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11.—Deep-sea Biological Studies in America, 1846 to 1872—their contribution to the Challenger Expedition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2011

Rudolf S. Scheltema  and
Amelie H. Scheltema
Rudolf S. Scheltema
Affiliation:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass.
Amelie H. Scheltema
Affiliation:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass.
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Extract

On December 7, 1872, H.M.S. Challenger left Sheemess, England, on one of the great adventures of scientific exploration, a voyage of four years which was to circumnavigate the globe and to visit all the major oceans of the world. The stated purpose and objectives of the expedition are given in a letter from the Royal Society of London to the Secretary of the British Admiralty. These goals were to study: (1) ‘the physical conditions of the deep sea throughout all the great ocean-basins’, (2) ‘the chemical constitution of the water at various depths from the surface to the bottom’, (3) ‘the physical and chemical characters of the deposits’, and finally (4) ‘the distribution of organic life throughout the area explored’ (Challenger Rep., 1 (1), iii). This was an extraordinarily comprehensive plan! To get some notion of the enthusiasm this expedition engendered and to recapture some of its excitement, one needs only to read the narrative of this historic cruise written and extracted from the logs and personal journals of members from the scientific party.

Type
Founders of Oceanography
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Section B: Biological Sciences , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , 1972 , pp. 133 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1972

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References

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