Discovery
In 1951 researchers on board the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service research vessel were indulging in a spot of long line fishing. They noticed that the gear deep under water drifted eastwards. This was unusual because the surface currents of the pacific ocean flow westwards on the equator. (They follow the direction of the winds).
The following year Townsend Cromwell led a research party to investigate how the currents of the ocean varied as a function of depth. They discovered a fast flowing current that flowed eastwards in the deep surface layers.
Read more about this topic: Cromwell Current
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“That the discovery of this great truth, which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so very few, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men, who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish.”
—Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)