Paleoceanography — the Deep-Sea Record

Paleoceanography, the study of ocean history, emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, when cores became available that provided data from which history could be reconstructed. Initial efforts by W. Schott (1935) using short cores taken by the German research vessel Meteor have been mentioned (Sect. 8.2.3). In essence, the Swedish Deep Sea Expedition (1947–1948) played the same role in launching the new science of historical oceanography that the Challenger Expedition had played 70 years earlier, for physical and biological oceanography. The research vessel Albatross set out from Gothenburg in 1947, to begin the circumnavigation of the world’s tropical environment, under the leadership of Hans Petterson. The expedition used a new device, the piston corer, developed by B. Kullenberg in Copenhagen. This technique typically recovered cores of a length of 7 m or so, with the oldest sediment being from 0.3 to 1 million years in age. Kullenberg’s device, with modifications, is still used today (Fig. 9.1).