Anno Accademico 2017-2018

Docente: Renzo Mosetti

[email protected]
 Connected to the
world’s overall history

◦ Commerce, warfare,
resources, weather

 The oceans have shaped

humanity’s past
 Understand how and why people apply
marine sciences today

 Oceanography’s history is about people, not

just oceans and test tubes.
 Not sure when ocean voyages actually began
◦ Fish hooks and spears dated approximately 5000
B.C.

 Earliest recorded sea voyage – Egyptians

about 3200 B.C.
 Most important early
Western seafarers
 Motivated by trade,
Phoenicians traveled
incredible distances
 Established first trade
routes throughout the
Mediterranean and as far
north as Great Britain
 Stayed within sight of land
 Traveled at night – steered by observing

constellations and the North Star.

 In the ancient world, the North Star was

called the Phoenician Star

 Between 2000 and 500 B.C.
 Often traveled thousands of kilometers across open
ocean
 Open canoes cut from tree trunks
 Developed stick maps with ocean currents
 Settled most of the islands in the Pacific Ocean
hundreds of years before Europeans reached Pacific
Ocean
 Earliest
known
regular, long-
distance,
open-ocean
seafaring
beyond sight
of land
 First who used mathematical principles and
developed sophisticated maps for seafaring
 Pytheas – Greek explorer, noted that he

could predict tides in Atlantic based on

phases of moon
 He also measured angle between horizon

and the North Star to determine position –

improved navigation
 2 major contributions
that furthered Pytheas’
work
 Calculated Earth’s
Circumference ~40,000
km
 Invented first
latitude/longitude
system
 Created map of Earth that showed a portion of the
Earth as a sphere on flat paper.
 Produced first world atlas

Improved longitude/latitude system

◦ System still used today
 Vikings of Scandinavia were active
explorers during The 9th century
 Discovered Iceland and Greenland
 Leif Eriksson – son of Eric The Red, set off

in search of timber for Greenland Colony

and discovered North America
(Newfoundland, Canada)
 The Chinese Ming Dynasty sent large
convoys of ships out on missions in
which seven voyages were made
 There ships were more technologically
advanced than anything in Europe,
consisting of five masts and magnetic
compasses and navigational charts
 The Ming Dynasty reached as far as Africa
 Prince Henry the navigator, (1420’s) founded
first school of navigation
 Christopher Columbus (1490’s) was attempting
to find a west-ward route to India when he
reached the Bahama Islands
 Ferdinand Magellan (1520) led the expedition
that first circumnavigated the word; he was
killed in the Philippines
 Previous exploration driven by military, trade,
or conquest objectives
 Royal Navy of Britain launched voyages with

objectives of exploration, mapping and

projecting British presence around the world
 Made 1st accurate maps of many regions
in the ocean w/ new invention
 Chronometer invented by John Harrison
 Chronometer is a time piece capable of

keeping accurate time aboard ship at sea

 Noted northerly routed ship from Europe took
longer than ships that came by a longer more
southerly route
 Learned about gulf stream from nephew, who gave
his uncle a chart
 Franklin had the chart printed and distributed to the
captains of mail ships.
 They shortened their inbound voyages by avoiding
the current and they shortened their outbound
voyages by using the current.
 Matthew Maury, in charge of the Depot of
Naval charts and instruments.
 Organized first international meteorological

conference to establish uniform methods

 Published a summarized version of data in

first Oceanographic textbook in 1855

 From 1831 to 1836 a naturalist for the HMS
Beagle circumnavigated the southern
oceans and oceanic islands.
 Darwin observed birds and other organisms
on isolated islands, most of his research
took place in the Galapagos Islands.
 In 1859, his observations were published in
the book “On the origin of Species”.
 John Ross took samples and animals in Baffin bay
(Canada) Later James Ross took samples from Antarctic
ocean bottom at 4.3 Miles
 John Ross and James Ross found that there are some
bottom dwelling creatures in Baffin Bay and Antarctic
Ocean. They discovered that deep Atlantic is uniformly
cold.
 Forbes – Oceans divided into life-depth zones;
concluded that ocean life decrease as depth increases.
This contrasted with Rosses finings and created dispute
for decades in Britain.
 The expedition covered 79,178 miles.
 Directed by C. Wyville Thompson
 2 contributions:

◦ Discovery and classification of 4,717 new marine

species
◦ Measurement of record water depth at the Mariana
Trench of 26,847 feet.
 multimillionaire benefactor to oceanography,
especially in the U.S.

 1st to use steel cables for deep sea dredging

 Victor Henson solved the problem about
population fluctuations in commercial fish.
 Coined the term plankton
 He found that cold water is more nutrient

rich, leading to more plankton, and a larger

fish population.
 Fridtjof Nansen set out with a crew of 13 on a
boat called Fram to explore the Artic sea.
 His boat became frozen in ice and drifted for

3 years
 His drift proved that there was no continent

in the Artic sea.

