Cold War Oceans: Military Funding of Marine Geology, the Development of Modern Geology and the Initiation of Deep-Sea Resource Strategy
Presented by: Gary M. Hanson, Hanson and Associates
In-Person
Where: The Petroleum Club of Shreveport, 15th floor
Member Cost: $25 • Non-Member Cost: $35
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Biography
Gary M. Hanson was born in Shreveport, but grew up in the quaint, South Arkansas oil community of Smackover. He is owner of Hanson and Associates. After receiving his B.S. in geology from Louisiana Tech University, Gary moved on to finish his 2nd summer of Naval Reserve Officer Candidate (ROC) School in Rhode Island. The Navy recommended that after completion of officer training he acquire a masters in oceanography. Gary was commissioned by the Commanding Officer of Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, New Hampshire, a premier builder and maintainer of Navy nuclear submarines. He began drilling at the co-located Inshore Underwater Warfare Unit and commenced graduate school in geological oceanography at the nearby University of New Hampshire. After graduation, he was assigned as Boat Department Head on the USNS Harkness surveying classified bathymetric maps mainly for use by U.S. subs in the Aegean Sea. His next duty station would be the highly classified Naval Facility (NavFac) Pt. Sur, California. While at NavFac Pt. Sur Gary developed and taught oceanography for Monterey Peninsula College with navy personnel and residents of the Big Sur community attending.
After leaving the Navy, Gary joined Pennzoil and requested to start out in the Shreveport District Office instead of the Houston exploration office. He became the trial balloon as newly hired Pennzoil geologists were sent to district offices first. He started his development experience by coring, and evaluating, an untested deep Cotton Valley productive sand encased in thick shale in Carthage Field Texas in 1976. This resulted in significant gas produced from that one zone across the field. Gary moved back to Shreveport after working in the Houston office and became exploration geologist for IMC Exploration. He worked his way up to District Exploration Manager prior to the company leaving the industry. Gary went on to work at several local companies until he joined Heritage Energy as a partner. With the continued industry downturn 1980-1990, Gary moved on to PRC, Inc. where he worked as a hydrogeologist and oceanographer, working sites like Savannah River Site for the Dept. of Energy and Naval Air Station Pt. Mugu, Ca. Starting in 2000 he joined the faculty at LSU Shreveport, was awarded a professorship and served as the Director of the Red River Watershed Management Institute for 19 years after which he retired.
Abstract
In February 1943, 1,009 Marines and attached Navy Corpsmen were killed during the assault on a beach in the Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific. Many of these deaths have been associated with an inaccurate assessment of a critical oceanographic parameter, underscoring the potentially decisive military consequences of limited local knowledge of tides. In the aftermath, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was prosecuting the war in the Pacific, confronted the human cost of that failure firsthand, an experience that reinforced the strategic importance of improving oceanographic intelligence. This wartime imperative would later drive another, seemingly separate intellectual development: the transformation of twentieth-century earth science. In 1926, Alfred Wegener presented his theory of Kontinentalverschiebung (Continental Drift) to a skeptical American geological establishment at a symposium sponsored by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in New York. The reception was deeply unfavorable, and after Wegener’s death in 1930 the theory lost much of its momentum within mainstream geology. Yet within a few decades, plate tectonics emerged as a unifying framework for modern earth science. The speed with which this transformation occurred invites a broader historical question: to what extent did the rapid consolidation of plate tectonic theory depend not only on conceptual advances within geology, but also on the institutional, technological, and financial conditions created by Cold War priorities and funding?
This study argues that military patronage of oceanography, together with technologies adapted from the oil and telecommunications industries, created important conditions for advances in ocean acoustics, geophysics, seismic monitoring, and subsea volcanic research. Naval investment in undersea surveillance and geologic research expanded the observational capacity available to scientists, while the later declassification of selected technologies helped extend those capacities into civilian research. These developments contributed to the growth of cabled ocean observatories and to improved mapping of hydrocarbon and mineral-rich regions of the deep ocean. In this sense, the rise of modern geology and contemporary interest in deep-sea resources can be understood not solely as products of scientific ingenuity, but also as outcomes shaped by strategic competition, industrial capability, and state-sponsored research. Deep ocean mining has caught the attention of the public. Although China is investing greatly in this endeavor, some of their actions indicate they also are jointly investing in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) tactics and technology… directed at the U.S. Are we in another Cold War under the seas?
