The 1960s Ocean: Science and Exploitation

The decade of the 1960s was characterized by excitement and optimism regarding the possibilities for studying the ocean.  The sea and, increasingly, its depths and floor, came to be seen as wilderness to explore, farmland to cultivate, battleground, playground, dump site, mine, oil well, construction site, movie set, and human habitat.  Knowledge about the ocean emerged from the interplay of scientific research and technology – and also from strategy, imagination, desire, and need.  At no time more clearly than in the post World War II world did understanding of the ocean derive from the intersection of observations of the ocean environment (and its constituents) with intentions for using the sea and its resources.  Yet, many uses imagined for the ocean did not come to pass.  Similarly, ocean science was briefly much broader than the version of oceanography, familiar today, that remained by the mid-to-late 1970s.  For a time between the second world war and the mid 1970s, study of the ocean was expected to encompass – in addition to geology, chemistry, marine biology, and physics – human physiology, ocean engineering (an industrial sector akin to aerospace), and underwater capabilities for archaeology, salvage and mining.  The 1960s version of ocean science was intended to support a new human relationship with the sea, one predicated on expectations created by scientists and engineers of the almost unimaginable number and scale of resources available there.  
        This paper draws from popular works and scientific and technical literature to recall and explore this vision of and for the ocean, arguing that, although it passed away unfulfilled, it left its imprint in the expectation held by politicians, managers, and scientists involved in the planning and managing of ocean resource exploitation from the global level, with the unfolding Law of the Sea process, down to local levels.