Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Founded in 1903 and incorporated into the University of California system in 1912, the institution has since broadened its research focus to encompass the physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and climate of the Earth. The institution awards the Nierenberg Prize annually to recognize researchers with exceptional contributions to science in public interest.

History

Founding

Scripps Institution of Oceanography traces its beginnings back to William Ritter, a biologist originally from Wisconsin. In 1891, Ritter was offered a job teaching biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and married Mary Bennett. Their honeymoon and subsequent biological studies took them to San Diego, where Ritter met a local physician and naturalist, Fred Baker, who would later encourage him to build a marine biological laboratory in San Diego.

Ritter searched for eleven years for an appropriate place for a permanent marine biological laboratory. He spent summers at various places along the coast with students. His goal was frustrated by lack of money and lack of an appropriate place. During this time, research was being conducted at the boathouse of Hotel del Coronado on San Diego Bay.

In 1903, Ritter was introduced to newspaper magnate E. W. Scripps. Together with Scripps' half-sister Ellen Browning Scripps and Baker, they formed the Marine Biological Association of San Diego with Ritter as the Scientific Director. They fully funded the institution for its first decade. E. W. Scripps gave the biological association the use of his yacht, the Loma, in 1904 and served as the first research vessel in the history of the institution. In 1905, they moved to a small laboratory in La Jolla Cove until they arranged for the purchase of a 170-acre (0.69 km²) site in La Jolla, north of San Diego. The land was purchased for $1,000 at a public auction from the city of San Diego (the same site where the SIO main campus is today). However, construction cost estimates for a permanent building were around $50,000. Funding was secured through E. W. and E. B. Scripps, and the first permanent building (today known as the Old Scripps Building) was constructed in 1910.

The Marine Biological Association's first seafaring vessel, the Loma, ran aground in Point Loma in 1906 and prompted the search for a new one. With funds secured from Ellen Browning Scripps, the association was able to have a ship built by Lawrence Jensen strictly for oceanographic research - among the first for an American nongovernmental institution. The new vessel was acquired on April 21st, 1907 and was named the Alexander Agassiz after the Harvard biologist who had visited in 1905. The 85-foot Alexander Agassiz, a sailing vessel with twin gasoline engines, served the institution for ten years.

In 1912, the Biological Association became incorporated into the University of California and was renamed the Scripps Institution for Biological Research.

The first iteration of Scripps Pier, along with other buildings, was approved for construction in 1913, but was only completed in 1916 due to delays related to World War I. In 1915, the first building devoted solely to an aquarium was built on the Scripps campus. The small, wooden structure contained 19 tanks ranging in size from 96 to 228 U.S. gallons (360 to 860 L). The oceanographic museum was located in a nearby building. Since the pier was completed in 1916, measurements have been taken daily. The modern Scripps Pier was built as a replacement for the 1916 structure in 1988.

The institution's name changed to Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in October of 1925 to recognize the growing faculty's widened range of studies.

Easter Ellen Cupp was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in oceanography from SIO in 1934, studying diatoms under Wynfred Allen. She stayed with Scripps until 1939.

In 1935, SIO director T. Wayland Vaughan became the first Scripps member to be awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal by the National Academy of Sciences. Harald Sverdrup was awarded the medal 3 years later, beginning a long history of Scripps oceanographers being awarded the prize (Johnson in 1959, Revelle in 1963, and many more).

In November, 1936, the research vessel Scripps was sunk when there was an explosion in the galley, killing the cook and injuring the captain. The sinking of the Scripps left SIO without a research vessel, so SIO director Sverdrup approached the UC president Robert Gordon Sproul and Bob Scripps (son of E.W and Ellen) to acquire a new one. They found Bob's pleasure yacht, Novia Del Mar, ill-fitting for the science roles performed by the Scripps, and purchased a different yacht from actor Lewis Stone in April 1937. The Serena was rechristened E. W. Scripps and was presented to SIO in December 1937. The E. W. Scripps would be quintessential for Sverdrup to build datasets supporting simple theories of ocean circulation, including the Sverdrup balance.

Wartime

When World War II broke out Scripps created the University of California Division of War Research (UCDWR) in Point Loma, focusing on acoustics and waves to support the US Navy. Collaborative research between the UCDWR and the Navy led to the discovery of the deep scattering layer, a region from 300 - 500 m deep filled with organisms. The UCDWR would continue to research sound beacons and sonar until being absorbed into the Navy Electronics Laboratory and Scripps Marine Physical Laboratory between 1945 and 1948.

