No. 15 September 2003 CONTENTS EDITORIAL................................................................................................................... 1 ARTICLES Rémi Chazallon - a forgotten “ingénieur hydrographe”......................................... 3 Marine scientists in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Fratres in maribus. the first international ocean-science conference .................... 5 ICHO-VII IN KALININGRAD - TWO PERSONAL VIEWS ........................................ 10 CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR THE NEXT INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON HISTORY OF OCEANOGRAPHY .................................................................... 13 REGIONAL REPORTS ................................................................................................. 13 BOOK ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REVIEWS ............................................................. 14 NEWS AND EVENTS ................................................................................................... 16 ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHIES ...................................................... 18 INTERNATIONAL UNION OF THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 1 DIVISION OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE C0MMISSION OF OCEANOGRAPHY President Eric L. Mills Department of Oceanography Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4J1, CANADA Vice Presidents Jacqueline Carpine Lancre La Verveine 7, Square Kraemer 06240 Beausoleil, FRANCE Margaret B. Deacon Jopes Park Cottage Luckett Callington, Cornwall PL17 8LG, UNITED KINGDOM Walter Lenz Institut für Klima- und Meeresforschung Universität Hamburg D-20146 Hamburg, GERMANY Helen Rozwadowski Maritime Studies Program University of Connecticut, Avery Point Groton, Connecticut 06340, USA Secretary Deborah Cozort Day Archives Scripps Institution of Oceanography La Jolla, California 92093-0219, USA Editor of Newsletter Eric L. Mills Department of Oceanography Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4J1, CANADA Phone (902) 494-3437 Fax (902) 494-3877 e-mail: [email protected] Text preparation: Pamela Larivee, Department of Oceanography, Dalhousie University Editorial - Looking back again International Congresses on the History of Oceanography, like that in Kaliningrad last month, lead to reflection. 2 A century ago, in 1903, several major expeditions were in progress or had just begun: the German South Polar Expedition (1901-1903) on Gauss under Erich von Drygalski, the British National Antarctic Expedition (1901-1904) on Discovery under Robert F. Scott, the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (1902-1904) on Scotia under W.S. Bruce, J.B. Charcot’s French Antarctic Expedition (1903-1905) on Français, and Roald Amundsen’s assault on the North West Passage (1903-1906) in Gjoa. They were only examples of expeditions to many oceans, but mainly the South Atlantic, the Southern Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific, that would completely revolutionize knowledge of the deep circulation of the oceans largely due to work in the Institut für Meereskunde in Berlin in the early 1920s. During a period of three years beginning in 1906, the Norwegian physicist and applied mathematician V.F.K. Berknes was beginning a professional reorientation, moving from the theory of electricity to meteorology and oceanography. A few years earlier (in 1898) he had proposed a theorem useful in calculating the motions of real geophysical fluids (air and water) on the surface of the Earth. In 1903 his junior colleagues and former students Bjørn Helland-Hansen and Johan Sandström modified the theorem to allow the calculation of ocean currents using the relatively easily measured properties temperature and salinity. Their paper, Ueber die Berechnung von Meeresströmungen, translated into English in 1905 and widely noted, along with the appearance of Martin Knudsen’s tables enabling interconversions of the properties of seawater, transformed the nature of physical oceanography and gave enormous impetus to its reorientation from a geographical field to a branch of geophysics. And the precise measurement of temperature at sea, a sine qua non for the new methods, was promoted by the first use of Richter reversing thermometers on the Norwegian research vessel Michael Sars in 1903. 