2003, Oceanography 16(3):8–10, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2003.23

Where We Are Now, Where We Are Going:
Scripps Science in Two Centuries

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Author

Charles F. Kennel | Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, California, USA

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First Paragraphs

Scripps Institution of Oceanography shares its centennial year with innovators who changed the twentieth century and our ability to navigate it; the founding of the Ford Motor Company and the first flight of the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, also occurred in 1903.

Automobiles and airplanes have dramatically evolved over 100 years, and Scripps science is much different today than it was in the summer of 1903, when William E. Ritter and a handful of his students began studying marine life in San Diego Bay.

Scripps quickly became a multidisciplinary institution, researching and teaching all of the subjects pertinent to the oceans—physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. Scripps had few formal curricular—or geographical—constraints inhibiting research initiatives, and studies soon extended to such areas as volcanology, seismology, atmospheric science, and climate science.Today, Scripps is more like an earth science research center than a traditional ocean institution.

Its foundation of twentieth-century achievements has positioned Scripps to meet the even more profound interdisciplinary challenges of the twenty-first century. Indeed, Scripps, at 100, is at a turning point.

Our established competence in ocean and earth science is the principal asset we can invest in the future—though this principal asset is at risk, as Scripps faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That alone will force change, but there is a more profound reason for change. The earth itself changed profoundly in the last century, and ocean and earth science are changing in response. So to ask where Scripps is going, we must ask where science has been and where it is going.

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Full Article

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Citation

Kennel, C.F. 2003. Where we are now, where we are going: Scripps science in two centuries. Oceanography 16(3):8–10, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2003.23.

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