Oceanographers Get A Sinking Feeling

Columbia University oceanographer Arnold Gordon had planned to spend much of this year plumbing the Straits of Indonesia to understand how warm water from the Pacific Ocean mixes with the cooler waters of the Indian Ocean. His field work, financed by a $4.4 million grant, from the National Science Foundadon, would have been part of a five-year study to understand how differences in water temperature affect global weather patterns. But three years after Gordon first traveled to Jakarta to sketch out the project with his Indonesian collaborators, he has yet to collect any data; in fact, he’s lost his grant. Instead of learning more about ocean currents, Gordon has been taught a bitter les son in international law. The source of his misery is a provision in a seven-year-Old international treaty —which has not yet gone into effect—that allows nations to control access to their coastal waters. What happened to Gordon was that Indonesian officials, for reasons of their own, decided to use the proposed agreement as an excuse to stall the project. Every time Gordon sought permission to carry out the he was ignored. The bad news is that Gordon's story is by no means unique. In times past, oceanographers faced a crazy quilt of regulations that varied by country. However, those rules were rarely enforced. But that era of benign neglect ended with the 1982 signing of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The provision now viewed by oceanographers as egregious allows a nation to declare an “exclusive economic zone” extending as much as 200 miles offshore. Countries can bar foreign scientists from their coastal waters if their research includes drilling or has “direct significance for the exploration and exploitation of natural resources.” Gordon has no intention of tampering with Indonesia’s natural resources; he wants only to measure ocean flow. But that doesn’t mean Indonesian officials have to give him a green light. Although only 35 of the required 60 nations have ratified the treaty (objections. to a provision that would create an International SeaBed Authority to control seabed mining have blocked the treaty’s passage in the United States, for example), most countries have agreed to abide by the provision that permits each nation to regulate marine research off its shores. That’s what Indonesia, by its refusal to grant Gordon permission, is doing. Why care about an obscure provision of a yet-to-be-enforced treaty that seems to be hampering the work of a few specialists? The provision is part of a broader attempt to regulate the use of the world’s oceans by ensuring equal access to their bounty. Although the eventual result may be a more enlightened policy toward development of this precious resource, the rules on coastal waters may be harming science. In Gordon’s case, although NSF officials initially extended his grant by several months, they finally felt compelled to withdraw their support. The result .was that the money went to another project—one ranked lower on the agency’s list. Further, Indonesia’s decision has hurt its own scientists. Pointing to the local researchers who were eager to hone their skills on more advanced U.S. technology, Gordon says: “This project would have allowed them to enter mainstream oceanography, as well as to work with modern equipment. What’s more, we were hoping to train them to take over the project once we returned to the United States.” Avoiding Risks The underlying concern of scientists like Gordon is that the damage this treaty is doing to science is greater than the sum of the individual projects that are being abandoned. “There is research that is very important from a global standpoint that scientists won’t tackle because they can’t afford to risk their time and research funds,” says Gordon, who has been working in the South Atlantic since his Indonesian project was scrapped. “Even [if he had come across] a very important scientific topic, a scientist would really be foolish to put in a proposal to work in Indonesia now." Fred Spiess, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, couldn’t agree more. He knows of a site off the coast of Mexico that he believes would be ideal for a five-year study of sea-floor spreading in the Pacific. But the unpredictability of the Mexican government may force Spiess instead to select a site off the coast of Washington state. Spiess knows that poor weather in the Pacific Northwest could jeopardize the project, but he reasons that scanty data is better than no data at all. The greater the number of oceanographers who, like Spiess and Gordon, forsake prime coastal waters for secondary targets, the greater the loss to mankind. At least, that’s the principal argument of oceanographers who point out that coastal areas are the centers of some of the most interesting—and environmentally crucial—oceanographic questions, such as upwelling of ocean currents and reflection of internal waves. The zones also determine the exchanges of energy and chemicals that affect all aquatic life. Explains Ned Ostenso, director of sea grant and extramural programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: “It’s