Appendix 4 - Milestones in the History of Ocean Study

4000 BCE Egyptians developed shipbuilding and ocean piloting capabilities, as well as trading on the Nile.

3800 BCE First maps showing water (river charts).

3000 BCE Evidence for seafaring between China and Taiwan that may have spurred colonization of the tropical Pacific Ocean islands by the Polynesians.

2000-500 BCE The Polynesians voyaged across the Pacific Ocean and settled all the major islands, first inhabiting Tonga, Samoa, ca. 1000 BCE. Micronesian stick chart used.

1200-850 BCE Phoenicians explored entire Mediterranean Sea and sailed into the Atlantic to West Africa and to Cornwall, England for trading.

900 BCE Greeks first use the term okeanos, a mythical god, to describe the great river that flowed in a circle around the Earth and the root of the present word ocean.

800 BCE First graphic aids to marine navigation.

600 BCE The Greek Pythagoreans assumed a spherical Earth.

Thales of Miletus, a Greek natural philosopher, developed the origin of science as we define it today and he is alleged to have written a book on navigation.  

450 BCE The Greek Herodotus compiled a map of the known world centered on the Mediterranean region.

325 BCE The Greek Pytheas explored the coasts of England, Norway, and perhaps Iceland. He developed a means of determining latitude from the angular distance of the North Star and proposed a connection between the phases of the moon and the tides. 

         The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, published Meteorologica, which described the geography of the Greek world, and Historia Animalium the first known treatise on marine biology—a catalog of marine organisms.

300 BCE Library founded at Alexandria by Alexander the Great, which served as the repository for scrolls from ships and land caravans; for the next 600 years, it was a maritime studies center, fostering advances in science, celestial navigation by a variety of Greek and Egyptian scholars.

276-192 BCE The Greek Eratosthenes, a scholar and librarian at Alexandria, calculated the circumference of a spherical Earth with remarkable accuracy using trigonometry noting the specific angle of sunlight that occurred at Alexandria and Syene (now called Aswan), Egypt. He also invented latitude and longitude lines based on landmarks.

127 BCE Hipparchus of Nicaea, a Greek mathematician, developed a 360 degree system and arranged latitude and longitude in regular grid by degrees.

54 BCE - 30 CE The Roman Seneca devised the hydrologic cycle to show that, despite the inflow of river water, the level of the ocean remained stable because of evaporation.

1st century CE Chinese invent first compass.

150 CE The Greek-Egyptian scientist, Claudius Ptolemy, added minutes and seconds to the latitude-longitude system and compiled a map of the Roman World, but erred in estimating Earth’s circumference, which remained uncorrected for hundreds of years.

415 CE The Alexandrian library with an estimated 700,000 scrolls destroyed and the last librarian, Hypatia, murdered by religious mob; Earth considered flat again.

673-735 CE The English monk Bede published De Temporum Ratione, which discussed the lunar control of the tides and recognized monthly tidal variations and the effect of wind drag on tidal height.

780 Viking raids begin.

800-1000 Hawaii colonized by Polynesians

950-1250 Medieval Warm Period

982 Eric the Red, a Norse chieftain, completed the first transatlantic voyage, reaching present-day Baffin Island, Canada.

995 Leif Ericson, son of Eric the Red, established the settlement of Vinland in what is now Newfoundland, Canada.

1000 Norwegian colonies established in North America

1050 The astrolabe, a navigation instrument used to measure the height of celestial bodies above the horizon, first arrived in Europe from the East.

1400-1900 The Little Ice Age.

1405 Admiral Cheng Ho, the commander of the Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne began his voyages for Emperor Chu Ti, ultimately ruling the South Pacific and Indian Ocean until 1433.

1420 Prince Henry the Navigator, of Portugal, founded a naval observatory and the first school for teaching navigation, astronomy, and cartography.

1452-1519 Leonardo da Vinci, the famous Italian scientist, observed, recorded and interpreted characteristics of currents and waves and noted that fossils in Italian mountains implied that sea level had been higher in the ancient past.

