THE SEA FLOOR: EXPLORING ITS HISTORY

This is an autobiographical account of a sixty-year career in marine geoscience and micropalaeontology; topics which I combined to help understand the evolution of the sea floor. It plots the course I followed from my undergraduate days in the 1960s through my retirement, to 2024. My career includes the short, exciting transition in the late 60s to early 70s, when earth science teaching and notions passed from the 19th century dogmas of uniformitarianism and crustal stasis, via the period of “earth science enlightenment” with the acceptance of sea-floor spreading, to the modern expansive attitudes engendered by plate-tectonics and palaeogeographies. I have seen and experienced enormous changes in the technology of sea-floor exploration, which had its own renaissance with the advent of digitisation in data-collection and management, and navigational techniques. Similar changes have been slower in micropalaeontology, where taxonomy is still critical, but concepts of ocean-basin evolution have necessitated radical rethinking of global palaeobiological developments. The book is a personal journey of exploration from a time when marine geology was a fringe academic activity in the North Sea (before commercial hydrocarbon exploration had begun), to twenty years of geological and geophysical mapping the unknown fringes of the SE Atlantic/SW Indian, and the Southern oceans. Simultaneously, I undertook sample collecting on land in southern Africa, New Zealand, and Antarctica. My final contributions have been cogitating the development of global deep-sea benthic micro-crustacean faunas on which I specialised, viz, Ostracoda. Physically, the journey took my studies from Hull, to Cape Town, to Aberdeen, to Cambridge (BAS), to Copenhagen, and finally to the Natural History Museum in London. During this time I was a full professor at Cape Town and Copenhagen. It is also a record of communal endeavour (going to sea is not a solo operation), and my interactions with some interesting and charismatic personalities.