at the boundary of the ocean where most of the action is going on.” The scientific action, that is. The political action is taking place between officials of developing lands and anyone from the industrial world who wants to conduct business in their countries. Those officials say that U.S. scientists in particular must accept the fact that they can no longer run roughshod over the rights and desires of other nations. “Sometimes science might be damaged slightly, but that is pan of the game of sovereignty,” says Jose Jesus, Cape Verde’s ambassador to the U.N. and chairman of a U.N. Law of the Sea preparatory commission. “It protects the interests of the scientists while at the same time protecting the interests of the coastal states.” Jose Vargas, Mexico’s representative to the treaty negotiations and currently director of the Mexico-U.S. Law Institute at the University of California, San Diego, shares Jesus’ distrust of U.S. scientists. Vargas calls on U.S. oceanographers to abadon what he describes as their self-image as Indiana Jones, Hollywood’s daredevil archaeologist, Such scientists, he charges, believe they have no obligation to brief the host nation on their findings or to train new scientists from that country. By contrast, he notes, land-based researchers long ago accepted the fact that they cannot cross borders willy-nilly in the quest for knowledge. Suspicious Nations There are other reasons that coastal research is being stymied. David Ross of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who chairs a National Academy of Sciences panel that is monitoring current problems between oceanographers and politicians, says that some developing nations impose restrictions because they fear scientists will give away to other nations or companies details concerning the extent of their offshore resources. Such actions are taken, he notes, even though the coastal nation may not itself possess the technical know-how to assess its resources. Another hurdle for oceanographers is the fear on the part of many countries that research projects could disguise efforts to gather military secrets. Mexico’s Vargas cites the 1968 capture of a U.S. intelligence ship, the U.S.S. Pueblo, as the kind of event that raises suspicions. The North Korean government said that the ship’s captain confessed that the Pueblo had been disguised as an oceanographic vessel. Although the U.S. government has denied the accuracy of the purported confessions, Mexico’s Vargas says the Pueblo incident lingers in the minds of diplomats from many developing nations and is a factor in their review of research requests. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are as unhappy with Mexican officials as the Mexicans are with them. “We have tremendous problems with Mexico,” notes the State Department’s William Erb, whose office forwards U.S. scientific requests to foreign governments. “‘The foreign ministry wants to be helpful, but it’s confronted by other agencies that want to play a major role.” Some nations, he adds, are simply unable to cope with any request from a foreign scientist. “It’ll just sit there on somebody’s desk,” he complains, “and eventually it’ll get lost.” Erb says the situation is especially dismal for those scientists who must deal with Brazil, Spain, India, Venezuela, and Indonesia. Why, U.S. officials fret, don’t these nations recognize that it is often in the best interests of the developing nation to invite foreign scientists into its coastal waters? Only through collaboration, they say, will it be possible to understand and deal with such global problems as the greenhouse effect and acid rain. “That sort of awareness is what gives me hope in the long run,” says Donald Heinrichs of the NSF’s division of ocean research. The U.N., which specializes in long-run hopes, is working to resolve some of these issues at an upcoming meeting. It has invited officials from 30 countries—15 developed nations and 15 developing nations—to a September conference to work out rules and regulations that are consistent with the treaty. The intention is to avoid “a rehash of the old argnments,” says Mary Fisk of the U.N.’s Law of the Sea office. “We want to see how we can make this regime work.” Increased Cooperation Some scientists believe that the ultimate solution may be to forge stronger ties with their colleagues from the, developing nations off whose coasts they want to study. Increased scientific cooperation, says Ross, could simultaneously give scientists from developed nations access to coastal waters and help the developing nations get a better fix on their own resources. Judith Fenwick, a Woods Hole oceanographer who has worked on the issue with Ross, predicts a gradual “blurring of national interests” in the conduct of oceanography. “There won’t be a national force of ocean- ographers from the United States going to work in the waters of some other country,” she says. “Instead, there will be American scientists on a West German ship with crew from various countries.” Vincent Kiernan is a knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

Oceanographers Get A Sinking Feeling

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