Oceanography | March 2015
In September and October 2012, R/V Knorr
operated in the North Atlantic to deploy auton-
omous platforms that would collect measure-
ments over the following year for the first phase
of the Salinity Processes in the Upper-ocean
Regional Study (SPURS-1). When the ship was
retired in late 2014, after 44 years of oceano-
graphic service, a plaque on the bridge (see
above, right) still displayed the vessel’s motto,
"Sal sume sub sole," which was provided by
Emerson Hiller, the first captain.
Hiller had also been captain of R/V Chain,
whose stack sported a logo of a strong arm and
a chain along with the Latin motto “Laboramus,”
or “We work.” He thought that was a bit pre-
sumptuous, and for the Knorr he wanted the
less somber motto “More fun under the Sun,”
and searched for someone to put it into Latin.
Townsend Hornor, President of the Associates
of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
(WHOI), gave the project to his wife Betsy,
who was trustee of a girls’ school in New York.
According to the WHOI oral history archives,
Hiller says: “I got a long letter from the school
explaining how they spent a whole month on
this project to put into Latin ‘more fun under
the Sun.’ In their research, the students found
that early Roman soldiers were paid in salt, a
very valuable commodity, and the soldiers
exchanged it for fun and entertainment. The
students thought it reasonable to employ salt
or sal to mean the same as ‘fun and enter-
tainment’ and came up with the slogan Sal
summi sub sole—more fun under the Sun—
more salt, actually. “
We
noticed
the
plaque
during
the
September/October 2012 deployment cruise,
and decided it was an excellent motto for
SPURS as well. However, my high school Latin
nagged at me a bit; something did not seem
quite right. Google Translate tells us that the
motto as actually printed means to “Take salt
under the sun.” “Take salt” reminded me of
the salt tablet dispensers common on ships
when I first started going to sea, before people
worried about their blood pressure. Perhaps
the inscriber misunderstood what the school-
girls actually conveyed.
The originally intended Sal summi sub sole
is well suited to SPURS. Actually, Sal summa
sub sole or “highest salt under the sun”
would be even better. We enjoyed wonder-
fully sunny skies at the center of the subtrop-
ical high during the cruise. We also measured
the highest surface salinities ever reported for
this area, just reaching 37.8 psu. Higher salin-
ities are found in the Mediterranean and Red
Seas, but the North Atlantic salinity maximum is
the saltiest spot in the open ocean. It was salt-
ier than ever when we were there in 2012, con-
sistent with the trend of “salty getting saltier,
fresh getting fresher” associated with the inten-
sifying water cycle over the ocean (see Durack,
2015, in this issue).
While we were at sea, we got word that the
Navy had decided to name Knorr’s replace-
ment ship R/V Neil Armstrong after the Navy
pilot who first walked on the moon. He had
passed away a few weeks before we sailed,
and his ashes were scattered at sea off the
Atlantic coast of Florida, at the same time and
latitude that we were working, though well to
our west. This event provided even more con-
nection of the Knorr with the NASA-funded
SPURS project. NASA had named the space
shuttles for oceanographic research vessels
and now an oceanographic ship was to be
named after a NASA hero. In recognition of the
occasion, we managed to make a call to the
International Space Station and
discussed the commonalities
of ocean and space explora-
tion with Commander
“Suni” Williams as
she whizzed
by overhead.
It was sad to see the Knorr retire in 2014. The
ship had a hand in many of the most significant
oceanographic discoveries of the last 44 years,
including the first samples of the Mid-Atlantic
Ridge, the GEOSECS (Geochemical Ocean
Sections Study) surveys, new life forms at deep-
sea hydrothermal vents, finding RMS Titanic,
doing many long sections for the World Ocean
Circulation Experiment (WOCE), and prob-
ing the ice-bound Arctic. Knorr logged more
than 1.36 million miles for science (the equiva-
lent of more than two round trips to the Moon
or 55 trips around Earth), visited 46 countries,
crossed the equator 58 times, and made it as
far north as 80°13.0'N, as far south as 68°41.3'S.
From the start, Captain Hiller instilled a strong
ethic of service to science throughout the crew,
from deck hands to oilers, engineers, and offi-
cers, and this continued through last fall. It is
a very capable ship and will be sorely missed
from the US oceanographic fleet. Fortunately,
its crew will transfer to the Armstrong when it
arrives at WHOI, and there they will carry on the
tradition of can-do service for science. They are
going to need a motto for the new ship, and I
have one to suggest…
REFERENCE
Durack, P.J. 2015. Ocean salinity and the global water
cycle. Oceanography 28(1):20–31, http://dx.doi.org/
10.5670/oceanog.2015.03.
AUTHOR. Ray Schmitt (rschmitt@whoi.edu) is Senior
Scientist, Department of Physical Oceanography,
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole,
MA, USA.
An Old Salt Retires
By Ray Schmitt
TRIBUTE
Oceanography | March 2015