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| Program > Quantifying the Sea and Forecasting the Fish |
| Programme > Quantifier l'océan et prévoir les poissons |
| Eric
L. Mills (Dalhousie University) Forgotten Calculation: Making the Physics of the Sea Quantitative, 1876-1900 |
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During the 1870s there was no appreciation of how a great debate over ocean circulation - whether it was due to the wind or to thermohaline processes - could be resolved. There was general agreement that measurement was required - but how could measurement alone, in the absence of some new world picture, do more than increase confusion and debate? The answers came first in Scandinavia, first Sweden, then Norway, due to their concern with climatic change, fishery failures, and the needs of industry. Swedish work led the way, with an increasing database of information about oceanic circulation, and in Norway the meteorologist Henrik Mohn recognized about 1880 that the mathematical models he had been developing for cyclonic circulation of the atmosphere could be applied to data from the sea. His monograph The North Ocean of 1887 provided a dynamic approach to circulation for the first time. This remarkable innovation fell upon unprepared ground, although it was similar to the dynamic approach developed successfully by Bjerknes, Helland-Hansen and Sandstroem only a decade and half later. Mohn's work has been described as "an abandoned mine: the veins have been exploited and their products have been incorporated into daily use, perhaps worn and recast, so that their presence is no longer recognizable," although he had solved the problems that lay beyond the powers of earlier students of ocean circulation.
Department
of Oceanography
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