1492 Christopher Columbus rediscovered North America, sailing to the islands of the West Indies. 

1497–1499 Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese navigator, journeyed to India by sea by rounding the Cape of Good Hope with four ships, thereby establishing the first all water trade route between Europe and India. 

1500 The Portuguese navigator and explorer, Pedro Alvares Cabral, traveled westward in search of a route to India, but reached and explored Brazil.

1513 Juan Ponce de Leon described the swift and powerful Florida Current.

1513-1518 Vasco de Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and sailed in the Pacific Ocean.

1515 Peter Martyr proposed an origin for the Gulf Stream.

1519-1522 Ferdinand Magellan embarked on the first circumnavigation of the globe; the crew led by Sebastian del Cano completed the voyage. On the voyage, the Pacific Ocean was named.

1569 Geradus Mercator, the Flemish mapmaker, constructed a map projection of the world that was adapted to navigational charts.

1605 Bishop Resen of Copenhagen drew the first map of the Gulf Stream.

1609 Hugo Grotius, a Dutch legal scholar, published Mare Liberum, the foundation for all modern law of the sea.

1674 The British scientist Robert Boyle investigated the relation among temperature, salinity, and pressure of seawater with depth and reported his findings in Observations and Experiments on the Saltiness of the Sea.

1687 Sir Isaac Newton published Principia Mathematica, which includes an explanation of the operation of gravity and that tides are the result of gravitational attraction of the moon and sun.

1714 Gabriel D. Fahrenheit invents a temperature scale.

1725 Count Luigi Marsigli from Bologna, Italy compiled Histoire Physique de la Mer, the first book pertaining entirely to oceanography, examining the geological formation of ocean basins along with the marine life that lived in the sea.

1733 English clockmaker John Harrison invented the first of his five accurate and durable nautical chronometers for determining longitude at sea. 

1735 George Hadley proposed an explanation for the trade wind regime that involved a consideration of the Earth’s rotation. 

1740 Leonhard Euler, noted Swiss mathematician, developed an approximation of the three-body problem to calculate the magnitude of the lunar and solar attractive forces that generate ocean tides.

1742 Anders Celsius invents a temperature scale.

1758 Carolus Linnaeus publishes 10th edition of Systema Naturae, formalizing biological nomenclature.

1760 John Harrison invented the Number Four chronometer in his quest to solve the longitude problem.

         Joseph Black proposed the concept of specific heat.

1768-1775 Captain James Cook commanded three major ocean voyages gathering extensive data on 1776-1780 geography, geology, biota, currents, tides, and water temperatures of all of the principal oceans.

1769 or 1770 The American scientist, Benjamin Franklin, published the first chart of the Gulf Stream (by Folger), which was used by ships to cross the North Atlantic Ocean faster.

1779 James Cook died in Hawaii.

1802 Nathaniel Bowditch of Massachusetts published the New American Practical Navigator, a navigational resource that continues to be revised and published to this day.

1805 Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort of the Royal Navy developed his 12-category wind force scale to aid mariners estimate wind speed; this scale was later modified. 

1807 President Thomas Jefferson mandated coastal charting of the entire United States and established the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, now known as the National Geodetic Survey.

1811 British chemist Sir Humphry Davy made the first gas hydrates in his laboratory.

1817-1818 Sir John Ross ventured into the Arctic Ocean to explore Baffin Island, where he sounded the bottom successfully (took the first deep-water and sediment samples) and recovered starfish and mud worms from a depth of 1.8 km.

1820 Alexander Marcet, a London physician, noted that the proportion of the chemical ingredients in seawater is unvarying in all ocean basins.

1831-1836 The epic five-year journey of Charles Darwin aboard the British research ship HMS Beagle led to a theory of atoll formation and later the theory of evolution by natural selection.

1835 Gaspard-Gustav de Coriolis, a French mathematician, published the first papers on an object’s horizontal motion across the surface of the rotating Earth.

1836 William Henry Harvey, an Irish botanist, devised a taxonomy of seaweeds.

1838-1842 Departure of the United States Exploring Expedition led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes on the flagship Vincennes. Six vessels mapping coastal areas, collected specimens.

