February 9, 1996 Contact: Robert Irion (408) 459-2495; irion@ua.ucsc.edu

OCEAN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING: TWO CULTURES MEET IN THE OCEAN

* For release in conjunction with the session on Ocean Science and Engineering at the 1996 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The session runs from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. EST on Friday, February 9, in room 321 of the Baltimore Convention Center.

BALTIMORE, MD--If the manned space program marked the first great marriage of scientists and engineers, and if the robotic exploration of the solar system provided an extended honeymoon, one might consider our first ventures into the harsh depths of the ocean as the challenging, temperamental offspring of this union. But as engineers devise clever new solutions for coping with the dark and crushing sea, and as scientists learn more about earth's last great frontier, it has become clear that the child has matured--and he has an impressive range of toys.

Scientists and engineers will describe some of the fruits of their collaborative marine labors during "Ocean Science and Engineering: Two Cultures Meet in the Ocean," a session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Chaired by Chancellor Karl S. Pister of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Dr. Peter G. Brewer, director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the session features talks by five researchers on the melding of two cultures that, at first blush, seem to mix like oil and water.

"Science is discovery, and engineering is creation," says Pister, who is finishing his term as chairman of the AAAS Section on Engineering. "In the ocean, the two must go hand in hand for research to succeed. I have been impressed by the innovative thinking and entrepreneurial spirit of engineers helping to explore the deep ocean. They are overcoming tremendous challenges to create the equivalent of space vehicles."

Pister notes that a successful ocean-exploration project involves not only scientific inquiry and instrument design and fabrication, but also operational wizardry in the face of brutal working conditions. Good examples, he says, are the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) that study the fine details of creatures in the midocean or the geology of the seafloor, all while tethered to tossed and windblown ships miles above. "The pilot of the ROV and the captain of the ship have to work almost like a ballet team to keep the instrument doing its job," Pister says.

Marine geologist Debra Stakes of MBARI, one of the speakers in the session, also recognizes this cultural "trilogy." "Scientists identify what they think they want--they say, 'I want this,'" says Stakes. "Engineers identify what is technically feasible--they say, 'You can have this.' But the operations teams are the ones who determine what we can do--they tell us, 'This is what you get.'"

To illustrate these points, Stakes will discuss an underwater robotic vehicle called MAPS, a joint project of MBARI, the NASA Ames Research Center, the Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey, and Stanford University. MAPS is designed to operate as deep as 6,000 meters, without a tether. Rather, it transmits data acoustically through the water to a ship at the surface, which then relays it via the Internet to the user at MBARI. A test mission at California's Mono Lake in August verified the concepts behind MAPS; its target mission in the ocean is to explore the early stages of an eruption at a midocean ridge.

Other speakers will include the following:

* Director Peter Brewer and engineering manager Daniel Davis of MBARI, on the interactions between scientists and engineers at their young but strikingly successful institution.

* Oceanographer James Morison of the University of Washington, on the Autonomous Conductivity Temperature Vehicle-- a five-foot, twenty-pound untethered probe that explores the salinity and temperature of the ocean thousands of feet beneath thick polar ice caps.

* Patrick Mantey, chairman of the Computer Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz, on the REINAS project--a Real-Time Environmental Information Network and Analysis System for gathering and visualizing oceanographic and meteorological data in the Monterey Bay region.

Mantey's team of computer scientists and engineers on REINAS have worked for nearly four years with scientists at MBARI and the Naval Postgraduate School to develop their system. "This project is helping to change the way that meteorology and oceanography work," Mantey says. "There is a culture in much of science, including environmental science, of gathering one's own data and then keeping it until it gets published. But for a real-time project like this to work, we need sharing of data as it is gathered. That's a culture shift, but the participants end up gaining more than they give by sharing with each other."

Other traditional differences in the cultures, Pister says, include the time frames of work and the sizes of teams. Scientists may need data now to publish a scientific paper, but engineers need time--often, lots of it--to design and build an instrument that works. And the scientific idea of one researcher or a few can translate into a huge team of engineers, each specializing in one cog of the whole machine.

"Some scientists can still work alone, but the days of single engineers are long past," Pister says. "In ocean science in particular, the instrumentation needed transcends the abilities of the individual or the small group."

Editor's note: Science writer Patti Parisi of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute contributed to this news release. For more information about MBARI, go to the MBARI home page at http://www.mbari.org. For more information about UC Santa Cruz, go to http://www.ucsc.edu.

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