essay about ocean basins

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Ocean Basins and Continents

Continents and the ocean.

Fig. 1.2 ( A ) Map of the world from the South Pole, including sea ice (1997) 

Image courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pacific Services Center

Fig. 1.2  ( B ) Map of the world from the North Pole, including sea ice (1997) 

Fig. 1.2  ( C ) Map of the world from the North Pole, not including sea ice 

Fig. 1.3  ( A ) A street view of Pearl Harbor.

Image adapted from Google Maps .

Fig. 1.3 ( B ) A satellite view of Pearl Harbor.

Fig. 1.3 ( C ) A nautical chart of a portion of Pearl Harbor. This portion is the area outlined in red on maps A and B.

Image courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Because the earth is spherical, its surface features can only be represented accurately on a globe. Two-dimensional maps are flat representations of the three-dimensional earth, and therefore they distort some of the information they display. This is especially true of maps that show large areas. Maps of the whole earth, for example, flatten the curved surface of the earth’s sphere onto a two-dimensional surface and, in doing this, change the way the earth looks.

Fig. 1.4. Pseudocylindrical map projection of the earth. On this map land is green even if it is covered by ice. This map does not show sea ice.

Image by Byron Inouye

Locate Ocean Basins and Continents

Check your knowledge of ocean basins and continents by locating and labeling them on a world map.

The Southern Ocean Basin

Continent confusion.

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Exploring Our Fluid Earth, a product of the Curriculum Research & Development Group (CRDG), College of Education. © University of Hawai‘i, . This document may be freely reproduced and distributed for non-profit educational purposes.

“History of Ocean Basins” by Hess Coursework

Introduction, article summary, works cited.

In this article, Hess reviews the formation of oceans. From the article it is vivid that the coming into being of oceans is subject to discussion since the previous knowledge is doubtful, and the existing framework is confusing. Interesting theories about this subject have been many, but none of them deals with the matter conclusively. Ideally this paper, will present background of the article, provide a summary of the article, and finally clarify concerns that Hess could have dealt with to farther strengthen his argument.

Building on the premise that radioactive dissolutions could precisely predict how old a solar structure is, the earth is approximately 4.5 aeons (Hess 1). It is assumed that the earth was born through collection of meteorites which originally comprised of solar composition. Prior to condensing into a concrete system the Earth disintegrated due to effect of evaporation and lost more matter than it currently holds. Also, undetermined quantity of denser particles was disseminated to solar system as well. This is marked by the absence of the atmospheric gases. Hess proposed that the dissemination of carbon and nitrogen, and possibly an extensive part of initial silica substances. He in addition highlights that the absence of high quantities of some volatile masses in the solar system shows that these substances did not have sufficient outer-core temperature. Hess argues that volatile substances held within the interior of solar systems have previously and are presently penetrating into the earth, and that through this the current atmosphere and ocean have developed (Hess 2).

The low temperatures more or less prevented emission of high quantities of substances following the condensation of the earth. Hess proposes that this emission happened when the substances making the earth became greatly scattered in order that the emission speed from the earth’s outer region was reasonably minimal. From the article, it vivid that the process of condensing these substances occurred swiftly, and certain less dense particles and unstable elements fell back into the condensed concrete mass of the earth. It is argued that the single cell theory changed gravitational force into thermal force. The thermal heat and possibly much higher quantity of heat originating from the thermal heat engaged in the condensation process were insufficient to form a molten earth. The suggested single cell theory led to the bi-lateral unevenness of the earth apparent in the oceans.

Hess provided a great wealth of knowledge regarding the origin of oceans. This is an indication that the author is well versed with both geosciences and theory behind the formation of oceans, allowing necessary denigration of previous research in similar field by individuals possibly falling short of the appropriate multi-disciplinary approach. The article provides a significant inclusion to the existing framework of study in theoretical background on how oceans came into being.

However, how Hess’s approach will influence the universe is subject to debate. While the single cell theory shows capability of continuous disintegration of all particles, the reality is that various natural hindrances still remain. Present day theory is far from even sufficiently stable disintegration processes explained in the article. For example, Atlantic Ocean is subject to the trailing borders of land masses separating from the ocean, while the Arctic Ocean is characterised by the leading borders of land masses moving closer to the islands and signifying inward-flowing traces of inner convection particles.

In his article, Hess has tried to bring a new perspective regarding the formation of oceans. It is barely possible that all assumptions provided by Hess are right. But it presents an important model for checking different and collective categories of hypotheses associating with the oceans.

Hess, Harry. “History of Ocean Basins.” In Petrological Studies: A Volume in Honour of A. F. Huddington, ed. By A.E.J. Engel, H. L. James, and B. F. Leonard, Geological Society of America , (1962): 23-38.

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IvyPanda. (2022, October 20). "History of Ocean Basins" by Hess. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-ocean-basins-by-hess/

""History of Ocean Basins" by Hess." IvyPanda , 20 Oct. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-ocean-basins-by-hess/.