1839-1843 Sir James Clark Ross led an expedition to Antarctica, recovering samples of deep-sea benthos down to a depth of 4.9 km.

1841, 1854 Sir Edward Forbes published The History of British Star-Fishes (1841) and then his Distribution of Marine Life (1854), in which he argued that sea life cannot exist below a depth of about 600 m (the so called azoic hypothesis).

1847 Hans Christian Oersted observed plankton.

1851 The first telegraph cable was laid across the Straits of Dover, stimulating new technologies to protect, raise and lower cables to the sea floor.

1853 The first international conference convened in Brussels by Lt. Matthew Fontaine Maury, USN for the purpose of establishing a uniform means of meteorological observations at sea.

1855 Matthew Fontaine Maury, USN compiled and standardized the wind and current data recorded in U.S. ship logs and summarized his findings in The Physical Geography of the Sea, credited as the first textbook of modern oceanography.

1859 Darwin’s Origin of Species published.

1865 Fr. Pietro Angelo Secchi, a papal scientific advisor, perfected the Secchi disc for determination of the transparency of Mediterranean Sea water to sunlight.

1868-1870 Charles Wyville Thomson, aboard HMS Lightning and HMS Porcupine, made the first series of deep-sea temperature measurements and collected marine organisms from great depths, disproving Forbes’ azoic hypothesis.

1870s William Ferrel, an American meteorologist, drew attention to the deflecting effect of the Earth’s rotation on ocean currents (the Coriolis Effect).

1871 The U.S. Fish Commission was established with a modern laboratory at Woods Hole, MA.

1872-1876 Lead by Charles Wyville Thomson, HMS Challenger conducted worldwide scientific expeditions, collecting data and specimens that were later analyzed in the more than 50 volumes of the Challenger Reports.

1873 Charles Wyville Thomson published a general oceanography book called the Depths of the Sea.

1877-1880 Alexander Agassiz, an American naturalist, founded the first U.S. marine station, the Anderson School of Natural History, on Penikese Island, Buzzards Bay, MA.

1880 William Dittmar determined major salts in seawater.

1884-1901 USS Albatross was designed and constructed specifically to conduct scientific research at sea and undertook numerous oceanographic cruises.

1880s Development of the civil time zones and the ultimate specification of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the world-wide reference.

1888 The Marine Biological Laboratory was established at Woods Hole, MA.

1890 Alfred Thayer Mahan completed The Influence of Sea Power upon History.

1891 Sir John Murray and Alphonse Renard classified marine sediments.

1893 Discovery of Maunder sunspot minimum by astronomer E. Walter Maunder.

1893-1896 The Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, while aboard the Fram, studied the circulation pattern of the Arctic Ocean and confirmed that a northern continent did not exist. 

1900 On 8 September, a hurricane storm surge struck Galveston, TX. More than 8000 people died, mostly by drowning, in the most deadly natural disaster in U.S. history.

1902 Danish scientists with government backing established the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) to investigate oceanographic conditions that affect North Atlantic fisheries. Council representatives were from Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, and the Soviet Union.

1903 The Friday Harbor Oceanographic Laboratory was established at the University of Washington in Seattle.

         The Laboratory that became the Scripps Institution of Biological Research, and later the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, was founded in San Diego, CA.

1905 Marconi perfected wireless telegraphy, which became important for communication on the ocean.

         The Swedish oceanographer, V.W. Ekman, published his classic work on the cause of the spiral nature of wind driven ocean currents near the surface. 

1906 The first Sonar type listening device was invented by Lewis Nixon in order to detect icebergs. 

         Prince Albert I of Monaco established the Muscée Océanographique.

1907 Bertram Boltwood calculated age of Earth by radioactive decay.

1911 Roald Amundsen was first at South Pole.

1912 Following the sinking of the Titanic, the International Ice Patrol was formed to monitor icebergs.

         German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of continental drift.

1912 Scripps Institution allied with the University of California.

1918 Vilhelm Bjerknes and colleagues at the Bergen (Norway) school formulated theories of air masses, atmospheric fronts, and midlatitude storm systems.