1903 saw the meeting of a committee to supervise the production of the first General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, chaired by Albert 1er of Monaco, and the beginning of the process that led to the production of the first GEBCO in 1905. Present at that first meeting in Wiesbaden in April was the French mineralogist Julien Thoulet, the most vigorous exponent of French oceanography for decades, who, in addition to his work on and for the GEBCO committee, suggested in 1903 that various bivariate plots could be used to characterize water types - thus proposing the use of what came to be known as T-S plots thirteen years before they were proposed independently by Bjørn Helland-Hansen. Helland-Hansen himself, along with the Norwegian fisheries biologist Johan Hjort, became involved in 1903 in the first International Course in marine science, in Bergen, intended to provide a strong scientific background in all aspects of oceanography to the scientific assistants involved in the regular survey work being done by the nations involved in the newly-founded International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Others attended them too, including senior academics from several European countries. The courses, which lasted until the beginning of the First World War, were immensely influential in spreading quantitative approaches to the sea, and in establishing the marine sciences as acceptable professional specialties. In Germany in 1903, Karl Brandt was working on his theory of the control of the spring plankton bloom by bacteria of the nitrogen cycle, proposed first in 1899 before the University of Kiel in his famous lecture Ueber den Stoffwechsel im Meere. His junior associate, Rudolf Feitel, showed that there were denitrifying bacteria, essential components of Brandt’s theory, in the coastal waters of the Baltic and North Seas. Farther afield, Hans Gazert, physician on Drygalski’s Gauss, reported that he had been unable to find significant numbers of denitrifying bacteria and no evidence of denitrification in the Southern Ocean, a result similar to that of the Norwegian biologist H.H. Gran in coastal waters of Norway at the same time. In the Mediterranean, the Kiel biologist Hans Lohmann demonstrated that seemingly poor waters were actually much mo re productive than had been suspected; his very fine gauze and paper filters showed that there was a significant population of very small cells, later called nanoplankton, results that led directly to his pioneering calculation of the production of the nanoplankton in Kiel waters in 1908. A world away in 1903, the University of Washington biologist Trevor Kincaid proposed that the university locate a new marine biological station in Friday Harbor, on the San Juan Islands (it opened in 1904), establishing the site occupied to this day. And in San Diego, at the invitation of the local physician Fred Baker, the Berkeley zoologist William E. Ritter spent his first summer of marine biological study in that city, using the boathouse of the El Coronado Hotel. From that grew the Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association of San Diego, the Scripps Institution for Biological Research, and eventually the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which in 2003 has a full year of centenary celebrations underway, well advertised at http://scripps100.ucsd.edu. And so we move from 1903 to 2003! Eric Mills RÉMI CHAZALLON - A FORGOTTEN “INGÉNIEUR HYDROGRAPHE” Last year, in January 2002, occurred unheralded the bicentenary of the birth of Antoine-Marie Rémi Chazallon 3 (1802-1872), a worthy French expert on tides. In the history of tidal science, Chazallon was overshadowed by his British contemporaries, Airy, Lubbock and Whewell, while the practical methods of analysis introduced by him were later superseded by William Thomson’s (later Lord Kelvin) harmonic theory. However, for many years Chazallon was the only person to develop and improve the methods of analysis initiated by the great mathematician, Pierre Simon Laplace. Born in the small market town of Désaignes (in the Ardèche) - where he later died - Rémi Chazallon received a first class education in the mathematical sciences at the famous Ecole polytechnique of Paris. On graduation, he entered the Service hydrographique de la Marine in 1824 as “ingénieur hydrographe,” which he made his sole career.i The “ingénieurs hydrographes” were given responsible assignments then, as now, but they did not necessarily have the liberty to pursue individual scientific research as academics did, unless closely related to the subject of duty. However, Chazallon’s principal assignment was to improve tidal data and predictions for all the major ports of France, including on the Mediterranean; this necessitated a good deal of organisation, ingenuity and research. Before the mid-nineteenth century, all tidal data were restricted to records of the times and heights of High and Low Waters. Chazallon saw that much more could be learned from a time -series of sea levels at intermediate times, as would be given by an autonomous recorder. Through the support and influence of Academician François Arago, Chazallon obtained funds to design his own tide recorders and had them installed at the principal ports, starting with Brest, where Laplace had initiated a famous series of visual tidal readings.ii With the aid of his new