Life, Aquatically: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging June 1956

 

By way of housekeeping, borrowing services are now being suspended mid-semester, if you are lazy and dumb and  miss overdue notices because they are sent to the Google Mail account you give marketers, and which is therefore soul-crushing to even check. And so there will be no Engineer until at least January. Last week was Thanksgiving, a great Canadian food holiday, and my stat holidays were carried over to next week, when I have a four-day weekend, followed by a vacation the next week, so that's when I plan to do my postblogging. Be there or be square! You wouldn't want to accidentally miss a major landmark in the history of technology like Jacques Cousteau's Palm D'Or for The Silent World! You know, like someone did. 

That said, I'm not posting about Aqua-Lungs or, for that matter, SOSUS this week, having done both, and unfortunately I am not posting about Cousteau's underwater flying saucer, which is not until 1958, or his prototype underwater cities, which is the Sixties. Rather, the inspiration for this week's post is The Economist's ongoing whining about the Peruvian/Ecuadorian 200 mile limit, the extension of their maritime frontiers over their Humboldt Current fisheries, a typical Fifties imbroglio that hits differently in this "Super-El Nino" year (the "El Nino" concept seems to have first gained salience in 1982), and in general to our generations-long shift from seeing the ocean as a source of infinite abundance to an overharvested marginal ecology. I thought I was going to talk about the first UN Law of the Sea Conference, a big deal at the time (1959, as it turns out), but it's not even a blip on the horizon in 1956, and is all but forgotten today. 

It turns out that I have some interesting things to say about our coming to know the underwater world, though. And it has all the fun stuff, including pseudoscience, patent (or scientific discovery) trolling, and a classified military contribution.

 

I think I'm stealing this from an AI-generated blog? You be the judge.
https://thesutrocean.blogspot.com/2023/10
/what-is-mid-atlantic-ocean-ridge.html

The existence of a submerged mountain range running down the mid-Atlantic was, it says here, was first proposed in 1853 Matthew Fontaine Maury, an American oceanographer and naval officer who stained his future reputation by joining the Confederate Navy on the outbreak of the Civil War, although not so far as to discourage someone from writing a very long and loving Wiki biography. It appears that the year date is chosen because Maury was the presiding American official at the International Maritime Meteorological Conference that the  U.S. government convened in Bruxelles on 23 August 1853, which sure sounds like an excuse to have a summer vacation in Europe, and where he does not seem to have given a talk on undersea topography. That had to wait for the publication of his The Physical Geography of the Sea, a book based on his work at the Naval Observatory, but published by Harper's to collect the royalties from what ran to eight editions,, and which was far from well received by the scientific community due to lots of weird pseudoscience about magnetism causing ocean currents and whatnot. However, the deep sea soundings reported by the Observatory, which used John Mercer Brooke's patented sampling probe to take soundings down to  3700m. The first of these were reported in 1853, and were fascinating not least because the returned samples consisted of shells to the exclusion of silt and gravel. Maury also proposed the existence of a "telegraphic ridge" off Newfoundland during promotions of the transatlantic telegraph cable, which seems like a denial of the existence of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. Whatever: You can't lay that cable and not figure out that you are draping it across a mountain range, and you certainly couldn't accuse Maury of not being the kind of guy who was down with transatlantic cables. (Hurrah!) Man, that's a long biography. 

The expanding Earth through the ages, by
Neal Adams, yes, the Neal Adamas who used 
to draw Batman and Green Lantern and got
Speedy hooked on heroin. He turned into a
bit of a crackot in retirement. Hard to believe
of a guy who thought that Man Bat could
carry a monthly!

So, anyway, the Ridge was actually discovered by HMS Challenger in 1872 by Sir John Murray, with later work by Johan Hjort, publishing together in 1912.  And now we jump ahead to "the 1950s," when "Marie Tharp, Bruce Heezen, Maurice Ewing, and others" "revealed that the Mid-Atlantic Rdige had a strange bathymetry of valleys and ridges."

By this is actually meant "Marie Tharp," a possibly neurodivergent scientist, as successful female scientists so often were back in the day to function in the laboratory at all, who did the actual work at the Lamont Geological Observatory while Heezen was off gallivanting on the research ship Atlantis, until Ewing fired her in 1964. The illustration above is a detail from from Heinrich Berann's commissioned  map for the National Geographic, published in 1977, and based on the Heezen/Tharp, previously published piecemeal by the magazine in the course of the  Sixties.  Between Heezen's presentation of their work as demonstrating the existence of a mid-Atlantic Ridge, and, more importantly, of a rift valley in the middle of the rangein 1957, and the big National Geographic articles there's a bit of water under the bridge, however, in the form of S. Warren Carey's "Expanding Earth Theory," which gets its own joyfully cracked Wikipedia article. The Earth is expanding because it is decompressing, or gaining mass, either from meteors or the luminiferous ether, or because the universal gravitational constant is decreasing. This explains the Mid-Atlantic Ridge --it's the seam where the Earth is expanding. When you're arguing with the continental drift people, you're supposed to argue that there is no evidence of counterbalancing subduction, and in that sense the big thing with the Tharp/Heezen maps is the Pacific subsea topography, because that's where the subduction happens. There is, of course, a Continental Drift article for those interested in reading the consensus on the science instead of the pseudo-science. 

