THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, December 1, 1995 TAG: 9512010231
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY WILLIAM J. BROAD, THE NEW YORK TIMES
LENGTH: Long : 180 lines
The Navy is starting to release a treasure trove of physical data about the sea that was gathered in secrecy during the long decades of the cold war, exciting scientists who see it as a bonanza for understanding environmental change.
The riches include readings on ice depth, ice shape, ocean depth, sediment composition, sea-surface height, salinity, seabed magnetics, water temperature, bioluminescence and light transmissibility.
Over the decades, the Navy has deployed thousands of ships, planes, submarines and satellites to collect such data.
Usually kept secret, the information was viewed as vital to the quiet war against the Soviet Union, helping submariners glide stealthily through the sea and hunt the hidden assets of their adversaries.
Today, such readings are seen as unrivaled yardsticks for judging long-term processes like global climatic change and planetary warming. Indeed, the Navy keeps decades of detailed readings on the thickness of the Arctic icecap, a wilderness at the top of the world that is now considered one of the most sensitive and reliable indicators of global temperature change.
``The Navy holds much more data on the past state of the oceans than the civilian community could ever hope to get hold of,'' said Dr. Gordon J. MacDonald, a geophysicist at the University of California at San Diego. ``The value of that data is measured in tens of billions of dollars.''
The release of naval data has been championed by Vice President Al Gore and MEDEA, a group set up by the vice president that is headed by MacDonald and is made up of about 60 scientists from academia and industry who advise the nation's intelligence agencies on how secret data can be used to study the environment. MEDEA stands for Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis.
The release of the data is part of a broader push throughout the federal government to turn cold war assets to good use. While the focus of the naval effort is historical, dealing with past data, a related effort also championed by MEDEA is redirecting the nation's spy satellites to spend part of their time snooping on nature to detect environmental shifts.
The MEDEA group's lobbying already prompted the Navy this summer to release gravity measurements of the world's sea floors, which civilian oceanographers promptly turned into the first good map of the global seabed. Although a major milestone, that represented just a tiny fraction of secret and sequestered data scheduled for public release.
``It's a real event in the history of oceanography,'' said Dr. Walter Munk, a member of MEDEA who is a leading scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
Dr. Edward C. Whitman, technical director of the Office of the Oceanographer of the Navy, said perhaps 95 percent of the Navy's physical data would eventually be made public. Studies that weigh the risks and benefits to national security are nearly complete, he said, adding that there is little or no chance of foot dragging.
``There's a lot of pressure on the Navy to release this stuff coming from the very highest levels of the government,'' Whitman said in an interview. ``And that will move us to make a decision.''
Some of the data are considered sensitive because they reveal information of military importance like the exact routes of warships and submarines and disclose patrol zones and patterns. In other cases, the public release of data acquired inconspicuously in the coastal waters of foreign nations might prove embarrassing. The Navy says it is considering ways to make the public release as large as possible, in some cases by declassifying only data summaries or data from certain geographic regions.
Presumably some of the data were gathered by submarines that trespassed into territorial waters of friendly and unfriendly states, though the Navy admits no such thing. These nations may be appalled by the public release of data about their submerged territories, yet in theory such information could be a potential gold mine available at no cost, courtesy of the U.S. Navy, making them uncertain whether to express outrage or gratitude.
The Navy's oceanographic data holdings are so rich and varied that they are expected to advance many fields beyond environmental studies, including geology, climatology, weather forecasting, pollution studies, marine engineering, commercial fisheries management and deep oil and mineral exploration.
The riches are appraised in a 52-page report published MEDEA in June, ``Scientific Utility of Naval Environmental Data.'' The 11-member panel that wrote the report was headed by Dr. Otis B. Brown of the University of Miami.
In a forward to the report, MacDonald said the release of the secretive naval data would aid not only civilians but also the military because wide analysis would inevitably ``strengthen the Navy's overall capabilities to understand and utilize the oceans in addressing its national security responsibilities.''
