It should be included in what I found online. The history of human understanding of the ocean began when people engaged in production activities in coastal areas and at sea. Ancient humans already had some geographical knowledge about the ocean. But it was not until the 1870s, after the Challenger organized by the Royal Society completed its first global oceanographic scientific expedition, that oceanography began to gradually form an independent discipline. After the 1950s and 1960s, oceanography achieved great development and became a highly comprehensive marine science.
From ancient times to the end of the 18th century, it was a period of accumulation of marine knowledge and also the budding period of oceanography.
In ancient times when science was underdeveloped, people's understanding and exploration of natural phenomena in the ocean mainly relied on inadequate observation and simple logical reasoning. Although it was limited to intuitively and generally grasping some properties of the ocean at that time, it also put forward many wonderful insights. For example, Thales of ancient Greece from the 7th to 6th centuries BC believed that water is the origin of all things, and the earth floats in the vast ocean. In China's "Book of Songs" from the 11th to 6th centuries BC, there are already records of rivers "conquering the sea". In the fourth century BC, Aristotle, the most knowledgeable of the ancient Greek thinkers, described and recorded more than 170 species of animals in the Aegean Sea in "Fauna". In the first century AD, Wang Chong of the Eastern Han Dynasty of China scientifically pointed out the correspondence between tidal movement and the movement of the moon.
From the 15th century to the end of the 18th century, the development of natural science and navigation promoted the accumulation of marine knowledge. Marine knowledge at this time was mainly based on the global sea and land distribution and the physical geography of the ocean described in voyages and expeditions.
From 1405 to 1433, Zheng He of the Ming Dynasty of China led his fleet across the Indian Ocean seven times; from 1492 to 1504, the Italian navigator Columbus crossed the Atlantic four times and reached America; from 1519 to 1522, the Portuguese navigator Magellan and others Completed the first circumnavigation of the world in human history; from 1768 to 1779, the British Cook conducted the first scientific expedition in the ocean exploration and obtained the first batch of data on ocean surface water temperature, currents, depth, and coral reefs.
These activities and results not only enabled people to understand the shape of the earth and the general distribution of land and sea, but also directly promoted the development of modern natural sciences and laid the foundation for the formation of various major sub-disciplines of oceanography. . For example, in 1670, Boyle of England studied the relationship between seawater salinity and seawater density, pioneering the study of marine chemistry; in 1674, Leeuwenhoek of the Netherlands was the first to discover protozoa in Dutch waters; in 1687, Newton of England used the law of gravity to explain Tides laid the scientific foundation for tidal research; in 1740, Swiss scientist Bernoulli proposed the theory of tidal statics; in 1772, French Lavoisier first measured the composition of seawater; in 1775, French Laplace pioneered the dynamic theory of ocean tides, etc. .
From the early 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, the emergence and development of large-scale machine industry greatly promoted the establishment and development of oceanography.
Darwin, the British scientist and founder of the theory of biological evolution, sailed around the world with the "Beagle" from 1831 to 1836. He conducted a lot of research on marine life and coral reefs, and published "The Structure and Structure of Coral Reefs" in 1842. "Distribution" and proposed the subsidence theory of the cause of coral reefs; published "The Origin of Species" in 1859 and established the theory of biological evolution.
British biologist Forbes proposed the concept of marine life distribution zoning in the 1840s and 1850s, and published the first marine life distribution map and the classic book of marine ecology "The Nature of the European Sea". history". American scholar Murray made a more significant contribution to the establishment of oceanography. His "Physical Geography of the Ocean" published in 1855 is known as the first classic book of modern oceanography.
The British "Challenger" expedition from 1872 to 1876 is considered to be the true beginning of modern oceanographic research. During its voyage of more than 120,000 kilometers, the "Challenger" made multidisciplinary and comprehensive ocean observations, and achieved a large number of results in marine meteorology, ocean currents, water temperature, seawater chemical composition, marine life and seabed sediments, etc., making oceanography It differentiated from the traditional field of physical geography and gradually formed an independent discipline.
From 1925 to 1927, the German "Meteor" scientific expedition in the South Atlantic used the electronic echo sounding method for the first time and measured more than 70,000 ocean depth data and other data, revealing the bottom of the ocean. It is not flat, it is as varied as the landforms. At the same time, research on basic sub-disciplines such as marine physics, marine chemistry, marine geology and marine biology has also made significant progress, and some natural laws of the ocean have been discovered and confirmed.
The establishment of the Scientific Committee on Ocean Research (SCOR) in 1957 and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) in 1960 promoted the rapid development of marine science. The U.S. deep submersible "Trieste 2" dived to a depth of 10,919 meters in 1960, and the U.S. nuclear submarine "Nautilus" crossed the North Pole from under the ice in 1950, showing that any part of the ocean can be used for Conquered by humans. However, the crashes of the U.S. submarines "Thresher" in 1963 and "Scorpion" in 1960, in which all crew members were killed, proved that the marine environment is still difficult to control.
In fact, from a technical point of view, it is more difficult for humans to walk on the deep sea floor than to walk on the moon.
Modern oceanography’s research on specific marine natural phenomena or specific sea areas generally develops from traditional static qualitative descriptions and simple causal analysis to dynamic quantitative analysis, emphasizing basic theory, field experiments and functional simulations. Research.
The mutual integration and interpenetration between various branches of marine science and between marine science and adjacent basic sciences have gradually formed a series of interdisciplinary and highly comprehensive research topics. For example, ocean-atmosphere interaction and long-term climate forecast, marine ecosystems, material circulation and transformation in the ocean, ocean floor structure, and fundamental issues related to the origin of the ocean and the earth, and the origin of marine life.
The development of deep-sea drilling and marine geophysical detection technology has led to new breakthroughs in marine science (especially marine geology) and earth science research methods and theories. For example, the plate tectonics theory, known as one of the most significant achievements in earth science in the 20th century, was mainly established through the study of marine geology and geophysical detection results.
All major developments in marine science since the 1960s are related to the successful development of new observation instruments, research tools and methods, as well as extensive and close international cooperation. For example, fruitful ocean observations, the application of data transmission and processing systems, the application of aerospace remote sensing, telemetry technology and hydroacoustic technology, the International Geophysical Year, the International Indian Ocean Survey, cooperative research on the Kuroshio and adjacent waters, and the International Ocean Survey Decade , Global Atmospheric Research Program Atlantic Tropical Experiment, Deep Sea Drilling Program, and the establishment of the World (Ocean Science) Data Center and other international marine science cooperative research.