Lecture 5 - Early Ocean Exploration PDF

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Early study tied to voyaging - Ancient Polynesians migrated from Southeast Asia through the Pacific archipelagos of Oceania starting in 3000 BC - Ending in Rapa Nui and Hawaii in 900 AD and Aotearoa in 1200 AD - Polynesians were expert navigators - Used constellations and the position of the sun - Also observed direction of bird migration - Used clouds - Color and temperature of the water - Used graphical representations of geological features - Had advanced ship building technology Mediterranean trade and conquest - Cretan and Phoenicians traded throughout the Mediterranean and as far as the west coast of Africa and British Isles around 1200 BC - Greeks traveled between 900-700 BCE - Noted currents running N to S outside the strait of Gibraltar and named it Okeanos (root word for ocean) - Made first charts or maps of ocean features Ptolemaic Egyptians - Established Library of Alexandria circa 285 BC - Marine Science was a research focus - All books entering the city of Alexandria must be sent to the library and copied - Eratosthenes -- second librarian of Alexandria -- accurately predicted the size of the Earth and was only 8% off from modern measurement - Hipparchus - Created the modern evenly distributed latitude and longitude grid Roman Egypt - Claudius Ptolemy - Oriented grid system with N at the top and East to the right - Incorrectly estimated the size of the Earth to be 70% of its true size, which eventually led Columbus to think he had made it to India/Japan - Hypatia - Last librarian of Alexandria and first notable woman mathematician, philosopher, and scientist - Christians burned the library to the ground and murdered Hypatia in 415 AD because science was considered witchcraft - Around 700,000 scrolls were destroyed The Dark Ages - Vikings: built fast, strong, stable ships - Danish and Norwegian raided Paris, Ireland, and England - Sweden raided Kiev, Ukraine, and Constantinople

- Iceland was colonized in 850 AD and Greenland in 982 AD - Newfoundland was colonized in 1000 AD but was abandoned due to a little ice age - Calcite might have been used to navigate the often overcast North Atlantic Ancient Egyptians - Had advanced sailing technology for navigating rivers and seaways, as well as war - The first depiction of seagoing vessels appeared around 2500 BC - Traded with Syria through the Mediterranean Sea as evidenced by pottery and Lebanese cedar - Traveled the red sea as depicted in a relief of Queen Hatshepsut expedition to Punt in 1460 BC - The typical ship included 14-16 oars, 6 steering oars, trapezoid sail, and anchor Chinese innovation and seafaring - 4th century AD invention of the compass - 1086 AD Shen Kuo deduced that the earth was ancient and had a layered structure due to sedimentary deposits, uplift, and erosion - Large ships with sails featuring bamboo battens for easy hoisting and furling - Central rudder - Watertight compartmentalization - Distilled water and grew gardens onboard - 1405-1433 Admiral Zheng He commanded a fleet of 317 ships to explore the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, and even sail around the tip of Africa - Diplomatic tour to show off the great wealth and power of China and the Ming dynasty - The largest ship had 9 masts and was 440 ft long - When the Ming dynasty feel seafaring in multi-mast ships was outlawed European age of colonization - New trade routes were needed once Constantinople was conquered by the Moors - Prince Henry the Navigator established the first oceanographic research institute in Sagres, Portugal - 1451-1470: patronage led to more detailed charts and voyages to West Africa for commerce - A fleet of smaller ships that used compasses - Compasses were kept in secret because they were introduced from Arab in the 1200s but were still considered pagan witchcraft in Europe - Columbus used Claudius-Ptolemy’s inaccurate conception of the earth to make his own estimate which was off by ½ - Thus, there was no concept that the Americas should exist - He tried to sail to India but ended up in the west indies - Ferdinand Magellan - Tried to circumnavigate the world in 1519 - Was killed in the Philippines but 18 of his men returned to Spain after 3 years at