IvyPanda . (2022) '"History of Ocean Basins" by Hess'. 20 October.

IvyPanda . 2022. ""History of Ocean Basins" by Hess." October 20, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-ocean-basins-by-hess/.

1. IvyPanda . ""History of Ocean Basins" by Hess." October 20, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-ocean-basins-by-hess/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""History of Ocean Basins" by Hess." October 20, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/history-of-ocean-basins-by-hess/.

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History of Ocean Basins

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H. H. Hess, 1962. "History of Ocean Basins", Petrologic Studies, A. E. J. Engel, Harold L. James, B. F. Leonard

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For purposes of discussion certain simplifying assumptions are made as to initial conditions o n the Earth soon after its formation. It is postulated that it had little in the way of an atmosphere or oceans and that the constituents for these were derived by leakage from the interior of the Earth in the course of geologic time. Heating by short-lived radio nuclides caused partial melting and a single-cell convective overturn within the Earth which segregated an iron core, produced the primordial continents, and gave the Earth its bilateral asymmetry.

Mid-ocean ridges have high heat flow, and many of them have median rifts and show lower seismic velocities than do the common oceanic areas. They are interpreted as representing the rising limbs of mantle-convection cells. The topographic elevation is related to thermal expansion, and the lower seismic velocities both to higher than normal temperatures and microfracturing. Convective flow comes right through to the surface, and the oceanic crust is formed by hydration of mantle material starting at a level 5 k m below the sea floor. The water to produce serpentine of the oceanic crust comes from the mantle at a rate consistent with a gradual evolution of ocean water over 4 aeons.

Ocean ridges are ephemeral features as are the convection cells that produce them. A n ancient trans-Pacific ridge from the Marianas Islands to Chile started to disappear 100 m illion years ago. Its trace is now evident only in a belt of atolls and guyots which have subsided 1–2 km. N o indications of older generations of oceanic ridges are found. This, coupled with the small thickness of sediments on the ocean floor and comparatively small number of volcanic seamounts, suggests an age for allthe ocean floor of not more than several times 10 8 years.

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is truly median because each side of the convecting cell is moving away from the crest at the same velocity, ca. 1 cm/yr. A more acceptable mechanism is derived for continental drift whereby continents ride passively o n convecting mantle instead of having top low through oceanic crust. Finally, the depth of the M discontinuity under continents is related to the depth of the oceans. Early in the Earth's history, when it is assumed there wasmuch less sea water, the continental plates must have been much thinner.

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2.1: Lesson 2 Introduction

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• Page ID 14920

• Eliza Richardson
• Pennsylvania State University via John A. Dutton: e-Education Institute

Living on an Island: Origin of Ocean Basins and Sea Floor Morphology

About Lesson 2

Credit: Sunita Williams(link is external)

In one sense or another, we are all Living on an Island . The continents are buoyant rock masses that are floating in the Earth’s mantle-asthenosphere and surrounded by water at the surface. Earth’s surface is in constant motion and the ocean basins are continually evolving. The image of the Red Sea on this page is an example of some of the most recent change—an ocean basin is forming! We’re going to spend Lesson 2 exploring the Origin of the Ocean Basins and learning about how Sea Floor Morphology relates to the processes that have shaped the current ocean geometry. As I suspect you know, this all starts with Plate Tectonics and Sea Floor Spreading.

By the end of this lesson you should have a deeper understanding of: plate geometry and kinematics, the role of earthquakes, hot spots and how they relate to volcanic edifices, and continental margins. One of the things to think about this week is how you might develop a teaching module on Plate Tectonics.

What will we learn in Lesson 2?

By the end of Lesson 2, you should be able to:

• Explain the basic tenets of plate tectonics including relative and absolute plate motion.
• Use spherical trigonometry to calculate linear and angular distances on Earth’s surface. Employ this knowledge to work with plate motion vectors
• Use on-line resources to calculate rates of plate tectonic motion.
• Explain hot spots at a basic and sophisticated level, including how they can be used to determine relative plate motion, past theories of their origin, the concept of “Mantle wind,” and current ideas about their origin.
• Describe the Wilson Cycle and related concepts of Sea Floor Spreading.
• Discuss Earth’s internal structure, including the relationship and distinctions between chemical classifications (Crust, Mantle, etc.) and rheologic classifications (Lithosphere, Asthenosphere…).
• Readily point out examples of the three basic plate boundaries and their tectonic, seismic and volcanic manifestations at Earth’s surface.
• Use on-line resources to construct maps of the ocean floor

What is due for Lesson 2?

The chart below provides an overview of the requirements for Lesson 2. For assignment details, refer to the lesson page noted. Due dates are listed in this table and in Canvas.

If you have any questions, please post them to our Questions? discussion forum (not e-mail), located in the Discussions menu in Canvas. I will check that discussion forum daily to respond. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help out a classmate.

