{"id":367096,"date":"2024-02-28T15:40:47","date_gmt":"2024-02-28T20:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cnr.ncsu.edu\/2024\/02\/28\/no-trees-at-sea\/"},"modified":"2024-07-24T15:09:01","modified_gmt":"2024-07-24T19:09:01","slug":"no-trees-at-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cnr.ncsu.edu\/2024\/02\/28\/no-trees-at-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"No Trees at Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"
Amid the domestic turmoil and Motown sounds of the mid-1960s, a group of NC State forestry graduates set sail across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as members of a secretive research project. It was an exhilarating period in our lives as we sought to complete an objective that proved to be more important than we could have ever imagined. <\/p>\n\n
By the time my classmates and I graduated with our bachelor\u2019s degrees in forest management in 1967, the Cold War and Vietnam War had made it difficult for recent graduates to find employment. But the federal government, through the U.S. Civil Service Commission, had begun hiring students with strong educational backgrounds in science and mathematics. And it was paying a premium salary because of the cost of living in Washington, D.C. <\/p>\n\n
It wasn\u2019t long after graduation that I, along with Ben Schwanda, Ken Johnson, Scott McKeller and Les Brouillard, decided to temporarily step away from forestry to join the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO). Many of us were assigned to the Gravity Division as geophysicists. Les was assigned to the Hydrographic Charting Division as a nautical cartographer, joining our classmates Herb Kirk and Bill Chandler, who had been selected as the division\u2019s interns during the summer months preceding graduation. <\/p>\n\n
When we joined NAVOCEANO, we never imagined participating in research that would contribute to the direct defense of our country. The Cold War with Russia, brought on by the nuclear arms race, prompted NAVOCEANO to assign many geophysicists, including myself and my fellow NC State classmates, to sea cruises aboard WWII-era Liberty ships and newly-constructed oceanographic vessels to collect data about the ocean floor and its features. <\/p>\n\n
Sea cruises, also known as SURVOPS, routinely consisted of a Military Sealift Command service crew, who operated the ship, a U.S. Naval detachment of officers and enlisted sailors, corporate technicians and civilian scientists. During these expeditions, we utilized technologies such as sonar, gravity meters and magnetometer equipment to collect raw data about the ocean. We usually spent 25-30 days at sea followed by a week of import, then back out to sea for one or two more rounds of data collection.<\/p>\n\n