1921 International Hydrographic Bureau founded.

1924 Discovery of the Southern Oscillation by Sir Gilbert Walker.

1925-1927 A German expedition aboard the research vessel Meteor studied the physical oceanography of the Atlantic Ocean, using an echo sounder extensively for the first time.

1929 British geologist Arthur Holmes proposed that convection in Earth’s mantle was the driving force for continental drift. This explanation was revived in the 1960s by Harry Hess and Robert S. Dietz. 

1930 The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was established on the southwestern shore of Cape Cod, MA.

1931 Atlantis launched.

1932 The International Whaling Commission was organized to collect data on whale species and to enforce voluntary regulations on whaling.

1937 E.W. Scripps launched.

1938 Serbian astronomer Milutin Milankovitch began work on his astronomical theory of the Ice Age.

1942 Harald Sverdrup, Richard Fleming, and Martin Johnson published the first modern oceanographic reference text, The Oceans, which is still consulted today.

1943 Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan invented the scuba regulator and tank combination, the “aqualung” for diving underwater.

1946 On 1 April, a tsunami destroyed most of the waterfront of Hilo, Hawaii causing 159 deaths.

1949 Maurice Ewing formed the Lamont (later changed to Lamont Doherty) Geological Observatory at Columbia University in New York.

1957 Systematic monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels began at the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, under the direction of Charles D. Keeling.

1957-1958 The International Geophysical Year (IGY) was organized as an international effort to coordinate geophysical investigations of the Earth, including the ocean.

1958 The first U.S. nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus, also made the first submerged transit of the Arctic ice pack, passing the geographic North Pole.

1959 Antarctic Treaty System adopted by 12 nations.

1959-1965 The International Indian Ocean Expedition was established under United Nations auspices to intensively investigate Indian Ocean oceanography.

1960 The bathyscaphe Trieste carrying Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reached the bottom of the deepest (Mariana) trench (10,912 m, or 35,800 ft).

1960s Jacob Bjerknes developed concept of teleconnections involving El Niño events and the Southern Oscillation.

1962 Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring initiated the U.S. environmental movement.

1963 F.J. Vine and D.H. Matthews of Cambridge University interpreted sea floor magnetic field anomaly patterns in support of sea floor spreading.

1964 Alvin, the world’s first deep-ocean research submersible was launched.

         On 28 March, a tsunami struck the Seward, Alaska area, claiming more than 100 lives.

1965 Discovery of a natural deposit of methane hydrates under permafrost in Siberia.

1966 The U.S. Congress adopted the Sea Grant College and Programs Act to provide nonmilitary funding for marine science education and research.

1968 Glomar Challenger returns first deep-sea cores, indicating the age of the Earth’s crust. The cores support theories of plate tectonics.

         The U.S. National Science Foundation organized the Deep Sea Drilling project (DSDP) to core through the sediments and crust of the ocean bottom. 

1969 Santa Barbara, CA, oil well blowout captured national attention.

         Stratton Commission developed the first national ocean policy for the U.S.

1970 The U.S. government created the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to oversee and coordinate government activities related to oceanography and meteorology.

         Completion of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River.

1970s The United Nations initiated the International Decade of Ocean Exploration (IDOE) to improve scientific knowledge of the ocean.

         Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Intensity Scale rated hurricanes from 1 to 5 corresponding to increasing intensity. It was revised in 2010 and is now known as the Saffir Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

1970 John Tuzo Wilson, a Canadian geologist, proposed a cyclic model of tectonic revolution.

1971 Jason Morgan of Princeton University proposed hotspot volcanism.

1972 The Geochemical Ocean Sections Study (GEOSECS) was organized to study seawater chemistry, ocean circulation and mixing, and the biogeochemical recycling of chemical substances.

         Marine Mammal Protection Act established a moratorium on the hunting of marine mammals in U.S. waters and by U.S. citizens on the high seas (reauthorized in 1994).

         Provisions of the 1972 Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act authorized the President to designate national marine sanctuaries in coastal waters of the continental shelf and in the Great Lakes (reauthorized in 2000).

