencies,

of which the Gervy was only one, they're possibly the worst. So going to sea was a very hazardous enterprise, and people were really, I think, sort of concentrating on getting to where they wanted to go and staying alive, and they didn't really have much sort of aptitude or wish to do science. By the latter part of the century, it's become what I think has been referred to as, the whole thing changed.

You could see where you were going, you could plan where you were going. They began to solve in a pragmatic rather than an understanding way, the problems related with nutrition, say that Cook, lost men on his first voyage through disease in the East Indies but had virtually no problem with scurvy at all. He didn't understand, as we do today, what the real causes were, but he just took every eventuality to protect his men. It worked.

So you had people now with the leisure and the energy to collect scientific information. And of course, on his first voyage he took Sir Joseph. Banks, who's an almost important figure in this respect. It's been called possibly the beginning of the Grand Tour of the Pacific rather as the grand tour

to the countries of Europe that the sort of noble and wealthy youngsters would take during the ageing... It brings biology in after geography, doesn't it really. We're bringing specimens back and we're looking at plant lives of not only the sea but other places in the world, in this case, South seas and the search for breadfruit and all that sort of thing.

So it brings about, in the 19th century, Tony Rice, with this unrivaled navy we had after the Napoleonic Wars, in a sense almost partly to do with giving them something to do. Absolutely. Away they went on various expeditions. And the polar explorations were very important. And as Margaret's indicated, we began to switch from commerce and geography to biology as well. Can you just tell us what, before we come to challenge it, what was happening in the 19th century, what the Navy was finding out? Well, first of all, they'll go back very briefly to the last half of the 18th century, as Margaret pointed out,

the problems of navigation by the time you get to Cook are now more or less solved. And as a result, by the end of that century, the broad outline of the geography of the Earth was pretty well known. Remember that one of Cook's objectives, for example, was to search for what was called Terra Incognita. there was thought to be an enormous landmass in the south, southern half of the earth, to balance the enormous landmass that we all lived on in the north. Of course it wasn't there. There was this other rather sterile or difficult landmass, Antarctica.

Anyway, by the end of the century, by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, that was pretty well worked out. What wasn't known was a good deal about the interior of some of the continents. Consequently, the first intention was to use the unemployed navy, would you believe, to investigate Africa. An attempt was made sailing up the Congo or the River Zaire to find out what the situation with the great rivers like the Niger and the Nile

in the interior of Africa were. That was 1815, actually just before the war ended. It was a total and utter disaster. Almost everybody died. So Sir John Barrow, the second secretary of the Admiralty, whose responsibility basically was to convince the government not to sack all his officers, thought of another ruse. and the ruse was, let's go to the polls.

And let's look, introducing commerce again, let's first look for the old Northwest Passage, which had, of course, been an objective 200 years before with Hudson and Baffin and people like that. Never found it. Of course, we still haven't got one, but that was what was the first expedition in 1818 after. So how much have, the one happened in the 1870s,

there was this great voyage of the Challenger. Now it's been compared to the space probes. It lasted five years. 68,000 nautical miles. Goodness knows how many stations, stops and so on. It was massive and unprecedented, and the consequences, I believe, are still with us. It was a magnificent enterprise.

Can you just give people the size of that and the scope of it and why it's important? I think it's quite difficult for us to think back to just how much this mattered, this great, clearly, scientific voyage. That's the first point. 1872. 22-7, yeah. Six. Yeah.

It's one of the things that I think really does need emphasis is that it's a dedicated voyage. That is to say, naval resources are being used, not mainly, but almost solely for putatively scientific ends. And that speaks to the rapidly emerging power of what can to be called the science lobby in high Victorian England. Men like Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog, a professor in London, a brilliant physiologist, himself the veteran of a naval voyage into the South Seas on HMS Rattlesnake back in the 1840s. He and his allies understood extremely well that the Navy was likely to be interested in many of the data that marine science could produce. It would help with navigation and oceanographic mapping. But at the same time, they also understood extremely well as great scientists do, that one has to think up very good reasons for spending so much money over such a long period. The point about science being that it's not just the finding but the publishing that always matters. And the Challenger voyage and all the samples that it collected and all the maps that it made occupy more than four dozen large volumes.

It took another 30 to 40 years of work after the voyage fully to compile, analyze and catalogue all the results on marine organisms, tides and winds and currents that they found. And perhaps the most important thing is that it helped forge a genuine. international community of experts interested in marine science. It's really a whole project that begins to see the internationalisation of a genuine community of marine science. And remember, the idea of giving the data, the specimens to foreigners at the time, went down like a lead balloon with the British scientific establishment. They didn't want to. This was British material collected by a British naval.

ship and belonged to us. It was Sir John Murray who will ultimately supervise the publication of the results who took this stand. But going back also to the origins of the voyage, the voyage cost altogether about 200,000 pounds at the time. That's big money, something like 20 million now, certainly compared with space research small, but it's reckoned to be the first example of big science. It would not have taken place had science been the science been the only excuse for it. It was also because the Navy, the Hydrographic Office, was being asked for more and more information about the nature of the bottom of the sea, particularly in relation to the new technology of submarine telegraph cable laying.