With Harald Sverdrup as the SIO director, recent graduate student Walter Munk was recalled from the army and together they were tasked with aiding Allied amphibious landings off the coast of Africa. The goal was to predict coastal surf and sea state for Allied landings in Africa, though their model was also applied to the Allied landings in Normandy, Sicily, and in the Pacific. SIO's UCDWR would train over 200 American and British military officers on swell forecasting techniques throughout the war. Though Sverdrup was initially intending on holding the position of SIO director for only 3 years until 1939, Nazi occupation of Norway prolonged his assumption of the role until 1948. Though Sverdrup's family became US citizens during the war, he struggled with Navy clearance which gave him an awkward relationship to the projects he was overseeing.

Wartime changed the funding dynamic for Scripps. Prior to the war, the only federal support for SIO came from the Navy seeking to protect the hulls of their ships. Threatened by German submarines, concepts within physical oceanography were researched for submarine warfare. By summer 1942, Roger Revelle was appointed as a Navy liaison for oceanography and the sonar head of the Navy Bureau of Ships. UCDWR research led to rapid development of bathythermographs, as well as the understanding of the thermocline and benthic sediments in the context of underwater warfare. Research on biofouling organisms were led by Dennis Fox and Claude ZoBell, with the goal to develop biological deterrents for seaplanes and vessels.

It was during 1942 that Sverdrup, along with Martin Johnson and Richard Fleming, completed the first comprehensive textbook of oceanography, The Oceans. The textbook was considered a first of its kind and of such military importance that it was forbidden from distribution outside of the United States.

SIO's first scientific diver was biologist Cheng Kwai Tseng, who used equipment to collect algae off the coast of San Diego in 1944. Tseng took red algae samples of Gelidium cartilagineum and cultured them to reduce the US dependence on Japanese agar, which was important to hospitals at the time.

The Golden Age of Oceanography

Following the war, Roger Revelle continued to act as a liaison for oceanographers and was consulted during Operation Crossroads in 1945. He noted significant difficulties during the project, stemming from the difficulty of civilian research to access naval research vessels and naval bureaucracy. To remedy this, Revelle championed joint research of the newly-established Office of Naval Research (ONR), the US Hydrographic Office, and Navy Bureau of Ships and Scripps was receiving around $900,000 annually from federal funding.

The Navy bestowed the operation of a number of vessels to SIO ushering in a "Golden Age" of oceanographic research and discoveries. Between 1947 and 1949 three post-war vessels were acquired and modified for scientific research: The Crest, Paolina-T, and Horizon. These vessels, combined with the overlap of expertise from the ONR in 1946, provided additional resources for ocean exploration. The three new vessels were put to work on the new Marine Life Research Program in 1950 (now CalCOFI), which sought to investigate the collapse of the California sardine population. In doing so, approximately 670,000 square miles (1,700,000 km²) of ocean would need to be surveyed.

When Aqua-Lung was made available in the US in 1948, UCLA graduates Conrad Limbaugh and Andy Rechnitzer were able to convince Boyd W. Walker, their marine biology advisor at the time, to purchase one. Together, they introduced the Aqua-Lung to SIO in 1950 (with Limbaugh studying under Carl Hubbs) and began the Scripps Diving Program. Roger Revelle took over the director role at SIO in 1951 from Carl Eckart and, following a diving fatality at La Jolla in 1950, requested that Limbaugh develop a scuba training program for SIO, which debuted in 1951 and was heavily influenced by practices of the U.S. Navy's Underwater Demolition Team. It was also during this time that Hugh Bradner, a physicist at UC Berkeley, became an advisor at SIO and developed the wetsuit in 1952. Bradner would go on to become a professor at SIO's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics in 1961. The SIO Diving Program would continue to innovate and expand up to more than 160 affiliated divers in 2015.

The Vaughan Aquarium-Museum opened at the University's Charter Day in March 1951 to replace the prior aquarium, which had been in a consistent state of disrepair since at least 1925. Named to honor former institution director T. Wayland Vaughan, museum curator Percy S. Barnhart planned a replacement up until his retirement in 1946, passing the project along to Sam Hinton. Hinton would go on to collect specimens aboard the E. W. Scripps until the building was completed and occupied in 1950. While nearly three times the size of the previous aquarium, the building also housed the director's offices on the second floor and the preserved specimens in the basement. The seawater supply from Scripps Pier was renovated in 1964 to increase capacity and improve filtration.