1972 London Dumping Convention banned the discharge of waste from land into the ocean by ships or aircraft.

         Coastal Zone Management Act passed into law whereby the federal government assists coastal states in managing and protecting coastal resources.

1973 U.S. Endangered Species Act became law.

1974 Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study) mapped and sampled the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a zone of seafloor spreading.

1974 F.S. Rowland and M.J. Molina first warned of the threat of CFCs to the stratospheric ozone shield.

1975 Sinking, on 10 November, of the ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior with the loss of her 29-member crew.

1976 Scientists discover indications of Milankovitch cycles in deep-sea sediment cores.

         Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries and Conservation Act established fishery councils to manage the fishery resources in each region of the nation.

1977 The submersible Alvin finds hydrothermal vents in the Galápagos rift.

1978 Seasat-A, the first satellite dedicated to the remote sensing of the ocean, was launched.

         Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS) flown aboard NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite.

1979 NOAA’s SLOSH numerical model developed to predict the location and height of a storm surge.

1981 The Burgess Shale declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

1982 The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea established, which granted jurisdiction over an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) to 151 coastal nations.

1983 The Chesapeake Bay Program became the nation’s largest federal-state environmental restoration project; the nation’s first estuary selected for restoration and protection. 

1985 The scientific research vessel JOIDES Resolution replaced Glomar Challenger in Deep Sea Drilling Project.

         Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere (TOGA) commenced a 10-year experiment in the equatorial Pacific, with the deployment of the TOGA Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) Array. 

         R. D. Ballard located wreck of Titanic.

1986 Moratorium on commercial whaling issued by the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

1987 Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFSS) founded to assess processes controlling carbon fluxes.

1988 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formed by the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environmental Programme to evaluate the state of climate science as the basis for policy action.

         Heinrich layers first described by German researcher Hartmut Heinrich. Sediment released to the floor of the North Atlantic during the melting of fleets of ice bergs.

1989 On 24 March, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, producing the 2nd largest oil spill in U.S. history.

1990 The JOIDES Resolution retrieved a sediment sample estimated to be 170 million years old.

1991 JOI researchers bore to a depth of 2 km (1.24 mi) beneath the seafloor near the Galápagos Islands.

         The NOAA National Weather Service Forecast Office in Miami, FL, began to issue outlooks for rip currents.

1992 The U.S.-French TOPEX/Poseidon satellite launched to monitor global ocean topography.

         The Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE) was conducted in western Pacific.

1993 Beginning of a series of ocean iron fertilization experiments. 

1994 The Law of the Sea Treaty entered into force.

1995 Keiko, a small remotely controlled Japanese submersible, sets a new depth record, reaching 10,978 m (36,008 ft) in the Challenger Deep.

1998 UN declared the “Year of the Oceans” to increase awareness of the importance of the ocean.

         Galileo spacecraft found possible evidence of an ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa.

         Scientists from 30 nations began deploying Argo profiling floats in the world ocean.

2000 Beginning of 10-year international project, Census of Marine Life.

2004 On 26 December, tsunami originated off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia; death toll is estimated at 227,900.

         U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy made recommendations for a new national ocean policy.

2005 On 28 August, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. At least 1500 people lost their lives in the most destructive hurricane in U.S. history.

2007-09 Fourth International Polar Year (IPY).

2007 Modern Japanese drill ship, Chikyu, became fully operational.

         Argo array is completed with over 3000 active profiling floats deployed in the world ocean.

2008 The U.S.-French Jason-2 satellite launched to continue monitoring global ocean topography.

2009 IceBridge, a six-year NASA mission, begins the largest airborne survey of polar ice.

2010 An explosion on 20 April at the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, leased by BP, releases almost 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico before it is capped in mid-July.

         The Census of Marine Life completes a decade of ocean life research. 

         The National Ocean Council is established by Executive Order. 

2011 On 11 March, a tsunami originates off the east coast of Japan with a death toll of 15,093 in Japan and 9,093 persons missing.

2020 Discovery of microbial life deep within Earth’s crust beneath ocean sediments.

2026 The UN High Seas Treaty, formally known as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement, officially enters into force in January.