ABSTRACT
Early Ideas about the Sea Oceanography is a young science with a long history. Scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tried to study the sea, but were often frustrated by its sheer size and complexity and the practical difficulties involved. During the nineteenth century technological advances made systematic exploration of the deep sea possible for the first time, and oceanography became an independent scientific discipline. However, the greatest strides toward understanding the sea and its importance, both as a feature which governs the Earth as we know it and one that influences human activities in many ways, have been made during the twentieth century. Oceanography today is very different from what it was 50 years ago, let alone 200 years or more, so is there any good reason why anyone, apart from historians, should be interested in its past? Science is a continuum; as an activity it grows out of its past, even if that sometimes means rejecting outmoded ideas or unreliable data. A look at how oceanography has developed can be a valuable way of helping to understand the modern science, both in terms of a set of ideas and as an institution.
