Pssst! Hey, 251ers! It's time for class! Are you ready? Welcome.
Welcome back, 251ers. Here I am again. This shirt, if you can't read the horrible writing on it, it says, I am Iron Man.
Ah, what do you do? It's another black side of the shirt. We're going to see how long we can keep this gag going. How many black side of the shirts does this guy have?
You're going to find out. So when we left off, I promised you that we would spend this next video talking about the explorations of the oceans. I put here briefly because this is a really interesting topic.
You'd probably teach a whole course on this. However, we are going to teach one video on it. So there you have it.
But it's important for... I think it's important to know this because... When you can kind of connect the human aspect of science to the discoveries, I think it's a lot more interesting. It also helps you, or helps me remember things. Hopefully it helps you remember things a little bit about how the ocean was discovered and some facts about it.
So, as far as we know, the first boats that we have records of that we've discovered were about 40,000 years ago. That's right. This number is in italics because I'm so amazed by it.
So that's a really long time ago. I don't know if that classifies as prehistoric, but I don't think there was a lot of writing back then. So probably.
But you can imagine, as long as there have been people that have seen the water, be it rivers, lakes, or oceans, I'm sure that there were people that were like, I need to be on that right now. So, and... Once, I'm sure that once the first person saw something swimming in the water they were like what is that and I had to eat it.
Right? That's how people are. So 40,000 years ago is our first record of boats.
Who knows, maybe they've been around for longer. The first islands that we know much about their exploration of were the Pacific Islands and they were first inhabited and explored by Asians that had left from the Asian continent. Actually, I'm not sure if it's... I would assume it's from China, but I'm actually not sure if it was from China. It could have been from India.
But Pacific Islands, we know that they were first explored and inhabited by Asians. The remote islands of Polynesia. Let's see if we can find Polynesia on this map. We have French Polynesia over here.
So this is pretty far. This is pretty far out into the Pacific Ocean, right? Like these islands are closer to Asia, and so they were inhabited first. And then people started moving in this direction. And so here we have, we have Fiji in here.
And this right here says 1100 BCE is when the remote islands of Polynesia were occupied at least. We know at least that early. So. 1100 BCE, we are in the year 2018 CE.
So that, maybe 2019, depends on when you're watching this, that's 3,000 years ago. It's a long time ago, right? So people were exploring these areas at least 3,000 years ago. We know that Hawaii, which is all the way up here, was colonized... about 450 to 600 CE, common era.
So that's about 1500 years ago. And we have no written records prior to 1600, about 1600. Really, CE, is that true? I was thinking that would be BCE. See, even I'm surprised by my own slides at times.
We have no written records prior to here about the exploration of these areas, right? There's Obviously, written records from Egypt and other places prior to that. But so a lot of this history we have to piece together using artifacts and dating them and things like that.
But suffice it to say, these islands, which are way out in the middle of nowhere, were being explored in this area between a few thousand years ago and a few hundred years ago. Hawaii occupied about 1,500 years ago. and all of these have obviously been continuously occupied since they were first discovered whenever that was.
I say whenever that was because it was different to the different islands. So the Polynesian people were the people that found a lot of these islands. And so, therefore, I have dubbed them some of the earliest badasses.
Because, remember, the Pacific Ocean covers a third of the planet. This is the biggest ocean that we have. So you can imagine that when these early Polynesian badasses set off in their boats, they had no idea, probably, where they were going to end up.
They just said, this is going to work out because I'm badass and it's going to work out. I'm sure that it didn't work out for some of them. And so it's amazing. I think it took an incredible amount of bravery to kind of go out exploring and trying to find other islands.
So to aid them in their badassery, they use things like movements of stars and seasonal winds to navigate. They follow the flights of birds. This is. This is a pretty good idea, right? Birds are going to need to land eventually and eat, and so why not see where it is that they're following, that they're going, and that's probably where the land is.
And they also notice changes in the water when you're close to islands. You can see when you get closer to islands, the water gets, it changes color, right? So you can, if you're really, really keen, and you have to imagine, we're not very keen because we live now, and we have all of these aids to help, like, tell us where we're going.
We have cell phones that we can just look at, and they have maps that magically come to us from space and tell us where we are in the world, and so it's pretty easy for us. But they didn't have those things, and so if you didn't have your cell phone, take it from me. I'm old enough that I didn't have cell phones growing up, and so I was a little bit more observant of what was going around in the world around me, because you have to be, right?
If you don't have an aid, then... you'll probably rise to the occasion, or most people, or at least some of the people, will rise to the occasion and figure things out. And so these people, they didn't have any of these things. And so they were just really observant, and they really in tune with the world around them.