Following are some of the data proposed for release and the MEDEA assessment of their importance:
Marine gravity
Large seabed features like deep rifts and high mountain ranges exert gravitational influences on surface waters miles above, and these influences can be read with sensitive instruments. The gravity data that were recently released came from a Navy satellite that in the 1980s made gravity measurements over all the world's oceans as part of a quiet effort to increase the accuracy of long-range missiles fired from submarines. But in addition to that effort, fleets of Navy ships spent decades making even more detailed gravity measurements in certain parts of the seas. These are now up for declassification.
The MEDEA report said their release would throw much new light on geology, including the volcanic workings of mid-ocean ridges, the variations of crust thickness and the structure of puzzling fracture zones that run perpendicular to the ocean ridges.
Geomagnetics
For decades, the Navy made wide surveys of seabed magnetism, partly for purposes of navigation. MEDEA said the release of these data would improve navigational safety and aid understanding of the evolution of the Earth's crust, since over the ages bands of volcanically erupted seabed became magnetized in different ways as they cooled. The data, the MEDEA report said, would also illuminate the workings of the Earth's core and inner regions that are responsible for the planet's magnetic field.
Seafloor sediments
The Navy conducted a global program to determine sea floor sediment types and thicknesses, partly to understand how sound echoed off the bottom and to improve its tracking of enemy ships and submarines. The MEDEA report said the release of such data would aid the search for manganese nodules, titanium deposits, oil-saturated sediments and salt domes that act as petroleum traps. More generally, it would aid the understanding of how currents act to speed erosion and deposition.
Ice shape and depth
The Navy amassed huge amounts of information on the frigid Arctic because it was a main theater for the deadly serious hide-and-seek games of nuclear-armed submarines from East and West. Arctic ice was both a hazard and a haven, its jagged downward spikes threatening to pierce submarines as well as providing visual and acoustic cover. In the silent war, the Soviets tried to hide their missile-carrying subs under the icecap while American attack submarines tried to track them closely, ready to destroy them if the war turned hot.
The MEDEA group said decades of ice data promised to be a major aid in pinning down the reality of global warming, in studying fluctuations in climate, in forecasting ice conditions and in calibrating civilian satellite sensors that pass over polar regions.
Marine bathymetry
For decades Navy ships crisscrossed the sea to map the inky darkness of its lower regions by bouncing sound waves off the bottom. Such seabed maps were used for everything from navigation to understanding current flow and sound propagation. In general, they are much sharper than the civilian ones recently made from gravity readings. MEDEA said the maps would greatly aid the understanding of seabed geology and evolution and would pinpoint such seabed features as undersea volcanoes.
Temperature and salinity fields
Since 1900, the Navy has carefully gathered global data on ocean temperatures and salinities, two measures that are closely intertwined. Among the Navy's uses for such data were understanding the propagation of sound through the sea, which aided the detecting of enemy submarines at great distances. The MEDEA report said the release of such data would greatly aid climate studies.
Ocean optics and bioluminescence
The Navy made global measurements to determine light transmissibility for such things as knowing the potential for the visual detection of underwater objects and for such studies as laser depth readings. The MEDEA group said the release of such data would aid the design of satellite sensors.
Among its recommendations, the MEDEA report called for the creation of an ``exploitation center'' for the released data at the Stennis Space Center at Bay Saint Louis, Miss., which is also the headquarters of the Naval Oceanographic Office.
Dr. Landry J. Bernard, technical director of the Naval Oceanographic Office, said in an interview that 10 to 20 percent of the data had been declassified and that much more was on the way. He said historical data on ocean temperature and salinity began to be released in the past four or five years, after the cold war. ``That's when we really got active'' in opening up the Navy's endless archives of oceanographic data, he said.
As for the future, Bernard said: ``We're taking a proactive role. It's, `When in doubt, release.' If you can't make a good case for it being classified, then it's open, whereas before it was the other way around, to keeping it secret.'' MEMO: Copies of the MEDEA report can be requested at 703-883-5265 voice,
fax 703-883-6190.
by CNB