 Tested his ideas about the direction of ice
drift
 Froze a vessel in the polar ice pack and

drifted with it to reach the North Pole

 His vessel was called the Fram
 The ship remained in the ice for 35 months
 Measurements showed that the Arctic was a

deep ocean basin, not a shallow sea

 Water and air temperatures were recorded
 Plankton numbers were measured
 Il periodo “classico” delle ricerche oceanografiche in Adriatico

*Accademia nautica di Fiume: Wolf e Luksch Campagne in Adriatico con le

navi:

NAUTILUS (1874); DELI (1875, 1876, 1877); HERTHA (1880)

*Regio Comitato Talassografico Italiano fondato nel 1909.

campagne con le navi MONTEBELLO e CICLOPE

*Permanente Internationale Kommission fur Erforschung der Adria – 1910

NAJADE (12 campagne); CICLOPE (10 campagne)

Da Wolf e Luksch (1881, 1887)
La sede triestina di ISMAR, fino al 2002 denominata Istituto Sperimentale Talassografico
"Francesco Vercelli" , è una tra le più antiche Istituzioni italiane che si siano occupate di
ricerche oceanografiche e meteomarine. Le sue origini risalgono al 1841, anno in cui
iniziarono a Trieste le osservazioni meteorologiche sistematiche presso l'allora
Osservatorio Marittimo della Imperial Regia Accademia di Commercio e Nautica,
Istituzione governativa dell'Impero Austro-Ungarico. Per questo motivo l'archivio storico
sull'Adriatico, ed in particolare sul Golfo di Trieste, comprende anche dati risalenti alla
fine del secolo XIX.

Dopo la prima guerra mondiale ed il congiungimento di Trieste all'Italia, detta Istituzione

fu assegnata prima al Regio Comitato Talassografico Italiano, poi al
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (C.N.R.) e successivamente al Ministero
dell'Agricoltura e Foreste, per tornare nuovamente nel 1985 al C.N.R.
E’ presente una ricca ed aggiornata biblioteca di notevole specializzazione che annovera
circa 11.000 ingressi, di cui 3900 di libri ed il rimanente in collane di riviste, alcune delle
quali a partire dall'inizio del 1900. La Sezione possiede inoltre una piccola collezione di
strumenti meteo-marini ed oceanografici d'interesse storico, fra i quali alcuni reperti
appartenuti alla nave "Elettra" di Guglielmo Marconi.
Marconi
 Nel 1874 fu fondata laSocietà Adriatica di Scienze
naturali;
 Nel 1875 viene inaugurata a Trieste la “Imperial Regia
Stazione Didattica e di osservazione zoologica, sede
distaccata dell’Università di Vienna” (quasi coeva
della Stazione Zoologica di Napoli fondata nel 1874
da Anton Dhorn);
 UNA CURIOSITA’

Sigmund Freud dopo la laurea in medicina si recò in

Inghilterra e, successivamente, lavorò in un laboratorio di
zoologia diretto da Carl Friedrich Claus a Vienna e nella
Stazione Zoologica di Trieste dove si occupò di anatomia
e fisiologia animale arrivando a confermare l'esistenza
dei testicoli nel maschio dell'anguilla.
 First drilling ship
 Ship came from Germany
 Set the standard for multidisciplinary studies
of the Ocean
 Mapped the ocean bottom by echo sounding
 Meteor sailed for 25 months
 Musée océanographic – Europe
 Scripps institution of Oceanography (1 st institute in
U.S.) – California
 Woods Hole Ocean. Inst. (Boston)
 Lamont Geological Observatory - New York
 Rosenstiel school of Marine & Atmosphere Sciences -
Miami
 Texas A&M University administered The Ocean
Drilling Program
 German U-boat led to the invention of the echo
sounder to detect submarines
 WW2_military performed and supported many
studies on transmission of sound in the ocean
waves, currents, and ocean- floor topography.
 After WW2 U.S. government established a Sea
Grant program to fund ocean research
 The Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) was the 1 st
large-scale cooperative effort in academic ocean
research
 The Glomar Challenger began 1st leg of deep sea
drilling
 The deep sea drilling project became the ocean
drilling program (ODP)
 The ODP drill ship JOIDES Resolution, which is a
lot larger than the Glomar Challenger, conducted
its first scientific cruise and the JOIDES program
continues today.
 In 1915, Alfred Wegener developed the theory of
continental drift.
◦ He conceived of a single ancient landmass called
Pangaea that began to break 180 million years ago.
 Fredrick Vine and Drummond Matthews provided
evidence for sea floor spreading in 1963
◦ They mapped magnetic patterns of the ocean floor,
which showed parallel bands of similarly magnetized
reaches on either side of oceanic mountain ranges.
Which were records of changes in Earth’s magnetic field
over time
 Increased pressure on body cavities and gases dissolved
in body tissues limits duration of dives.
 Decompressing is necessary at greater depths because
rapid ascending turns dissolved gases in tissues into
nitrogen. These nitrogen bubbles can stop blood flow.
This is know as the bends and is extremely painful illness
which can be fatal.
◦ To protect oneself, a strict decompression schedule
which includes stopping at different depths
◦ Jim suit allows a person to repair machinery at the
ocean floor at surface pressure
 William Beebe- descended to a depth of
923 meters off Bermuda in a tethered
bathysphere to observe deep-sea life.
 Jacques Piccard- designed untethered

