Early History - 1970's and 1980's

[coming soon]

Recent History

This program evolved from the merging of the interests of independent research efforts of several individual ONR-funded principal investigators and small research groups. The PI's have, with the support of Oceanic Biology, arranged to use their funding to cooperatively pursue what we believe to be observations of a critical new discovery. We believe that Thin Layer phenomena may play a critical role in important marine ecosystems, and that Thin Layers may have a significant impact on ocean optics and acoustics.

As a group, a number of PI's approached ONR's program managers, and arranged a field experiment in an area where Thin Layers are known to occur with sufficient regularity to make it probable that they would be observed during a single experiment in a single year. The objectives of that exercise, held in 1996 in East Sound, San Juan Islands, Washington, were to work together as a team, bringing a variety of instruments and approaches together for the first time to focus on Thin Layers in the same place, and at the same time. The 1996 field work in East Sound was initiated with the foreknowledge that it would be primarily an effort to integrate our individual sensors, to develop methods for deploying them together, and to begin to understand exactly what each PI's instruments were measuring and how the data obtained were related. East Sound was considered an ideal location for this effort, since sea surface motions are relatively limited in this shallow, sheltered fjord. The experiment could be carried out from two small boats rather than an expensive ship, and access to land-based facilities and communications allowed us to test, modify, and try new approaches without the constraints of being at sea on the usual research vessel.

Next Page: Objectives of the 1996 Thin Layers Experiments

August 1999