Oceanography | December 2016
FROM THE PRESIDENT
One of my favorite stories to relay to my undergrad-
uate classes is about Adelard of Bath, who was an
English naturalist in the early twelfth century during
the reign of Henry the First. Among the 76 questions in
Adelard’s Treatise on Nature are:
• Why are the waters of the sea salty?
• How do the oceans not increase from the flux of the
rivers?
• Whence comes the ebb and flow of the tides?
Many centuries passed before we had answers to these
questions, though some of Adelard’s questions remain up
for speculation, including this one: Do beasts have souls?
Today, we might substitute “politicians” for “beasts” and
find the answer equally elusive. But that is a whole other
story. Instead, I mention Adelard because I was reminded
of him often when I served as a member of the US National
Research Council Decadal Survey for Ocean Sciences
Committee. During our committee deliberations, we too
were trying to identify unanswered questions, in our case
about the ocean. In the process of that identification, it
was readily apparent to me just how much we had learned
about the ocean since I started my graduate studies at the
University of Washington over 30 years ago. Unlike the
centuries it took for many of Adelard’s questions to be
answered, research questions today seem to have a half-
life of just a couple of decades, if not just a few years.
As I near the end of my term as TOS president, I have
been reflecting on how quickly our profession, not just
the questions we pursue, has changed since I was a grad-
uate student. At that time, information on research prog-
ress arrived monthly via subscriptions to journals from
professional societies and background information was
gleaned from a hike to the library. Graduate students,
by and large, entered and left graduate school with the
expectation of an academic career. And those graduate
students, and certainly the faculty, were fairly homoge-
neous in their ethnic, gender, and racial makeup.
Today, in the digital age, almost anyone with a smart
phone in almost any part of the world could, in a matter
of time that I do not care to estimate, find most if not all of
the information that I teach my students over the course
of a semester. Most any article written by most anyone
on most any subject in oceanography can be found with
a few keystrokes. The digital age has democratized access
to information; information is ubiquitous, free, and avail-
able to everyone. Today, as I have written before in this
column, graduate students have been largely disabused
of the presumption that an academic career awaits them
upon graduation. Nationwide, only about 10% of PhDs
in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM) fields now move on into academic positions. We
do not have firm numbers for ocean sciences, but a recent
estimate is that only 43% of ocean science PhDs cur-
rently go into academia, which is likely an overestimate
for those entering the professoriate since that estimate
counts PhDs entering postdoctoral positions.
And today, though we have made little progress in
recruiting underrepresented minorities into our profes-
sion, there has been a noticeable rise in the number of
women in graduate school and in early and mid-career
stages in ocean science professions. Today, the presence
of women at meetings, on committees, in the classroom,
in the lab, and at sea registers hardly any surprise.
My reflection of these changes turned to an assess-
ment of how well The Oceanography Society, as a pro-
fessional society, is responding to these changes. Here’s
my TOS report card:
When there is so much information available, syn-
thesis and context become all the more valuable.
In this regard, Oceanography magazine does an excel-
lent job. Quarter after quarter, this magazine, under the
superb leadership of Ellen Kappel, provides a set of articles
expertly wrapped around a topical theme. Yet the mag-
azine is more than the sum of these parts, since it offers
commentary on the threads that connect these articles. I
am not the only one impressed with the value and qual-
ity of Oceanography: Oceanography’s 2015 impact factor of
3.883 places it third among oceanography journals, on the
heels of two review journals that are published annually.
The New World of
Oceanography