Oceanograph

Strictly a field science is oceanography. For investigations of great ocean rivers like the Labrador & Humboldt Currents and the Gulf Stream, of wind-driven surface currents, of the habits and distribution of marine life and of many another aspect of the sea's vast and various lore, oceanographers must record temperatures not only at the surface but at considerable depths. Nearly a century ago a Frenchman named Aime used a "reversing thermometer" for taking depth temperatures in the Mediterranean. This instrument had a constriction in the tube above the bulb. Having been lowered to a measured depth, it was flipped upside down by some such expedient as slipping a weight down the line to actuate a lever at the end. This upset broke the thread of mercury at the constriction, preserving the temperature record until the instrument could be hauled up and examined.

Aime's thermometer, improved but unchanged in principle, is still in general use. It necessitates a separate operation for every depth at which the temperature is obtained. Thus ocean students were excited last week when Professor Carl Gustaf Arvid Rossby, head meteorologist of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported that he and two associates had devised an instrument which would record a complete temperature gradient from the surface to a maximum depth of 600 ft.

Called the oceanograph, the Rossby instrument has a stylus which makes a temperature-pressure graph on a sheet of smoked aluminum foil. The foil is moved back & forth by a barometer and tension spring hookup which keeps track of the water pressure (hence the depth). The stylus is moved from side to side by a bimetallic thermometer which keeps track of the temperature. Its creators state that the oceanograph is accurate to within one foot of depth and one-tenth of one degree Fahrenheit in temperature. It is to be used on the 142-ft. auxiliary ketch Atlantis, peripatetic research ship of the Wood's Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution.

Also in last week's news was a famed oceanographer who plumbs the depths not with the eyes of instruments but with his own. The National Geographic Society announced it was setting aside funds which will enable Dr. William Beebe next July to try to descend in his bathysphere farther below the surface than the 2,200 ft. he achieved year and a half ago off Bermuda (TIME, Oct. 3, 1932).

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