And so as you're sailing along, if you've ever been out to the deep ocean, you know, like if you've gone even deep sea fishing, which is really not that deep, but relative to where most of the people do fishing, it's deep, I guess. If you go... right next time, if any of you go deep sea fishing, you're probably in a few hundred meters of water, maybe a thousand meters of water.
A thousand meters of water is one quarter of the average depth of the ocean. So not really that deep, but deep compared to where most of the other activities are. So if you've been kind of deep sea fishing, if you've ever made it out onto the edge of the continental shelf, you see the water gets really, really, really blue.
It's this gorgeous, gorgeous color of blue. And as you come in closer to land, it gets darker and darker and darker. And near land, it's usually kind of greenish or grayish.
And some of that is just resuspension of sediments. Some of that is there's a lot more biology and life living in those waters because there's a lot more nutrients. There's various reasons that the water changes color.
And so they were really keen to that, and they could follow that around. And they also made maps with the resources that they had. I don't know that they had paper. Maybe they did. But this is an early...
Polynesian map. And if you look at it, this is from your textbook, you can find other versions of these on the interwebs. If you look closely, you can see kind of at these, a lot of these joints, there are shells and those shells represent islands, right? And these kind of crazy curved doohickeys here are actually indicating that the waves curve around the islands. And these straight ones are like, this is saying regular ocean wave direction, right?
But between islands, the currents will be kind of normal. But as you get closer to islands, islands are physical things. The water is moving.
Water is also a physical thing. So it's going to have to change its path a little bit to go around that island. So they knew it was up, these early Polynesians. Western navigators. First started exploring the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, near land about 2,000 BCE.
So this is about 4,000 years ago. And the names of those people are the Phoenicians. A little bit down the road, a guy named Pythias invented a way to measure latitude while at sea in the year 325 BCE, right? So this is 2,300 years ago, more than that, almost 2,350 years ago. And I put this out for two reasons.
One, that's pretty impressive. 325 BCE figured out, remember, to measure latitude while at sea, you just measure the angle between yourself and the North Star, since these people were in the Northern Hemisphere, between themselves and the North Star, and that's the latitude you have. But if you only have latitude, you can only tell where you are north-south. You can't tell where you are east-west, and so you only have half of the picture. So it's hard to draw really accurate maps.
And it would be, the amazing thing is, it took 2,000 years, over 2,000 years, before John Harrison figured out how to determine longitude at c in the 1700s. So that was a really long time. Oh no, somebody's calling me on the phone.
I probably can talk to this person later. Sorry about that. Back to our lecture. The other thing I wanted to show you is this guy Pythias who... Did figure out how to measure latitude.
That was Adrienne Correa, by the way. She's a professor at Rice University, and she works on coral reefs in the Flower Garden Banks. She's awesome. You should check her out. C-O-R-R-E-A.
But I'm talking to you, my 251ers, so Adrienne can wait. The other thing I wanted to point out is this guy Pythias, after he was like, hey, I've discovered how to measure latitude, started making maps and exploring a little bit. And so this is a map, or a recreation, of a map that he made.
This picture is straight out of Wikipedia. Sometimes there's good things on Wikipedia. A map of England, or I should say the, I'm sorry, Great Britain, not just England, that he made in whatever year it was, about 2,000 years ago, basically, or 2,300 years ago at this point.
If you look at this map, obviously it's not 100% accurate, but considering that he didn't know how to measure longitude, right? So north-south he has pretty good, east-west not so good. This is a really impressive map, right?
You have the smaller island here and the bigger island there. If I just had a look at that and somebody said, what do you think this is? I would probably say I think that that's Great Britain.
Not a bad job for how long ago this was. Okay, moving on. The next person of importance, according to this class. is Eratosthenes, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. I apologize horribly if people know how to pronounce that more accurately, but Eratosthenes, that's what I'm going to say.
This was a Greek guy. Again, a lot of the early explorers were the Greeks. They had that early great civilization. He lived between 276 and 194 BCE and determined the Earth's circumference within 0.08% of its true value, which happens to be...
40,000, 32 kilometers. This is ridiculous. None of you could do this today.
I can't do this. Maybe some of you, you might be smarter than I am. I don't think I could do this.
That's amazing. That is amazing, right? We only know that it's slightly more accurate nowadays, probably using satellites and stuff like that.
So Eratosthenes, he also invented geography, like literally invented. How many times can somebody be like, I invented this whole huge field, right? We know that Isaac Newton.
was like, I need to do this thing and there's no way to do it, so I'm going to invent calculus. This guy invented geography. And he used the Library of Alexandria extensively for his research, and we point that out, because sadly, the Library of Alexandria apparently was quite amazing, but it was burned down at some point later.
So Eratosthenes determined Earth's circumference really well, and he invented geography, and it's important for that reason. And then, way to jump forward. A lot of years, 1700 years, or really 1800 years. To this guy James Cook, perhaps you've heard of him.
