Woods Hole’s Enterprising Scientists Dive Deep to Find Oceans’ Secrets
Beginning in 1930, with $3 million from the Rockefeller Foundation and a small ship called Atlantis, scientists began exploring the ocean from this tiny seaport at a corner of Cape Cod.
Since then, oceanographers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have found vast underwater mountain ranges, strange life forms in the Galapagos Islands, hot springs miles beneath the surface--and even the Titanic.
In the movie “Jaws,” Richard Dreyfuss played a marine expert called in from Woods Hole to outwit the great white shark.
After 60 years of exhaustive research, experimentation and technology, scientists at Woods Hole can say, with pride, that man has now seen 1% of the ocean floor.
This from a nation that sent men to the moon more than 20 years ago? Scientists at Woods Hole will tell you that time and money would be better spent here on the planet.
“It’s much more important that we use the tremendous technology we have to understand ourselves,” said John Steele, a senior scientist at Woods Hole and former director of the institution. “We have major scientific problems as well as social concerns here on Earth.”
The success at Woods Hole is remarkable, given the lack of glamour attached to oceanography and the scarcity of funds available for research.
The government spends about $390 million a year on oceanographic research. President Bush proposed this year a $15.2-billion space agency budget.
“Perhaps we aren’t as good at selling ourselves as NASA,” said Steele, “but we also all had, even scientists, the mistaken belief that the bottom of the ocean was flat and uninteresting.
“Without the capabilities of Woods Hole and other institutions, we wouldn’t understand the Gulf Stream and why it’s important to problems of climate. We wouldn’t have made wonderful discoveries under the sea bed and we wouldn’t have appreciated the marine life in the deep ocean.”
It can be as tricky to send a scientist down to the ocean’s average depth of 12,000 feet as it is to send an astronaut into space. The incredible pressure and darkness make the construction of underwater vehicles and laboratories laborious and expensive.
The marine biologists, geologists, engineers, divers, technicians, chemists, physicists and others who make up the Woods Hole staff of 900 believe that many solutions to the environmental crisis may be found beneath the ocean surface.
Woods Hole is the largest private oceanographic institute in the world. It is supported mostly by grants, about 80% of which come from the federal government. Unlike its California counterpart, the state university-affiliated Scripps Institute in La Jolla, Woods Hole does not receive state money. It has an operating budget of $67 million a year.
As a result, Woods Hole scientists have been likened to entrepreneurs, each in charge of his or her destiny and relying on individual creativity and vision to come up with successful grant proposals.
Of Woods Hole’s 350 projects, one of the most eagerly anticipated is the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, a 10-year, $100-million global study that will track how the ocean influences climate over periods longer than weather forecasts of a few weeks.
Scientists from the Soviet Union, China, Brazil, Britain, France, Spain, Australia and other nations began gathering at Woods Hole more than three years ago to map the project.
“The ocean plays a significant role in determining the impact of the greenhouse effect,” said Terrence Joyce, a senior scientist at Woods Hole who is directing the hydrographic program for the World Ocean Circulation Experiment. “WOCE will give us an idea of how the ocean affects climate change and allow us to better predict the future.”
Woods Hole, or WHOI (locals and employees call it “Hooey”), has been on the vanguard of marine science since its inception. It was founded after the National Academy of Sciences recommended that an oceanographic lab be established on the East Coast.
The Woods Hole “campus” dominates this small town on a spit of land off the southwestern corner of Cape Cod. The large brick buildings of Woods Hole line the village’s main street, with water on both sides.
The institute has four large laboratories and a variety of smaller buildings in the village of Woods Hole and on the 200-acre Quissett campus nearby. There is a graduate degree program for future oceanographers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Work at sea is conducted aboard three large research vessels, a smaller coastal vessel and the Alvin, a three-seat, deep-water submersible.
During World War II, Woods Hole researchers developed anti-fouling paint, which keeps barnacles from adhering to the hulls of boats, and the bathythermograph, which measures and records temperature layers in the ocean.
Since 1964, scientists at Woods Hole have been able to penetrate the ocean frontier with the aid of Alvin, which has made more than 2,000 dives all over the world and can go down to 13,000 feet.
Alvin’s most dramatic early mission was reminiscent of the film “Dr. Strangelove.” In 1966, two military planes collided over Spain and a hydrogen bomb fell into the Mediterranean Sea. Alvin pilots found the device and then relocated it after it slipped down a steep slope during a recovery attempt.
In 1974, Alvin joined Project FAMOUS, a French-American undersea study, and collected the first photographs and samples of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
It was Woods Hole’s Robert Ballard, host of the National Geographic “Explorer” series on television, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985. Ballard found the German battleship Bismarck last year. “Woods Hole tends to support high-risk people more than a public institution would,” said Ballard. “It’s very comparable to private industry versus the government. There’s a greater risk if you fail, but it lets you try .”
