The ocean sciences are based on a rich exploratory heritage that dates back over a century, and expeditionary oceanography on dedicated research vessels will remain a vital component of current ocean sciences research—but a complementary new approach is also being embraced by the ocean sciences community. Recent decades have witnessed increasingly detailed spatial exploration of the oceans and seafloor, along with an evolution toward temporal exploration of change in the oceans and linkages among active processes through sustained time-series observations and adaptive long-term observatory technology. Understanding temporal evolution and linkages among processes in the oceans and the underlying plates will require a coordinated investment in a fulltime observational presence within the oceans and on and beneath the seafloor—an approach that is embodied in the budding Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and Ocean Research Interactive Observatories Network (ORION) program within the National Science Foundation (NSF; Isern and Clark, in press; Clark, foreword to this volume).

Becker, K. 2003. Marine geological and geophysical roots of the Ocean Observatories Initiative. Oceanography 16(4):6–11, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2003.02.

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