Captain James Cook lived from 1728 to 1779. He undertook three voyages of discovery. You can try to convince yourself that this was just because he was curious about the world and how it worked. That's not true. This was a lot of these voyagers, like Cook and all the Vasco da Gama. Amerigo de Vespucci and all those Columbus, all those old guys.
They were doing these things to further knowledge about the oceans, claim land for their country. By the 1700s, I don't know if they're still claiming land. He was doing it to help British maritime superiority. Remember I had mentioned this was around the time when they were developing that early X-Prize, and James Harrison, John, sorry, John Harrison, this guy, developed a way to measure longitude.
Cook actually tested that method at sea. And so... Partly he was going around the world to partake in activities that helped the British maintain their naval superiority.
So he was killed in what your book describes as a skirmish with the Hawaiians in 1779. That's putting a nice kind of historic glaze over what actually happened. He was killed by the Hawaiians because he tried to kidnap their king for ransom. After the theft, I guess he was docked in Hawaii and visited in Hawaii, and some of the people there stole one of his lifeboats.
And so he said, oh, you stole my lifeboat. I'm going to kidnap your king. And then they were like, well, no, you're not.
We're going to kill you. And the book describes that as a skirmish. I wouldn't describe that as a skirmish. But anyway, that is how he met his end, unfortunately for him.
But on the good side, so he's known for doing some not nice things to people as they travel around the world. On the flip side for larger humanity, I guess, his expeditions made many contributions to the scientific knowledge of the oceans. And this is why we're discussing him here.
He was the first person to generate an accurate outline of the Pacific Ocean. Remember, that's the biggest ocean, one third of the planet, average depth 3,900. 40 meters.
So that's pretty important. Captain Cook, out of scientific curiosity, was the first person to systematically measure water temperatures below the surface of the ocean, as well as winds, currents, and something called soundings, which are depth measurements. Soundings is a fancy word for depth. And he used John Harrison's chronometer to measure longitude. He was the first accurate measurements of the Earth's surface because...
Why? Why was he the first... Why is he the first accurate measurement of the Earth's surfaces, the 51ers? George knows. Because he was the first person that was able to use latitude and longitude.
So he had the whole coordinate system at his hands. And so he employed that, right? And three voyages of discovery went all over the Earth. And so...
I was able to make some pretty accurate, nice measurements. And also discovered that sauerkraut prevents scurvy. And I forget, is it vitamin C?
I'm embarrassed that I don't remember which one it is. It gives you, a deficit of it gives you scurvy eventually. This is something that happens at sea. There's not a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables out there.
And so sauerkraut was a way to get people vegetables when they're out at sea and it said, hey, Your diet matters when you're out at sea and there are things you can do to prevent from getting sickness. Now that doesn't sound like a really crazy thing. Whatever. He discovered a cure to scurvy. However, scurvy at the time was the biggest killer of people that did work on the oceans.
And so this actually was a really big deal. To be able to prevent that, there he is, a very serious looking man, Captain Cook. This shows you... Some of his voyages around the world, he was British, so all of them left from there, but you can see that he basically went around the entire planet three different times. You can see here that he went to Hawaii and he got killed and his ship must have gone on and gone back home.
And they're like, oh no, we better run away because we don't have a captain anymore. And they went back home. But that's pretty impressive. You got to admit, even though the guy was...
Probably not very nice in real life. That's really impressive. And here, I really like this picture for scale.
So if you've ever been down in Galveston, you've seen ships, these big giant cruise ships. This is the Queen Mary II. And that little itty-bitty ship right next to it, that is a replica of Captain Cook's ship. And so this is the size of ship that they were using back in the day to go around the world. And this was probably a pretty decent-sized ship for the time.
Captain James Cook. So and then I believe, oh no, there's some other ones. But this one, he happens to be my favorite, Charles Darwin.
He was British as well, from lived in the most of the 1800s, 1809 to 1882. Charles Darwin was a student at Cambridge University. He was a pretty religious man and he wanted to be a minister in the Church of England. He ended up taking a trip as an unpaid naturalist on the HMS Beagle for five years, from 1831 to 1836. Now, I point this out, unpaid naturalist. for a reason.
You'll notice that back in the day, kind of before, really before the 1900s, even into 1900s, you still see them nowadays. But a lot of the science back in the day was done by something called a gentleman scientist. Ah, that computer's whining again, sorry.
And it's because a gentleman scientist is another way of saying somebody who is rich enough that they could... They could spend five years on a ship without getting paid, and it didn't matter because they had so much money that that was fine. And that Charles Darwin happened to be one of these people.
You might say he was in the 1%. However, he changed the world with his knowledge, and so I'm okay by it. The Beagle is the ship that he went on for five years, went all over the planet.
