Oceanography The Official Magazine of
The Oceanography Society
Volume 21 Issue 03

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Volume 21, No. 3
Pages 14 - 21

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Glimpses of Oceanography in the Postwar Period

Walter Munk | Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA
Deborah Day | Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

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Several recent histories give a critical review of American oceanography in the postwar period. Ronald Rainger (2000a,b, 2001), who has written extensively about the history of oceanography, reviews the Navy-oceanography partnership, and Jacob Darwin Hamblin’s monograph, Oceanographers and the Cold War, examines the history of Soviet-US oceanographic relations at a time of increasing Navy sponsorship of US oceanography (Hamblin, 2005). Written by professional historians, these books give a long view of oceanography. Here, I share some personal glimpses of this era, which differ from the historians’ accounts, especially in regard to relationships between oceanographers and the Navy. Oceanography is again in a state of great flux—the reviews by Rainger and Hamblin may offer guidance concerning future developments.

Citation

Munk, W., with D. Day. 2008. Glimpses of oceanography in the postwar period. Oceanography 21(3):14–21, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2008.30.

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