vessel Trieste - 1960

 Alvin, Sea Cliff- 2 most widely used

submersibles
 Japan’s Shinkai- to study microbes in the

deep sea
 The bathyscaphe,
Trieste, descends to
10,915 meters
 Into Marianas Trench
 Deepest depth in the
ocean
 Factors of manned sub:
◦ Risk to human life
◦ High cost of the systems required
◦ Relatively short time that can be spent making observations
 Advantages of ROVs (remotely operated vehicles)
◦ No risk to humans
◦ Can make computer-assisted maps (based on sonar)
◦ Stay down in water for a long time
 Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
◦ Programmed to carry out specific data gatherings missions
of long durations without human life
 Jacques Cousteau- began designing and testing
the underwater living chamber in the 1950s

 In the 1970s teams lived undersea chambers for

up to 60 days
 May be placed on ocean floor or suspended

 Can respond and equalize to any pressure

 Sometimes ocean is observed from space; they can
measure temp., ice cover, color, etc.
 Seasat A - 1st dedicated oceanographic satellite.
 Nimbus 7- mapped phyto-plankton populations

 TOPEX/ Poseidon- mapped global sea level and got

data on ocean –atmosphere interaction.

 Global Positioning system- allows ship to determine

positions with in a meter
 Secchi disk- Determines how transparency of
the water
 Core Sampler- takes samples of core sediments
 Hydrometer- Determines the density of the
water
 Dredge- scoops up marine life
 Alvin- famous submarine that explored
deep sea
 Side-scan sonar- sonar that can scan in all
directions
 Current meter- determines the speed and
direction of the current
 Underwater camera camera that can work
underwater
 Flip- a bottle like vessel that
can flip sideways in the
water
 Purse seine net- used to capture schools
of fish
Attenzione: ACCURATEZZA vs. PRECISIONE

Precision and accuracy are terms used to describe systems and methods that
measure, estimate, or predict. In all these cases, there is some parameter you wish to
know the value of. This is called the true value, or simply, truth. The method provides a
measured value, that you want to be as close to the true value as possible. Precision
and accuracy are ways of describing the error that can exist between these two values.
Unfortunately, precision and accuracy are used interchangeably in non-technical
settings. In fact, dictionaries define them by referring to each other! In spite of this,
science and engineering have very specific definitions for each. You should make a point
of using the terms correctly, and quietly tolerate others when they use them incorrectly.
 As an example, consider an oceanographer measuring water depth using a
sonar system. Short bursts of sound are transmitted from the ship, reflected from the
ocean floor, and received at the surface as an echo. Sound waves travel at a relatively
constant velocity in water, allowing the depth to be found from the elapsed time between
the transmitted and received pulses. As with all empirical measurements, a certain
amount of error exists between the measured and true values. This particular
measurement could be affected by many factors: random noise in the electronics, waves
on the ocean surface, plant growth on the ocean floor, variations in the water
temperature causing the sound velocity to change, etc.
To investigate these effects, the oceanographer takes many successive readings at a
location known to be exactly 1000 meters deep (the true value). These measurements
are then arranged as the histogram shown in Fig. 2-11. As would be expected from the
Central Limit Theorem, the acquired data are normally distributed. The mean occurs at
the center of the distribution, and represents the best estimate of the depth based on all
of the measured data. The standard deviation defines the width of the distribution,
describing how much variation occurs between successive measurements.
 This situation results in two general types of error that the system can
experience. First, the mean may be shifted from the true value. The amount of this shift
is called the accuracy of the measurement. Second, individual measurements may not
agree well with each other, as indicated by the width of the distribution. This is called the
precision of the measurement, and is expressed by quoting the standard deviation, the
signal-to-noise ratio, or the CV.
Consider a measurement that has good accuracy, but poor precision; the histogram is
centered over the true value, but is very broad. Although the measurements are correct
as a group, each individual reading is a poor measure of the true value. This situation is
said to have poor repeatability; measurements taken in succession don't agree well.
Poor precision results from random errors. This is the name given to errors that change
each
 SPECIFICATIONS
General

Initial Resolution at 24 Time

Measurement Range Typical Stability
Accuracy Hz Response 1

0.0003 S/m 0.0003 S/m 0.00004 S/m

Conductiv 0 - 7 S/m
(0.003 (0.003 mmho/cm) per (0.0004 0.065 second
ity (0 - 70 mmho/cm)
mmho/cm) month mmho/cm)
Temperat
-5 to +35 °C 0.001 °C 0.0002 °C per month 0.0002 °C 0.065 second
ure
0 to full scale --
0.015% of full 0.02% of full scale per 0.001% of full
Pressure 1400/2000/4200/6800/10,500 m 0.015 second
scale year scale
(2000/3000/6000/10,000/15,000 psia)
5.5 Hz 2-pole
Butterworth
A/D Inputs 0 to +5 volts 0.005 volts 0.001 volts per month 0.0012 volts
Low
Pass Filter