Is that true? He definitely went over to the Galapagos. That's where he made a lot of his famous discoveries.
And we know him for, or we know him most, I should say, for discovering the process of evolution and describing it. But he also did a lot of other things. Like he described coral atoll formation.
And we'll talk about this in one of the upcoming chapters and then again at the end of the book when we talk about coral reefs. The end of the book, the end of the course. He also wrote many other papers, including ones on things like barnacles, volcanic islands, fossils, and earthworms.
So he really was a jack-of-all-trades. And unlike how the phrase goes, that jack-of-all-trades, master of none, he was a master of all trades. He was a really incredibly smart and, by all accounts, gentle human being.
And he published the origin on the origin of species in 1859, after deliberating over publication for years because He was a really religious person and he was worried about whether or not that would be taken well by the church at the time. I don't think it was, although nowadays it's a long time since then so it's not an issue with the church. And there's a really interesting story about why he finally published it when he did and it was basically that this other guy, Charles Wallace, no not Charles, he's Charles, George Wallace.
Wallace is definitely the last name, who was not rich and was running around the world collecting insects because he would sell them to museums and collecting specimens of birds and things like that. He also figured out this idea of evolution and biogeography, and Darwin had done a lot more work, but it was clear that Wallace was also going to publish, and so Darwin was like, well, I better get my book out. Wallace is also well-known, but not quite as well-known as Darwin.
There he is. I love this portrait of him. in 1882. This was 73 years old. He died in 1882, so this was not long before he passed away.
That is Charles Darwin, my favorite scientist. And some other pioneers in oceanography, more recently, Ben Franklin. Remember this guy? We talked about him last chapter. He made the first charts of the Gulf Stream in 1769. If you don't know what the Gulf Stream is, 251ers, guess what?
That won't last for very long. You're going to find out. We're going to talk about it.
But suffice it to say, it's a western boundary current that goes up the east coast of the United States, western boundary of the ocean, but the east coast of the continent. And he was the first person to chart that, so he was an early oceanographer, amongst many other things. Matthew F. Morey is a really interesting guy.
It's worth checking him out on Wikipedia or some other website. He's interesting because he's one of these characters in history. History, we love stories to be black and white, but history is not black and white.
So Matthew Mori, in 1847, made the first wind and current charts of the North Atlantic. And I forget his position, but I think he was high up in the Department of the Interior or Homeland something. They didn't have Homeland Security back then, but he was high up in the U.S. government, right? Notice these dates, 1847, 1855. He wrote this book, The Geography of the Sea, and this is basically considered the birth of oceanography. Matthew Mori is considered the first true oceanographer.
Like other people who are interested in the oceans, but he's the guy that went out there, was measuring wind and currents and describing the ocean as a system. So that's all really important. That's all also before the Civil War and Matthew F. Morey, as with we're in Texas, so we are in the South, was a southern gentleman.
And so when the Civil War broke out, he fought for the Confederacy. And given his knowledge on the ocean, he invented mines that were used to sink Union ships. And so he invented mines that killed many northerners.
And so it's a really interesting... character. Clearly I would not be on the side of fighting for the Confederacy, but he did all these other things and then did that. And then I think after the war he actually went back into government. So he's a really interesting character.
The most important thing about him, I guess, is that he's considered the first true oceanographer. And then this last one, and this will come up again and again, is the Challenger expedition. Remember, this is why we have Challenger deep. This is from 1872 to 1876. This was a British expedition. It's considered the first true oceanographic expedition, and it is also the birth of modern oceanography.
And so you're going to hear a lot about that. So it was a four-year expedition. They built a ship specifically to do science, not anything else, not trade vegetables, not blow people up, not do anything horrible, just do science.
First time that was ever done. It was also The first time a lot of those earlier cruises are funded by rich people or kings and queens. This is the first time that a scientific expedition was mounted, funded by the government.
And that is why it's considered the birth of modern oceanography, because most modern oceanography is funded by the government because ships are expensive. And so it's not common that. Private citizens have enough money to really mount oceanographic research, and also there's other reasons why it's important to have government-funded research, although there is clearly money from private groups as well. But anyway, Challenger Expedition will come up again and again, 1872 to 1876. This is the one to really, really remember Matthew Mori and Benjamin Franklin, also because they were important in the history of oceanography.
Blammo. We've made it to the end of this particular video. You're doing really well, 251ers.
I'm glad to have you along, and I'm going to stop the video here. We're done talking about these explorers, and the next section of the class, or next video, will talk about some of the basic properties of the planet and what some of these different things are very briefly before we get into more detailed science in the next chapter. So I'll leave it at that.
See you in the next lecture. Sometimes I go that way, sometimes I go this way. This time, maybe I'll just walk right into the camera, and I'll stare at it, and George will turn it off, and I'll see you later.