Oceanography's Third Wave

摘要

When John Delaney first started using ships and submersibles to explore the underwater volcanoes off the coast of Washington state back in the early 1980s, the experience, he says, was exhilarating. Delaney was part of the team that in 1984 discovered the Endeavour vent, a 70-kilometer-long volcanic ridge where magma from Earth's mantle wells up between a pair of tectonic plates. As exciting as those research trips were, they were equally exasperating, says Delaney, an oceanographer at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, who looks every inch the bearded sea captain and is fond of reciting T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Robert Frost. "They offered snapshots," he says. "We would get a ship and sub for a couple of weeks, come home, publish our results, and then write another set of grants. We would go and see something interesting. But it was 2 or 3 years before we could come back and see what was going on. That became very frustrating."