But, you say, where's the technology, Erik? What an excellent question! The answer is that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a couple thousand fathoms down, and so very hard to see, and we have to reconstruct it indirectly. And, fortunately, during WWII the USN came up wit a clever scheme to locate downed naval aviators by having them drop bombs into the sea; where, if they reached the right depth, they might be heard vast distances away. 

Like earthquake and bat bombs and ice-and-sawdust aircraft carriers and giant magnifying glasses in space and plutonium bombs, this project might sound like an attempt by draft-age scientists to avoid being sent to the Eastern Front. (I like the Tsunami Bomb. I don't think it gets enough attention, and it involves New Zealand, which is romantic for non-New Zealanders, and it's also somewhat relevant, so I linked it.) And, well, yes.

To be fair, for several years, it was actually intended to use SOFAR (heh) channel for this purpose. And while it didn't get far enough along to actually be used during the war, there was a test station at Point Sur, and also the intended Monterey station was operating not picking up much due to echoes from the Monterey Canyon walls. Honestly, I think this whole thing was halfways motivated by how cool Monterey Canyon is, so that must have been quite the blow.  However, on 18 Sptember 1952, the stations picked up what turned out to be the Myojin-sho eruption and subsequent minor earthquake that destroyed a Japanese MSA ship, although not liberating any giant radioactive dinosaurs.  Picking up underseas earthquakes is cool, too, and tsunami warnings are a worthy thin. But in practice the USN had been fiddling with ASW uses for the technology since 1949, so it didn't really need motivating. 

The parlor of the future Vema in 1923

SOFAR's "discovery" --it's an easily predictable acoustic effect, and you've got lots of other work on long-range underwater acoustic propagation by this point-- is credited to "William Maurice 'Doc' Ewing," quoting Wikipedia because we've got us a mid-century scientist who isn't nicknamed "Doc." Mo, as I call him, has already showed up in this post, and the reader will by now be suspecting that he's some kind of American scientific entrepreneur, a type which has also showed up in this post. And the reader would be right! Fabulously wealthy and influential U.S. banker Thomas Lamont had a weekend property on the Palisades, and his widow donated it, and presumably the funding to run it, to Columbia for an Observatory, since they couldn't spend all their money on renovating Canterbury Cathedral and whatnot. According to Wikipedia, one of Lamont's grandsons wrote his memoirs. And also he helped Calvin Coolidge make a killing on Black Tuesday, which some people thought was untoward. 

Anyhow, during WWII the USN somehow ended up running E. F. Hutton's private yacht, which he and his wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post, the Honeycomb heiress, used to take between American and Europe back in the day. With the coming of peace, it was left off Long Island to rot, and in 1952, Ewing bought it so that his observatory could have a research ship, just like Woods Hole. Now that SOFAR was a military secret and all, the RV Vema couldn't do that, but detecting underwater earthquakes was cool, and they had an echo sounder for more accurate soundings, so they did that, and by 1956 Tharp had enough data to demonstrate that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was an area of sufficient tectonic activity as to be identified as an area of active orogeny, and also to deduce the existence of a rift valley in its centre from the data. Tharp is vaguely credited with using "computers" for this work, presumably curve fitting to show the existence of the valley. One wonders if she had some kind of theoretical commitment to various explanations for various terrestrial rift valleys. Her early postgraduate work was in petroleum prospecting (the lab side, which, her Wiki biographer suggests, was a restriction imposed by her gender, and which chafed at her), and I imagine that the Rio Grande Rift was of some interest.  

(In summary, Bruce Black has been looking for oil in the Rift for fifty ears, and hasn't found any, but maybe there's helium down there.)

A more detailed account suggests that Tharp worked mainly with 1946--52 soundings from the Woods Hole ship, Atlantis, and earthquake data collated by Howard Foster, credit where credit is due.

Just let the Navy do it if they want it so bad. What's the worse that can happen?
Blue Streak on display in the Deutsches Musseum.
By Taken by John McCullagh. Original uploader was Jmcc150 at
 en.wikipediaLater version(s) were uploaded by Ian Dunster at en.wikipedia. -
Transfered from en.wikipedia, Public Domain, h
ttps://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3296792. 

So there you go. Echo sounders and seismographs and number crunching early computers aren't exactly technological cutting edge stuff, but oh boy, that map! This is very much a National Geographic kind of Technical Appendix, but I think it's fair to call National Geographic, and especially those great old insert maps, a huge part of the story of history of technology. Geography is something of a dying academic discipline, and Jesus Fucking Christ this turns out be a Quillete thing, but I think there's a lot to be extracted from the idea that a good map gives a far-too-spurious sense of encompassing understanding and ownership, and that might sometimes be a bad thing. We have far less of a clue about what's going on down there than we think we do what with giant wall maps of the ocean floor and all. We also, and I think this is important too, have no idea how good we are at detecting submarines, which you might think would have some implication for the future of the nuclear deterrence. Apparently Tharp and Heezen weren't allowed to publish a topographic map of the ocean floor for national security reasons, and that's why we have the painted maps instead.