The. Advanced Research Inst i tute (ARI) on Dynamic Processes in the Chemistry of the Upper OCean had its origins in discussions by the NATO Special Programme Panel on Marine Sciences during 1978 when a wide range of topics for future ARIs was being considered. What was then envisaged was a workshop on chemical aspects of the oceanic mixed layer, at which consider ation would be given to the inputs, cycling and removal of material, and the problems involved in the quantitative assessment of fluxes. It was realised that any attempt to model chemical processes would need the active collaboration of workers from other fields, especially physical oceano graphers concerned with air-sea interaction and turbulence, and biological oceano raphers with expertise in primary productivity and the cycling of particulate and dissolved organic material. As plans for the ARI developed further a somewhat different emphasis emerged, focused on the question as to how chemists should set about observing an environment as variable and dynamic as the upper ocean and selecting the appropriate scales for the framework of measurements to study a particular process, especially in the light of current knowledge of physical processes of transport and mixing. It was plain that the capabil ity of physical oceanographic methods to resolve differences on small spatial and temporal scales is considerably ahead of the capabilities of biologists and chemists who rely upon discrete sampling and complex lab oratory manipulations in order to obtain most of their data."

Oceanography: The Present and Future is the proceedings of a sym posium held at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on September 29-0ctober 2, 1980 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Institution. The symposium was immediately preceded by the Third International Congress on the History of Oceanography, also held at Woods Hole, and the proceedings of that Congress, Oceanography: The Past, also published by Springer-Verlag, forms a companion volume to this book. The editorial responsibilities were handled by Ms. Kate Eldred, who worked extraordinarily hard on this volume, while the scientific editing was performed by Dr. Peter G. Brewer. The organizing committee of scientists charged with responsibility for the symposium was: Dr. Peter G. Brewer, chemistry; Dr. Arthur E. Maxwell, geology and geophysics; Dr. Robert W. Morse, marine policy; Dr. David A. Ross, marine policy and marine geology; Dr. Peter B. Rhines, physical oceanography; Dr. John A. Teal, marine biology; and Dr. Robert Spindel, ocean engineering. They were faced at the outset with the problem that science proceeds with intense effort and competition within a disciplinary peer group but that, particularly in ocean science, the results of this work often have com pletely unforseen and important consequences in a totally unrelated area."