Challenges in education; Sea floor charts

Information gathered from more than 100 through surveys that crisscross the ocean area off North Carolina has been compiled into a chart and a block diagram that shows the shape of the ocean floor. The block diagram is almost three dimensional. In effect you can see here the all the mountains the valleys the plains and some of the major features of the sea floor including this very large broad plaque to the beginning of the bleak plateau which is at its widest off Jacksonville Florida. But we have a large segment of the bleak plateau here off the Carolinas and this really captures I think the way the sea floor would look if you drain the ocean away. You can see this very readily from this block diagram. The speaker is John Newton who has been responsible for compiling the data. In a moment he reports on his investigations. Challenges in education presented by Duke University.

Here with today's feature is Charles past the most complete chart ever made off the coast of North Carolina is now in existence because of the work of John Newton superintendent of oceanographic operations at the Duke Marine Laboratory. In fact some of the published Coast and Geodetic Survey charts of the area have been found to be an era because of lack of information in the past. Last summer a contour chart was drawn that shows the shape of the sea floor. This then is a big advantage and one glance we can get some idea of the various fuzzy graphic provinces of the seafloor off the Carolinas. And we can see some of the major features like the shelf that we were just talking about the Continental slope that steep area just to the southeast of the shelf and then the continental run is that hilly area that you see in light blue on this chart. And then of course in the some 250 miles off shore the Hatteras Abyssal Plain which is a very flat area in that region.

Some of the features shown on the chart are quite striking. John Newton explains one of the things that's really spectacular is the. Number of canyons with your current off Cape Hatteras there's a bait debate now among geologists about the shape of these canyons in fact some think that there are separate canyons maybe three separate canyons and there is another group that thinks that this is being one major Canyon complex with a whole lot of tributaries such as you'd find up on the Piedmont you know the Neuse River with all the streams running into it. The charge continues to be updated by information that is gained from cruises by the Duke research vessel the eastward although the chart looks fairly complete to the layman. Mr. Goulden hastens to say that there are many areas where information is lacking. Well there have been extensive surveys off California as an example in which they've done this type of thing and there are some better charts than this existing off New England. But this is the first time in this area that we've ever shown the

shape of the sea floor in such detail. So this is really one of the challenging things and sometimes we feel like the old cartographers who put dragons on the margins of their chart indicating that they didn't know what was there. In fact they would put the phrase underneath this saying here there are dragons in Latin. So this is the way we feel about our charts at times and maybe we should put dragons in the corners to indicate that this is where our knowledge is lacking. Mr. Newton hopes that his work will be made available to more people in the near future. Next year we hope to publish an atlas of the Carolinas in which we will incorporate not only this conjuror chart but also a block diagram showing the shape of the sea floor and perhaps other illustrations which show the nature of the water off the Carolinas and the locations of reefs rocks and wrecks and all of this information could be compiled in little pamphlet which would be of interest to engineers and geologists chemists oceanographers

students almost anyone who had any interest at all in the water and it would be of particular interest to fisherman the sports fisherman to know the locations of all these major rocks and reefs and wrecks around which the fish tend to congregate. This is Charles Braswell with challenges in education from Duke University. This program was distributed by the national educational radio network.