Institution marks 60 years of ocean exploration

WOODS HOLE, Mass. — Beginning in 1930, with a $3 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and a small ship called Atlantis, scientists began exploring the mysteries of the ocean from this tiny seaport at one corner of Cape Cod.

Since then, oceanographers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have discovered vast underwater mountain ranges, strange life forms in the Galapagos Islands, hot water springs miles beneath the ocean surface and even the RMS Titanic.

Even the movie “Jaws” featured Richard Dreyfuss in the starring role as a scientist from Woods Hole called in for his expertise on the great white shark.

But even after 60 years of exhaustive research, experimentation and technology, scientists at Woods Hole have only seen 1 percent of the ocean floor.

One percent? This from a nation that sent men to the moon two decades ago? Scientists at Woods Hole will tell you that time and money would be better spent here.

“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. We need to look inward.”

The success of the scientists at Woods Hole, many of whom are like modern-day explorers literally plumbing the ocean’s depths, is remarkable given the lack of glamour attached to oceanography and the scarcity of funds available for research.

The government spends about $390 million in oceanographic research annually. In contrast, President Bush proposed this year a $15.2 billion budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“Perhaps we aren’t as good as 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 scientists down to the ocean’s average depth of 12,000 feet as it is to send astronauts into space. The incredible pressure exerted at lower depths and the total absence of light make the construction of underwater vehicles and other technology laborious and expensive.

But the marine biologists, geologists, engineers, divers, lab technicians, chemists, physicists, and many others who comprise the 900 employees at Woods Hole believe that many of the solutions to the world’s environmental crisis may lie beneath the ocean surface.

Those solutions take different forms. Some scientists spend their days poring over data that will explain why certain clams get leukemia. Others have recently developed special sonar that distinguish images in the pitch black 10,000 feet below the surface.

Woods Hole is the largest private oceanographic institute in the world and relies mostly on grants. About 80 percent of the grants are from the federal government. Unlike its West Coast counterpart, the state university-affiliated Scripps Institute in La Jolla, Calif., Woods Hole does not receive state money. It has an operating budget of $67 million per year.

As a result, Woods Hole scientists have been likened to entrepreneurs, each in charge of their own destiny and relying on their creativity and vision to come up with successful grant proposals. About 500 proposals are submitted each year. Many of them are accepted.