Exploring the oceans with science
Exploring the oceans with science
Although nearly all nations have shores touching the sea most of the human race has never seen the ocean and few know it well. Yet it is humanity's great unused resource, and moreover, a truly international one.
The land is divided among nations; the sea belongs to mankind. A few miles, adjacent to the shores, are under local control but they form a microscopic fraction of the 139 million square miles of the ocean surface about two and a half times the entire land area of the earth. Its total volume is 328 million cubic miles, a figure which far surpasses the human imagination. The entire human race of more than 2,000 million persons, for example, could be contained in onetenth of a single cubic mile !
This incredibly vast storehouse of mineral and food resources has hardly been tapped to meet man's needs. It provides, for instance, less than one per cent of the world's food. Every cubic mile of seawater contains 750 tons of nitrogen, 225 tons of phosphorus and nearly two million tons of potassium three major agricultural fertilizers. Equally important is the rich plant-life of the sea : scientists calculate that a square mile of sea produces an average of 13,000 tons of vegetation per year, and a world total of probably five times that of vegetation on land.
Most of the sea plants are microscopic and simply serve to feed the fishes. But they are already recognized as potential food both for men and for domestic animals. Much more needs to be learned about their varieties, the conditions under which they grow best, and their nutritional value; methods must be invented for cultivating and harvesting them
But the major practical objective of océanographie research will be an increase in the availability of fish for human food. The U. N. Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that the world's total annual production of fish and all sea foods, excluding whales, is about twenty-six million metric tons per year. The amount of fish caught and consumed could be increased many times if fishing were no longer an essentially primitive method of finding food, much as hunting was for our ancestors who roamed the woods in search of game.
Many privately endowed and government institutes have developed new methods of studying the ocean depths, and revealed strange forms of deep-sea life. Recently international organizations like the Pacific Science Congress, the Indo-Pacific Fisheries Council, and F.A.O. have called attention to the research that is still needed, and especially to studies that will increase the world's food supply.
It is for this reason that Unesco is organizing a broader international attack on the problems of the sea as it has successfully done for the problems of the arid lands. As early as November 1953, Unesco participated in the studies on the development of océanographie research in the Indo-Pacific region and last September at meetings of marine biology scientists in the Latin American region. Two months later, a programme of aid to océanographie research on a worldwide scale, prepared in accord with F.A.O. was approved by Unesco's General Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay.
To co-ordinate this programme, Unesco is now setting up an International Advisory Committee on Marine Sciences. A first meeting of scientists was held in Rome in May. As in other fields of its work, Unesco cannot solve the complex problems of the sea all by itself. No human institution can. Unesco looks at the task ahead as a co-operative venture of long-term international research. It will serve as a worldwide link between the many organizations now dealing with these questions on a national, inter-governmental or international level and help to organize, encourage and co-ordinate research along specific lines.
The rich resources of the sea will not be truly mastered until oceanography develops as a co-ordinated group of sciences as reliable as the other exact sciences. This is a vital need for the future with a world population of 4,000 million persons foreseen by the end of the present century well within the lifetime of our own children.