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The 1960s saw the fruition of the initial
building period. MPL had established a senior scientific group of nine
(Anderson, Raitt, Shor, Fisher, Liebermann, Spiess, Rudnick, Vacquier,
and Eckart), along with a strong engineering staff and an administrative
structure that could support major equipment construction and seagoing
operations. ONR remained the primary source of support, augmented by
other Navy programs. There were fruitful collaborations both ashore
and at sea with others at Scripps.
MPL continued to emphasize two essential elements: innovations typical
of experimental physics, and seagoing action to learn about the real
ocean and the crust beneath it. Some of the principal devices that emerged
were:
- FLIP,
an easily deployable manned spar buoy laboratory,
- RUM,
a manipulator-equipped remotely operated seafloor tractor,
- ORB,
a support barge from which systems such as RUM could be operated,
- Deep
Tow, a deep seafloor imaging and mapping system,
- acoustic transponder navigation, and
- Albacore DIMUS, a 256-hydrophone receiving array
with a processor generating a comparable number of focused outputs
installed in an experimental U.S. submarine.
While the decade of the 1960s was a golden era
for oceanographic facility development, at the same time there were
changes in the surrounding environment. The University of California
began building a general campus adjacent to SIO. Liebermann and Eckart
moved into the new Physics Department, Eckart became a vice chancellor
and Anderson began to play a role in electrical engineering, particularly
in acoustics. Spiess served as director of Scripps and then as an associate
director.
As opportunities to use these new tools appeared, adventurous graduate
students joined in, becoming a larger component of the laboratory’s
program. Although the senior staff did not grow significantly during
this period, there were visiting scientists who joined MPL for periods
of up to several years, including the beginning of a sequence of postdoctoral
appointees, mostly from Cambridge University.
Most of these technological advances were carried out in the early 1960s
and scientific and engineering results flowed even from their initial
trial operations. Deep Tow data contributed to the evidence supporting
the emerging plate tectonics concept; FLIP supported sound propagation
studies and initial internal wave investigations.
Continuing to build on earlier work, Anderson led the signal processing
component of Project Artemis, a major multilaboratory program to investigate
the possibilities of ocean basin-scale active sonar systems for submarine
detection. He also led a program of installation and testing of the
DIMUS concept on a number of Navy ships and submarines. Fisher and Spiess
developed programs to understand the distortions that acoustic signals
are subjected to as they travel through the water and interact with
the seafloor. Vacquier added seafloor heat-flow measurement capability
to his already active geomagnetic seagoing activities, while Raitt and
Shor improved seismic reflection and refraction techniques.
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