Oceanic Trench - History of The Term "trench"

History of The Term "trench"

Trenches were not clearly defined until the late 1940s and 1950s. The bathymetry of the ocean was of no real interest until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the initial laying of Transatlantic telegraph cables on the seafloor between the continents. Even then the elongated bathymetric expression of trenches was not recognized until well into the 20th century. The term “trench” does not appear in Murray and Hjort’s (1912) classic oceanography book. Instead they applied the term “deep“ for the deepest parts of the ocean, such as Challenger Deep. Experiences from World War I battlefields emblazoned the concept of the trench warfare as an elongate depression defining an important boundary, so it was no surprise that the term “trench” was used to describe natural features in the early 1920s. The term was first used in a geologic context by Scofield two years after the war ended to describe a structurally controlled depression in the Rocky Mountains. Johnstone, in his 1923 textbook An Introduction to Oceanography, first used the term in its modern sense for any marked, elongate depression of the sea bottom.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Felix Andries Vening Meinesz developed a unique gravimeter that could measure gravity in the stable environment of a submarine and used it to measure gravity over trenches. His measurements revealed that trenches are sites of downwelling in the solid Earth. The concept of downwelling at trenches was characterized by Griggs in 1939 as the tectogene hypothesis, for which he developed an analogue model using a pair of rotating drums. World War II in the Pacific led to great improvements of bathymetry in especially the western and northern Pacific, and the linear nature of these deeps became clear. The rapid growth of deep sea research efforts, especially the widespread use of echosounders in the 1950s and 1960s confirmed the morphological utility of the term. The important trenches were identified, sampled, and their greatest depths sonically plumbed. The heroic phase of trench exploration culminated in the 1960 descent of the Bathyscaphe Trieste, which set an unbeatable world record by diving to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. Following Robert S. Dietz’ and Harry Hess’ articulation of the seafloor spreading hypothesis in the early 1960s and the plate tectonic revolution in the late 1960s the term “trench“ has been redefined with plate tectonic as well as bathymetric connotations.