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December 2010 Issue


Over the four decades I have worked in the global ocean community, I have more than once wondered how we who create or use sea technology might do a better job of getting across to the public the importance of our work. Many of those musings, of course, occurred when there was a lack of funds for particular programs that I was in charge of at the time. But it was not just concern for my own programs. Everywhere I looked, major marine programs were underfunded, programs that could have significant impacts on virtually everyone on the planet. Many of us, my colleagues and I, searched to understand the reason for the lack of adequate support from government funding agencies and the lack of interest in Congress. We decided that, ultimately, it could be traced back to a voting public totally unaware of the benefits they would directly or indirectly gain from ocean research.

Of course, everyone wants support for their own programs, but we believed that we had convincing reasons why these marine programs would help the public, and we also believed (perhaps naively, cynics might say) that if we could clearly communicate these reasons to the public, people would demand action from their representatives in Washington. The question was, how to get the public to understand?

One of the problems we faced was the challenge of how to make ocean physics exciting and how to create interest in the technology that measures the physical aspects of the ocean. Another problem was the difficulty in explaining how and why the global ocean has such an impact on our lives, without making the science too heavy. On the one hand, the general public does not want to simply be told something is important without reasons to back it up, but on the other, most of them will apparently lose interest if, in providing those reasons, the science and technology become too weighty. Thus, when most TV shows deal with nonbiologic marine topics (i.e., shows without sharks or dolphins or whales), they typically feel safe only covering a narrow aspect of a marine problem, making it as light as possible and highlighting some human story. Often in the process, the show does not provide any convincing reasons why the public should worry about a particular marine problem.

When I left NOAA a few years ago, I decided I would try a different approach—to write a compelling popular book about the sea where the dramatic historical stories pulled the reader along. By clearly explaining the science behind these events (without dumbing it down), the book would enable the reader to learn almost without realizing it.

The compelling theme for the book, I decided, should be the critical importance of marine prediction in saving lives: When the sea turns its enormous power against us, our best defense is to get out of its way—but to do that, we must first be able to predict when and where it will strike. What could be more compelling than death?

Over the centuries, while scientists and mariners were trying to learn how to predict the motions of the sea, the oceans killed millions, destroyed property worth untold billions of dollars and had significant impacts on history. The 300,000 lives lost to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the millions who were lost to storm surges in Bangladesh and India over the centuries, and the thousands of ships lost at sea to rogue waves were just a few tragic examples that I described in my book.

I began the book with ancient mankind's strange ideas about the sea and worked up to our latest technological advances in predicting the ocean's moments of destruction. This included stories about the first instruments that were used to measure the ocean and how they evolved into today's modern oceanographic technology.

I tried to do this in a way that would be accessible for general audiences through dramatic stories that demonstrated the sea's awesome power, interweaved with the stories of scientific discovery—namely, how we learned to measure, understand and predict ocean movements. The scientific stories included famous scientists like Aristotle, Sir Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon Laplace and Benjamin Franklin, and the historical stories included many famous names from history who were impacted by an unpredictable sea, such as Napoleon, Moses, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Christopher Columbus and the Allied forces who landed at the Normandy beaches on D-Day, to name a few.

Palgrave Macmillan published my book The Power of the Sea—Tsunamis, Storm Surges, Rogue Waves and our Quest to Predict Disasters in October. It tells the story of our long struggle to understand the physics of the sea so that we can use this knowledge to predict when it will unleash its power against us. Besides the three phenomena in the book's subtitle, it also includes the history of how we learned to predict the tides, El Niño and certain aspects of climate change.

I do not know how well this book will sell, and even if it sells well, I do not know how much it will succeed in raising public support for what marine scientists and engineers are trying to accomplish. Even if it isn't a popular success, however, it is a book that many colleagues at universities say they will have their students in introductory oceanography courses read, because it so dramatically shows the impact of ocean science on people's lives.

But my effort is only one try by one person. I am writing this piece to encourage others in the oceanographic community to consider also giving authorship a try. Write a popular book on some aspect of the sea and sea technology, or at least an article in a magazine or in your local paper. It certainly can't hurt, and it might even make a big difference.

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Bruce Parker is the former chief scientist of NOAA's National Ocean Service and presently is a visiting professor at the Center for Maritime Systems at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in physical oceanography from The Johns Hopkins University. Parker is the author of a new book, The Power of the Sea.

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2011:  JAN | FEB | MARCH | APRIL | MAY | JUNE | JULY | AUG | SEPT | OCT | NOV | DEC

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2010:  JAN | FEB | MARCH | APRIL | MAY | JUNE | JULY | AUG | SEPT | OCT | NOV | DEC

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Sea Technology is read worldwide in more than 110 countries by management, engineers, scientists and technical personnel working in industry, government and educational research institutions. Readers are involved with oceanographic research, fisheries management, offshore oil and gas exploration and production, undersea defense including antisubmarine warfare, ocean mining and commercial diving.