Partido State University Sangay Campus

Module 1 for BSF2

OVERVIEW OF OCEANOGRAPHY
Name of Student:_________ Week Number: Week 1
Course Code:PCF4 Name of Faculty: Redentor L. Buetre
Course Tittle: Oceanography

I.Learning Outcomes

1.Familiarize the meaning of Oceanography and its branches

2.Understand the importance of Oceanography
3. Familiarize the history of Oceanography
4. Familiarize the trend in oceanography and identify specific issues and challenges

II.Lessons
Oceanography meaning and its branches
Oceanography is the application of all science to the phenomena of the ocean. The key word
in this definition is all, for to truly understand the ocean and how it works, one should know
something about almost all fields of science and their relationships to the marine science.
Thus oceanography is not a single science but rather a combination of various sciences. Branch
s of Oceanography (Garrison and Ellis 2014):

1. Chemical oceanography- is concerned with chemical reactions that occur both in the ocean
and on the seafloor.
2. Biological Oceanography-involves the study of the distribution and environmental aspects
of life in the ocean.
3. Pysical Oceanography-concerned with the changes and motion of sea water.
4. Geological Oceanography- studies sediments and topography of the ocean floor.
5. Marine geophysics- deal with the deeper structure of the ocean floor and its physical
properties.
6.Ocean Engineering-concerned with the development of technology for oceanographic
research and exploitation.
7.Marine Policy- application of social and political sciences such as economics, law, and policy
toward the use and management.

Importances of oceanography:
Why study the ocean?
1 .By studying ocean sediments we can learn about ancient climate and how it changed, and
thus better understand our present climate.
2. The ocean is an important source of some commercially valuable chemical resources
including iodine, bromine, potassium, magnesium manganese and other elements. Studies on
the whereabouts of these resources in the ocean are needed for developing technologies that
will make them available to the industries.
3. The ocean play an important role in influencing the weather and climatic patters of the earth.
Effects of weather and climate dynamics as influence by oceanic motions are important input in
mitigating the demographic and socio economic impact to human as well as biological impact to
animals by these athmospheric processes
4. Desalination of ocean water is increasingly yielding important amounts of fresh water in arid
areas of the world .Sea floor mineral accumulation like phosphorite, manganese nodules,
heavy Metal rich muds, sand, and gravel are valuable commodities that in some instances are
already being exploited. Research on these are scarce.
5. Over 90 percent of the trade between countries is carried by ships;beneath the ocean, cables
link the communication networks of the world countries. The seas have been a battlefieled for
much of our history, and some of todays oceanic research is concerned with national defense.
Maritime policies could hardly made without basic understanding or input from oceanography
especially physical oceanography
6. The ocean is important for recreation; the sports of fishing, boating, water skiing, scuba
diving and swimming attract ever greater number of persons each year. This latter aspects
underscores one of the major problems facing human pollution, which if not controlled can
make some of these activities things of the past. Assesment of anthropogenic impacts on the
ocean such as dumping and fishing is important type of studies
Garrison and Ellis (2014) and Ross (1982).
History of Oceanography

The early study of the sea was usually motivated by a practical rather than an abstract curiosity
about the ocean. One simply wanted to go from one place to another in a short time as possible.
Therefore the beginning of oceanography is closely connected with people early thoughts about
geography and the development of trade. The Indian Ocean was the first ocean used for trade but the
last to be explored in detail. A condition exists in the Indian Ocean that makes it uniquely suitable for
sailing vessels. During the summer monsoon season, the wind blows from the southwest; During the
winter monsoon season, it blows from the northeast. Thus vessels with the simplest square rigged sails
could travel across the entire ocean in one season and return in the next. After the fall of the Roman
Empire, trade decreased, and during the dark ages most of the knowledge men had acquired about the
sea was lost.

After the early 1500s one had to accept the fact that the earth was round, not flat. Magellans
voyage around the world (1519-1522) proved this without a doubt. He also may have been the first to
attempt a sounding in the deep sea. Magellan used a sounding line of only 100 or 200 fathoms (182 to
364 m) in length in the Pacific and did not reach bottom. He thus concluded that this was the deepest
part
of the ocean. Actually a more successful sounding attempts may have been made 16 centuries before
Magellan. Posidonius who was born about 135 B.C. claimed that the sea near Sardinia had been
sounded to a depth of about 1,000 fathoms (1,828 m). Unfortunately, there is little information about
the methods
he used.

