Abstract
IN the interesting leading article in NATURE of March 10, and in the discussion which preceded it, one method of conducting oceanographic research appears to have been practically ignored. We mean its encouragement in permanent institutions and by continued marine surveys in the diverse parts of the British Empire. You have rightly laid stress on the importance of intensive study in particular localities, but we doubt whether research of the kind can be carried out in a satisfactory manner by parties detached for limited periods of time from an expedition of world-wide scope. There is nothing that has struck us more in our own work on the Indian seas and lagoons than the importance of returning again and again to the same place to investigate special problems. For example, in the investigation of the fauna of the Chilka Lake, a small offshoot of the Bay of Bengal, now being completed by the Zoological Survey of India, the true character of the fauna is being elucidated only by returning year after year and month after month to the same hunting-grounds; and it is not only the fauna to which this applies, for we find that the hydrography also must be studied again and again in years of different climatic conditions and at all seasons. The Chilka Lake is only a minute, almost isolated, fragment of the ocean, but in order to obtain a solid basis for the working out of any oceanographic problem recurrence is necessary, not only because conditions change from time to time—and in many parts of the ocean they change, so far as we know, very little—but also because detailed work on results obtained in the field inevitably opens new vistas, suggests unsuspected sources of error, and reveals paths that ought to be followed out.
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ANNANDALE, N., SEWELL, R. Oceanographic Research in the British Empire. Nature 107, 139 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/107139a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/107139a0
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