In 1959, an additional administration building was constructed next to the original 1910 building, named the "New Scripps" building. Campus construction expanded with the completion of the Sumner Auditorium and Sverdrup Hall in 1960.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography director Revelle spearheaded the formation of the University of California, San Diego in 1960 on a bluff overlooking the Scripps Institution, with SIO acting as the nucleus. It was during the 1960s that SIO led the development of the Deep-Tow system, with oceanographer Fred Spiess as the lead of the Marine Physical Laboratory. The purpose was to map the oceans, most notably being used in Project FAMOUS between 1971 and 1974.

In 1965, Scripps began leasing 6 acres (2.4 ha) of land in Point Loma to tie up research vessels, including the RP Flip (launched in 1962), from the US Navy. The navy gave this land to Scripps in 1975 and the facility was named the Nimitz Marine Facility (or MarFac) after Chester Nimitz.

Also in 1965, Scripps assisted the Navy with the SEALAB project, where divers dwelled in a submersible habitat at 205 ft (62 m) in the nearby Scripps Canyon for 15 days at a time.

In 1968, Scripps researcher Harmon Craig met with Henry Stommel and Wallace Broecker to discuss one of the first geochemical research programs, which would eventually become GEOSECS. The Scripps-directed GEOSECS program would go on to become a major domestic and international collaborative research effort from 1972-1980, laying the groundwork for numerous repeat hydrography programs to follow.

On October 25, 1973, California Sea Grant became a college (National Sea Grant College Program) administered by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

From March to May of 1979, SIO directed the RISE project and oversaw the 1979 discovery of black smoker hydrothermal vents at the East Pacific Rise.

International projects and modern history

The Old Scripps Building, designed by Irving Gill, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1982. Architect Barton Myers designed the current Scripps Building for the Institution of Oceanography in 1998.

In 1998, Scripps director Charles Kennel and former director William Nierenberg approached Jesse Ausubel to discuss the formation and funding for an international consortium of oceanographic institutions. Together with John Shepherd, a proposal was made for the Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean (or POGO), which held its first meeting in 1999 in Paris.

In 2007, the family and wife of late Roger Revelle donated 2.5 million dollars toward the Roger Revelle Chair endowed position, which Shang-Ping Xie now holds.

In 2014, SIO received a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to test the use of biofuels on one of its ships, the Robert Gordon Sproul. The vessel operated from September 2014 to December 2015 on 100% biofuels which reduced nitrous oxide emissions, but increased particle emissions. However, the fuel source provided a proof of concept that research operations could be completed using biofuels rather than conventional diesel.

Also, 2014 was the first year of cruises for the international GO-SHIP program, a repeat hydrography program focusing on straight transects across major ocean basins and a follow-up to the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, which ran until 2002. Scripps, along with NOAA as the sole American members of the science committee, has overseen and advised many expeditions to contribute to the global data set.

In 2019, Scripps received $1.2 million of philanthropic funding for a 42-foot (13 m) research vessel, named after John Beyster and his wife Betty. Though the vessel was secured in spring of 2019, plans for the vessel's acquisition began in 2017.

From January to May of 2019, SIO directed a study at Imperial Beach to collect samples of sewage pollution from the Tijuana River and found elevated levels of harmful bacteria and aerosols. In 2024, Scripps was added to a task force including researchers from San Diego State University and regional doctors to better understand health impacts from the pollution. While collecting samples later in 2024, the task force had to evacuate the area due to elevated levels of toxic gases.

A campus report was published in 2022 describing campus lab, office, and storage spaces and found that women make up 26% of research scientists at SIO, yet occupy 17% of the space. The report highlighted that emeritus faculty on campus are 86% male and hold nearly 25% of all space at SIO.

2023 graduate protests

In May 2023, the Scripps campus in La Jolla opened the Ted and Jean Scripps Marine Conservation and Technology Facility. The building required the razing of three older buildings originally constructed in 1963 and reinforcing of the nearby hillside in 2014. A month later, the building was vandalized in a protest against low graduate student wages. In June 2023, two SIO students and one recent graduate were arrested at their homes by University of California Police and held in custody overnight. The University alleged $12,000 in damages related to this incident. Union leadership in UAW 2865 and 5810, the local union chapters representing the arrested workers, accuse the University of California of retaliation and reneging on the contracts signed at the conclusion of the 2022 UC academic workers' strike. On July 10, 2023, hundreds of protesters gathered at San Diego's Central Courthouse to protest the arrests, however in a written statement the San Diego District Attorney's office said the arraignment would not move forward because the case had not been submitted to its office for review. However, university officials have up to three years to file charges. On July 18, 2023, UCPD obtained a warrant and searched a fourth student's house for evidence of chalk or union affiliation in relation to the May 30 incident.