Physical Oceanography

Abstract

It is no easy task to summarize the wide variety of material presented by physical oceanographers during this Joint Oceanographic Assembly, where the main emphasis lies on the multi-disciplinary unity of our subject. How can one provide an overview in which the contribution of the physicist is seen in relation to that of his colleagues in sibling disciplines? One way is to classify each contribution in terms of a single parameter. Choosing “time”, I ascribed to each paper a range of time scales that appeared to be of primary interest to the author. Thus, those concerned with the evolution of the ocean basins were given the range 100 to 1000 million years; those concerned with changing patterns of climate and fisheries populations, years and decades; those concerned with turbulence in the ocean, minutes and seconds; and so on. Then I plotted a frequency distribution showing the number of times each occurred, to the nearest half decade on a logarithmic time scale. The result is shown in fig. 1. I should mention that this histogram is based on the abstracts, and some of the speakers appeared to have changed their interests between abstract and final presentation, but I hope the resulting shifts in time scale do not too seriously alter the shape of fig. 1.