Some of the basic characteristics of the ocean, such as the fact that deeper waters are generally
cooler than surface water and that salinity is fairly constant, where known by the end of the sixteenth
century. One of the most successful of the early explorers was Captain James Cook, who early in his
career became known as an excellent sailor, astronomer, and mathematician. Because of these talents
he was chosen in 1768 to lead an expedition aboard the Endeavour to the South Pacific for an
astronomical study. After his last voyage (1776-1779) the broad general outlines of the oceans were
known and only Antarctica remained to be discovered. However, the depth and character of the sea
floor were still generally unknown.

Attempts at sounding the ocean depths by using a long line were made by Ellis in 1749,
by Mulgrave in 1773, and by Soresby in 1817. The first real success however was by sir John
Ross in 1818;he obtained a sounding and a mud sample from a depth of 1,050 fathoms in Baffin
Bay west of Greenland.Sir Clark Ross (Sir John nephew) during an Antarctic expedition obtained
soundings of 2,425 fathoms in the South Atlantic and 2,677 fathoms off of the Cape of Good
Hope. The art of sounding was advanced by a device built by midshipman Brooke of the US
Navy in 1854;at the end of the sounding line attached a detachable weight that dropped off
when the line hit the bottom. The weight dropping off the linemade it easier to detect when the
sounding line reached the bottom. It was not until 1925 with the Meteor Expedition, that
soundings were routinely and continuously made across the ocean. The Meteor measured
depth electronically and did not have to stop for each measurement.
Oceanographic research in the United States can be considered to have started in 1770
when Benjamin Franklin published his map of Gulf Stream. Franklin concluded correctly that a
northest bound flowing current along the east coast of the United States must be responsible
for the relatively faster travel time of ships sailing to Europe than returning from Europe. A
significant early contributor to American oceanography was Matthew Fontaine Maurry of the
US Navy. Maury used data from the logbooks of ships that had crossed the Atlantic to establish
the relationship between currents and oceanic weather. He published his findings in 1855 in a
book called the Physical Geography of the Sea.

In other nation, an important, although not strictly oceanographic, expedition was the
voyage of the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, with the young naturalist Charles Darwin aboard.
Darwins findings about the evolution and other aspect of the natural world stimulated other
scientists to explore the ocean further. Another important contributor to the developing field of
oceanography was the English biologist Edward Forbes.Forbes is generally considered to be the
initiator of the field of biological oceanography. Unfortunately however he is best known for
one of his errors when he suggested that the ocean was divided into two main zones based on
its content of life. He felt that the upper zone, from the surface to about depth of 548 meters,
contained essentially all the life to be found in the ocean. The lower, or azoic zone he thought
to be devoid of life. The reasoning was generally based on the assumption that light would not
penetrate below this depth. This hypothesis had several difficulties including the fact that the
living organisms had already been dredged up from the azoic zone. Neverthelesss Forbes
prestige and the support of his student were sufficient to keep his hypothesis alive until the
late 1870s even though he died in 1854.

Numerous oceanographic expeditions were taking place in the 1850 to 1870 interval
but the beginning of deep sea research is generally thought to have started with the Challenger
Expedition under the direction of Sir Charles Wyville Thomson. This expedition
circumnavigated the world and collected data on weather currents water temperature, water
composition, marine organisms and bottom sediments. More than 4,700 species of marine life
were discovered (An amazing average of about 5 new species for each day spent at the sea.
Modern oceanography is thought to have begun in 1925 with the work of Meteor
expedition in southern atlantic. This expedition made one the first detailed studies of a
particular part of ocean.. The meteor made 14 crossings of the South Atlantic in a 25 months
interval. Collecting data day and night through all weather and seasons. Meteor was one of the
first to use an electronic echosounder to measure ocean depths, gathering more than 70,000
soundings of the ocean. The results of these soundings clearly revealed the rugged ness of the
ocean floor. During the time of the Meteor expedition and in following years, oceanography
became an accepted science. It was also during this period that many large US marine
laboratories were established like Scripps Institutions of Oceanography in California, followed
by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Oceanography expanded rapidly following Worls
War II, partly as a result of advances in technology, military uses of the ocean, and some
disasters. By the 1960s much oceanographic research was being done on an international scale
with the participation of many countries (Ross 1982).

