RECENT RESULTS IN SUBMARINE GEOPHYSICS

Abstract

During the war period nearly all the established methods of studying submarine geology were found to have military application, and, as a result of the impetus given to such work by government research and development contracts, new techniques were developed. Thus the field work of the war period has added considerably to knowledge gained through established methods and has demonstrated the potential usefulness to submarine geology of entirely new instrumentation. The co-operation of geophysicists, submarine geologists, and oceanographers with the Navy9s research program has been particularly close and effective. It has led to improvements in the methods of both deep-sea and shallow-water seismic surveys, to advances in the techniques of underwater photography, and to the developments of other rapid systems for collecting information about the sediments. Some examples of the results achieved by investigators at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are presented. As an example of an entirely new tool for the exploration of ocean basins, a method of acoustically scanning the floor of the deep ocean is explained. This method is particularly promising for the location of active submarine volcanoes and isolated submerged sea mounts which cannot be easily found by conventional sounding techniques.