That's what drove it in the end. Cables were being laid across the Atlantic at great expense, and the last thing they wanted to do was to more all to break because we didn't know what the bottom was like. Is it too Panglossian to say this was the challenger was a very good example? of something which brought prestige to this country, brought it great scientific knowledge, and empowered it in straightforward ways, like we knew better how to lay cables, we knew more about oceans, so our ship's good.

Is that those three things come together? Absolutely, absolutely. But do remember, one of the things that Simon said was the challenge, it was also at the beginning of really international science. In fact, one of the scientists on the challenge was a man called Rudolf von Filimo, a German.

actually died during the voyage, would you believe, of erysipolis, which is now a sort of disease restricted to pigs, I understand. But anyway, he was brought aboard as one of the scientists, and this was the first time that an international complexion to a big scientific project that's taking place. So yes, the Challenger did bring back a great deal of information and prestige to the UK, but it also brought that knowledge to the international community.

Because remember that... Why didn't we keep it for ourselves, and sort of get ahead would be the churlish, churlish, I mean, I don't know who would say that sort of thing. But why didn't we? Well, we didn't because the people involved, some of the big names involved, were thinking bigger than that.

There were a lot of small minds who weren't. Sorry? No. So we didn't, and thank the Lord, we didn't, because within 20 years of the end of the Challenger expedition, things were happening on a much broader international scale with the International Council of the Seas which became a very important element

in the understanding of things like fisheries and so. In the last few minutes, I want to talk about the bottom of the ocean. There's an 11,000 metres below the surface of Atlantic Ocean. That's supposed to be the deepest, but a couple of people have only been there once, but there is a bottom of the ocean, a bit more of its, less of it, 11,000 metres. Now, that's the interesting thing about the bottom of the ocean,

is so much is going on when it seems from what we had known until we discovered that so much was going on, that nothing should be going on at all. Now, can you unravel that in a sensible way, Simon Schaffer, please? I think there's, as you've said, and as we've said right through the conversation, there are two different prejudices going on here.

I mean, one is the thought which everyone must have, that deep in the ocean, it's cold and dark, and therefore lifeless and uninteresting and inert. one might call that the telegraphers dream, because if that's true, then laying deep sea cables on the ocean floor should be nice and safe. But there's also, I think, very widely distributed in our culture, and it becomes extremely important precisely in the period of the challenger.

The idea of the ocean is warm soup, so that the coming of Darwinism in the middle of the 19th century are with spokesman for Darwinism like Huxley and his German allies begins to describe the ocean not as cold and inert and lifeless but as where life comes from so that for example for Huxley himself

he had a very powerfully worked out theory that the slime that could be found right across the ocean floor which he named in honour of his German colleague Ernst Heckel not entirely put politely is the substance from which all life has evolved. So at the biological level, one sees this in Jules Verne's stories, one sees this in stories of the crock and the ocean floor is a place of unknowable and overwhelming organic activity is perhaps

at least as important as the idea of the ocean as inert. And I think what's interesting about current oceanographic models of the ocean floor is the way in which it tends to confirm and celebrate this idea of a vital ocean floor. Not only that, but for me with sort of more expertise, as we said, in astronomy than in oceanography, the idea that the very extreme conditions one sees on the ocean floor in vents, for example, where the water is at extraordinary pressure and one gets volcanic eruptions undersea,

which produce very high temperatures and very high pressures, that those environments might well sustain a high, host of organic life forms and that one could use them to make an interesting analogy with life on other planets so that one can think precisely of

life in extreme conditions on the ocean floor as something like a sign of the fantastic range of environments in which life itself can survive and I think in a way this brings up a complete

circle in a sense Simon was just touching on these volcanic eruptions at the bottom of the sea and the extreme conditions. Hydrothermal vents, the ones that lots of us have seen pictures on the television of, these fantastic communities of animals living around water which is gushing out from beneath the surface of the seafloor at the ridges at 400 degrees centigrade. It doesn't boil at that temperature because of the enormous pressure,

bringing with it complex of chemicals. It supports communities which don't depend upon the energy from sea light, depend upon the energy from chemicals. These fantastic areas are thought possibly to be those where life originated. Now, these are waters gushing out from tunnels in the bottom of the sea. What did we start talking about? An idea in the 17th century that there might be tunnels in the bottom of the sea. Boy, we know there are.

Thank you all very much, and thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at bbc.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.