FROM THE PRESIDENT
The key word in our society’s name, oceanography, combines the
Greek words ὠκεανός meaning “ocean,” and γράφω, meaning
“write.” Other languages use oceanology, with the second word
λογία meaning “logic.” To me, the science of modern ocean-
ography includes both the description and the understanding
of ocean systems that cover a wide range of topics, including
marine life and ecosystems, ocean circulation, plate tectonics
and the geology of the seafloor, and the ocean’s chemical, bio-
geochemical, and physical properties. Since the beginning of
The Oceanography Society (TOS), we have recognized four sci-
entific disciplines with seats on our Council—physical, biologi-
cal, chemical, and geological oceanography—and we recognize
the importance of applied technology and education. I’d like to
suggest that to keep TOS—the only international society that
bridges all areas of ocean science—current, it is time to revisit its
disciplinary building blocks.
Erik van Sebille, one of the invited lecturers at the recent Ocean
Sciences Meeting, introduced himself as a “plastic oceanogra-
pher” with a twinkle in his eye. And Jane Lubchenco, in her Mary
Sears Medal lecture, ended with a call to action for our commu-
nity to “embrace a new social contract, one in which scientists
and their institutions are fully engaged in co-creating scalable
solutions that heal people and the ocean.” These words parallel
an agenda that the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable
Development will promote during 2021–2030. We need to ask
ourselves whether TOS embraces all ocean disciplinary commu-
nities needed to support these emerging challenges.
I also saw a large number of contributions at the Ocean
Sciences Meeting in the area of “digital oceanography.” About
15 abstracts explicitly mentioned the word “digital,” 20 included
“artificial intelligence,” another 20 referred to “big data,” and
more than 50 used “machine learning” methods. The European
Union is currently discussing a Mission Earth initiative that
would bring together scientific and industrial excellence to
develop a high-precision digital model of Earth (its “digital
twin”) that would radically improve Europe’s environmental
prediction and crisis management capabilities. Is TOS ready
to support the ocean’s piece? I am excited about an OCEAN5D
initiative supporting “digital twin oceans” that would describe
an ocean in one temporal and three spatial dimensions (4D).
The fifth dimension would refer to an ocean issue such as sea-
floor habitat, sea level changes, seagrass abundance, coastal vul-
nerability to harmful algae blooms, or the economic poten-
tial of zoning for mariculture or wind energy farming. If all of
our existing data were interoperable and FAIR (for details, see
https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/), we could deliver the
first OCEAN5D pilots rapidly at regional or sub-basin scales.
The US EarthCube initiative (https://www.earthcube.org/)
seems like a most relevant step in the direction of open and
interoperable environmental data.
For TOS to capitalize on these ideas, we should consider
enlarging our Council by two members, one to connect us to the
socioeconomic-legal ocean communities and another to repre-
sent the digital dimension of oceanography. Moreover, should
we consider cosponsoring two topical ocean meetings in 2021,
perhaps one on ocean solutions in partnership with the Ocean
Visions network (http://www.oceanvisions.org/) and another on
the digital ocean jointly with IEEE (https://www.ieee.org/)? I am
interested to hear your thoughts and ideas.
Martin Visbeck, TOS President
REFERENCE
El Saddik, A. 2018. Digital twins: The convergence of multimedia technologies.
IEEE MultiMedia 25(2):87–92, https://doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2018.023121167.
OCEANOGRAPHY IN THE DECADE OF
DIGITAL SCIENCE AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
New Opportunities for TOS?
A “digital twin” is a digital replica of a living
or non- living physical entity. By bridging
the physical and the virtual worlds, data
are transmitted seamlessly, allowing the
virtual entity to exist simultaneously with the
physical entity (El Saddik, 2018).
Oceanography | March 2020