sea Scientific Oceanography - Captain James Cook - HMS Endeavour took members of the British Royal Society to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the sun - Searched for the hypothetical southern continent - Charted New Zealand, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, as well as other Pacific islands - Made notes on natural history & cultures he encountered - Required crew to ventilate below-deck and brought cress, sauerkraut, and citrus extract to ward off scurvy - HMS Resolution and Adventurer - Charted Tonga and Rapa Nui - Circumnavigated the work at 71 S but did not sight the storied southern continent (Antarctica) - HMS Resolution and Discovery - Commissioned to find the NW passage - Captain Cook died on this voyage - Charts made during Cook’s voyages were used well into the 20th century and even helped the Allies wage war in the Pacific Theatre during WWII - Historians have long held that Captain Cook was mistaken for a god because he came during the seasonal fest of Lono the God of fertility - The view is whitewashed however - It is more likely that the Hawaiians were friendly with him initially - But things became heated when some Hawaiians “borrowed” the Discovery and Captain Cook tried to take their king hostage to get it back - 1838 US Exploring Expedition - Tired to the Navy - Lieutenant Charles Wikes was not very welled liked so the adventures of the USS Vincennes do not get the notoriety of the HMS Beagle or the HMS Challenger - Charted eat Antarctica and confirmed that there was land under the ice there - Charted the Oregon coast - Explored Hawaii and climbed Mauna Loa - James Dwight Dana confirmed Darwin’s hypothesis about coral atoll formation - Collected specimens for the Smithsonian Institute - Matthew Maury (The Feather of Physical Oceanography) - US Naval officer in charge of the Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments - First to conceptualize that there would be global patterns to winds and currents - Compiled thousands of ship’s logs containing wind and temperature dates to make the first charts of winds and ocean currents - Work was used to cut the transit time from the East Coast to Rio De

Janeiro by 10 days and East Coast to Australia by 20 days - Aided in the gold rush by decreasing the transit time from Cape Horn to California by 30 days - Work built on that of Benjamin Franklin who described the Gulf Stream in 1769 - It was Franklin’s cousin, Tim Folger, a Nantucket fisherman, who told him about the warm fast current on the east coast - Published Physical Geography of the Sea in 1853 - Still cited on many charts - Contributed to the slave trade Early Oceanography and the Slave Trade - Modern oceanography developed as a discipline in the 19th century with ocean depth sounding and charting of surface currents - Understanding of surface currents and trade winds was motivated by improving commercial trade ship navigation - Between 1810 and 1860, ships transported 3.5 million enslaved people across the Atlantic Maury as a key early oceanographer - Matthew Fontaine Maury was known as the “Scientist of the Seas” for contributions to ocean navigation -- improved commercial routes using collected data on surface currents and winds - Published the first textbook for modern Oceanography in 1855: The Physical Geography of the Sea - Professor at the Virginia Military Institute until death in 1873, former U.S. navy officer - Work spans oceanography, meteorology, astronomy, and geology - Served in Confederate Navy for the home state of Virginia - During the Civil war, he pushed European powers to support the Confederate cause - Prior to Civil War was a proponent of the idea of moving slaves out of the U.S. and into Brazil, like other proslavery politicians - “The Amazonian Republic”: Maury argued that slaveholders should own property in Brazil, which he considered, like the U.S. to be a “slave country” based on climatic & geographic similarity of Mississippi to Amazon - Ocean currents and winds flowed easily between the US south and Brazil, enabling connection - The plan was to forcibly migrate slaves to Brazil and continue producing American agricultural products - At his suggestion, the navy conducted navigability tests of the Amazon River Scientific Oceanography - Challenger expedition - First purely scientific expedition - Charles Wyville Thomas and John Murray coined the word oceanography as they convinced the Royal Society and Royal Navy to outfit this expedition and sparked

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the field of marine biology - 1872-1876: was the longest continuous oceanographic expedition - Half of the 269 person crew deserted - Tested the hypothesis that the ocean was devoid of life below 549m due to pressure and lack of light - The deepest sample collected was 8185m near the Philippines - 492 depth soundings with mechanical grabs and nets 362 stations - Salinity, temperature, and water density measurements - Measured distribution of sediments, ocean currents - Discovered Manganese nodules and published 50 volume report that was widely read and thrust Oceanography into the mainstream Fridtjof Nansen - Allowed ship Fram to be trapped in Arctic pack ice for over 3 years, proving that the Arctic is not a continent - 1958 US submarine Nautilus sailed under the North Pole from Alaska to the Norwegian Sea - 1925 German Meteor expedition were the first scientists to widely employ echo sounding - 1951 HMS Challenger II used an echosounder to get precise depth measurements of the Atlantic Pacific, Indian oceans, and the Med finding the challenger deep - 1968 Glomar Challenger drilled the Ocean floor...