Oceanography Test Review

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Vikings – Trade routes through Europe down to Africa, ventured west to Iceland, Greenland, and North America due to period of warming that opened northern sea routes. All this during the ‘dark ages’ in most of Europe.

Vespucci- America needed a name anyway, so let’s name it after this guy who is credited with realizing that South America was a ‘new’ continent.

Balboa – Not Rocky. Took a small crew and some small boats overland across the Isthmus of Panama to be the first European to sail the Pacific, which he names due to its peaceful appearance.

Harrison – Crazy English hillbilly who built the first successful chronometer (a clock that works at sea with its rough conditions.) Allowed sailors to calculate longitude easily and reliably.

United States Exploring Expedition-First major US scientific voyage. 1838. Captained by a young Mr. Wilkes, they are credited with proving (by seeing it) the existence of Antarctica. PS. The French think they found it first.

Matthew Maury- Virginia boy, hurt early in life, so he devoted his career to studying currents and navigation. Wrote the first modern oceanography textbook. Resigned his commission with the US Navy when the civil war broke out, headed CSN coastal defenses and worked for peace while seeking aid for the Confederacy. Has a statue on Monument, and then there is Maury Street on the Southside!

Charles Darwin – Chief naturalist on the HMS Beagle. Evolution of species, whatever. Important to us because of theory about atoll (ring-shaped coral island) formation. The land sinks, but the coral continues to grow upwards toward the surface.

The first H.M.S. Challenger expedition - First soundings >4000m (the average depth of the ocean), studied life in the middle and deep parts of the ocean, like the bottom. Found the Marianas Trench (by luck? With soundings every 140 miles or so and an average width of 43 miles, I’d say so!) Collected and described over 4700 new species. Huge amount of new data collected, published

In 50 volumes and 29.500 pages!

The Meteor expedition – German boat, mapped the Atlantic Ocean with the new-fangled SONAR. Crossed the Atlantic 14 times in two years. Studied currents, nutrient flow, and plankton growth

The Atlantis – First U.S. ship purpose-built for marine scientific exploration.

The H.M.S. Challenger II expedition – Used the newish technology of SONAR (SOund Navigation And Ranging) to map the Marianas Trench, and in doing so, located the deepest place on Earth, naming it the Challenger Deep after the Challenger Expedition mentioned earlier

ROV-Remotely Operated Vehicle: tethered to a mothership, operated by a human. Safer for many jobs formerly done by divers

AUV-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle: directs its own actions, can

be out to sea for extended periods without any human interaction

Submersibles – Submarines designed for deep-water research.

Thick hulls combat pressure, while lights, cameras, and sampling gear allow surface-dwellers to get a glimpse of undersea wonders.

SCUBA- Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus: highly developed around WW2 by Jacques Cousteau who went on to produce many documentaries about the ocean, inspiring a generation of people excited about oceanography.

- A. Briefly discuss the differences between the different types of

undersea vehicles presented in class. See Above

B. Why is having a submarine a good thing when doing ocean

research? You can be there, observing in the natural environment, picking samples carefully instead of netting or dredging, which damages samples and provide no “situatedness,” you know?

Situatedness – the who, why, where, when (background information) about what you’re studying. It’s the 411 on scene.