Trend in Oceanography

The future will see large scale research studies such as deep sea drilling projects but
emphasis may be more on applied problems like climate on the ocean resources especially
fisheries resources(impact on fish survival and recruitment and how the impact could be
mitigated) energy from the sea (its utilization and development of corresponding technology) ,
and environmental concerns (impact to ocean flora and fauna, and how to asses and address
the problems in the context of global and regional scale .
(https://doi.org/10.567/oceanog.2014.14.1 )(http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2014.83),
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ nclimate2119) ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-2979.2008.00315.x ) (,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsu159), ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1111322.)
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1958), (, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1095-8649.2010.02783.x )(
http://dx.doi.org/ 10.5670/oceanog.2010.09), ( http://www.nap.edu.oceanography in the next decade

III.Activities
Do internet searching of the following photos and submit :
1.World map (Mercator projection and Robinson Planisphere projection)
2. Beagle Ship Expedition
3.Challenger Ship Expedition
4.Meteor Ship Expedition
Choose one link under trend in oceanography and make one page paper analysis

IV.Assesment
1.What are the branches of oceanography
2.What are the importances of Oceanography?
3.Summarized briefly the history of oceanography
 4.Give the future trends of Oceanography and identify example of specific issues and challenges

V.Suggested References
Browman, H.I. 2014. Commemorating 100 years since Hjort’s 1914 treatise on fluctuations in the great
fisheries of northern Europe: Where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. ICES Journal
of Marine Science 71:1,989–1,992, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsu159.

Barange, M., G. Merino, J.L. Blanchard, J. Scholtens, J. Harle, E.H. Allison, J.I. Allen, J. Holt, and
S. Jennings. 2014. Impacts of climate change on marine ecosystem production in societies dependent on
fisheries. Nature Climate Change 4:211–216, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ nclimate2119.

Bograd, S.J., E.L. Hazen, E.A. Howell, and A.B. Hollowed. 2014. The fate of fisheries oceanography:
Introduction to the special issue. Oceanography 27(4):21–25,
http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2014.83.

Cheung, W.W., V.W. Lam, J.L. Sarmiento, K. Kearney, R. Watson, and D. Pauly. 2009. Projecting global
marine biodiversity impacts under climate change scenarios. Fish and Fisheries 10:235–251,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-2979.2008.00315.x

Garrison T. and Ellis R. 2014. Oceanography. An invitation to Marine Science. National

Geographic Learning
Historical and Future Trends in Ocean Climate and Biogeochemistry” in Oceanography 27
(1):108-119 ,https://doi.org/10.567/oceanog.2014.14.1
Mohammad H., 2016 .History of Oceanography.Research Gate,http//:DOI 13140/RG.2.2.2.2925.74726

Perry, A.L., P.J. Low, J.R. Ellis, and J.D. Reynolds. 2005. Climate change and distribution shifts in marine
fishes. Science 308:1,912–1,915, http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1111322.

Pinsky, M.L., B. Worm, M.J. Fogarty, J.L. Sarmiento, and S.A. Levin. 2013. Marine taxa track local climate
velocities. Science 341:1,239–1,242, http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1239352

. Poloczanska, E.S., C.J. Brown, W.J. Sydeman, W. Kiessling, D.S. Schoeman, P.J. Moore, K. Brander, J.F.
Bruno, L.B. Buckley, and M.T. Burrows. 2013. Global imprint of climate change on marine life. Nature
Climate Change 3:919–925, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1958

, . Pörtner, H.-O., and M. Peck. 2010. Climate change effects on fishes and fisheries: Towards a cause-
and-effect understanding. Journal of Fish Biology 77:1,745–1,779, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1095-
8649.2010.02783.x

Ross D. 1982. Introduction to Oceanography

Yoder, J.A., S.C. Doney, D.A. Siegel, and C. Wilson. 2010. Study of marine ecosystems and
biogeochemistry now and in the future: Examples of the unique contributions from space.
Oceanography 23(4):104–117, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.5670/oceanog.2010.09.

Prepared By Redentor Buetre

Faculty