The inviolate ocean

Excerpt

I love the ocean. I have lived near its edge and, as an oceanographer, have spent many hours at sea collecting animals, seining plankton, analyzing sea water, and enumerating the pollutants it contains.

Despite this experience, I realize that the land, which comprises 30 percent of the earth's surface, is the proper home of Homo sapiens. But the land is being threatened by people who fail to realize that the ocean is part of our planet too. To them, the ocean is inviolate. And that is placing the land in jeopardy.

This is the last year that ocean dumping of sewage sludge will be permitted. Henceforth, the sludge will go on the land, there possibly to contaminate groundwater or take out of another use our precious, limited land.

Many wastes, for example, most radionuclides, should go into the ocean. Even if we were to abandon nuclear power soon, some nuclear wastes would remain to be disposed of wisely. Disposal of high-level radionuclides in the quiescent beds of red clay beneath the deep Pacific is now being studied. When he first heard about the possibility of ocean disposal of radionuclides, Charles Hollister, a marine geologist at the Woods …