A basin is a depression, or dip, in the Earth’s surface.

Earth Science, Geology, Geography, Physical Geography

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A basin is a depression, or dip, in the Earth’s surface. Basins are shaped like bowls, with sides higher than the bottom. They can be oval or circular in shape, similar to a sink or tub you might have in your own bathroom. Some are filled with water. Others are empty. Basins are formed by forces above the ground (like erosion ) or below the ground (like earthquakes ). They can be created over thousands of years or almost overnight. The major types of basins are river drainage basins , structural basins , and ocean basins . River Drainage Basins A river drainage basin is an area drained by a river and all of its tributaries. A river basin is made up of many different watersheds . A watershed is a small version of a river basin. Every stream and tributary has its own watershed, which drains to a larger stream or wetland . These streams, ponds, wetlands, and lakes are part of a river basin. The Mississippi River basin in the U.S., for instance, is made up of six major watersheds: the Missouri, Upper Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, Lower Mississippi, and Arkansas-Red-White Rivers. Every river is part of a network of watersheds that make up a river system’s entire drainage basin. All the water in the drainage basin flows downhill toward bigger rivers. The Pease River, in northern Texas, is part of the Arkansas-Red-White watershed. It is a tributary of the Red River. The Red River is a major tributary of the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The Amazon Basin, in northern South America, is the largest in the world. The Amazon River and all of its tributaries drain an area more than 7 million square kilometers (about 3 million square miles). Structural Basins Structural basins are formed by tectonic activity . Tectonic activity is the movement of large pieces of the Earth’s crust , called tectonic plates . Tectonic activity is responsible for such phenomena as earthquakes and volcanoes . The natural processes of weathering and erosion also contribute to forming structural basins. Structural basins form as tectonic plates shift. Rocks and other material on the floor of the basin are forced downward, while material on the sides of the basin are pushed up. This process happens over thousands of years. If a basin is shaped like a bowl, a structural basin is shaped like a series of smaller bowls, stacked inside each other. Structural basins are usually found in dry regions.

Some structural basins are known as endorheic basins . Endorheic basins have internal drainage systems . This means they don’t have enough water to drain to a stream, lake, or ocean. The water that trickles into these types of basins evaporates or seeps into the ground. When enough water collects in an endorheic basin , it can form a very salty lake, such as the Dead Sea, between Israel and Jordan. While water evaporates into the atmosphere , minerals remain. The remaining water becomes even saltier. The Dead Sea is one of the saltiest natural body of water on Earth. Its shore, about 400 meters (1,300 feet) below sea level, is Earth’s lowest dry point. Death Valley , in the U.S. state of California, is another endorheic basin . At about 86 meters (282 feet) below sea level, it is the lowest place in North America. The water draining into Death Valley from its few streams does not exit the basin to a river or estuary . It evaporates or seeps into the ground. A lake basin is another type of structural basin . Lake basins often form in valleys blocked by rocks or other debris left by a landslide , lava flow, or glacier . The debris acts as a dam , trapping water and forming a lake. Hunza Lake in Pakistan was formed when an earthquake triggered a massive landslide in 2010. The debris dammed the Hunza River, in addition to killing 20 people and destroying the village of Attabad. The Hunza River continues to flow into the lake basin , and many geologists and villagers worry the basin won’t be strong enough to hold the water. Lake basins may also be carved out by glaciers —huge masses of ice—as they move down valleys or across the land. When the glaciers move, the basins they create remain. During the last ice age , glaciers carved the basins of the Finger Lakes, in the U.S. state of New York. Sedimentary basins are a type of structural basin that aren’t shaped like typical basins , sometimes forming long troughs. Sedimentary basins have been filled with layers of rock and organic material over millions of years. Material that fills up the basin is called sediment fill . Sedimentary basins are key sources of petroleum and other fossil fuels . Millions of years ago, tiny sea creatures called diatoms lived and died in ocean basins . Eventually, these ancient oceans dried up, leaving dry basins . The remains of the diatoms were at the bottom of these basins . The remains were crushed under billions of tons of sediment fill , over millions of years. In the right conditions, the pressure of the sediment fill turns the diatom remains into petroleum .

The Niger Delta sedimentary basin , in the countries of Nigeria, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea, is one of the most productive petroleum fields in Africa. In North America, the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin is one of the continent 's largest suppliers of gas and coal.

Ocean Basins Ocean basins are the largest depressions on Earth. Edges of the continents , called continental shelves, form the sides of ocean basins . There are five major ocean basins , coordinating with the major oceans of the world: the Pacific basin , the Atlantic basin , the Indian basin , the Arctic basin , and the Southern basin . Many smaller basins are often considered oceanic basins , such as the North Aleutian Basin , between the Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Tectonic activity constantly changes ocean basins . Seafloor spreading and subduction are the most important types of tectonic activity that shape ocean basins . Seafloor spreading happens along the boundaries of tectonic plates that are moving apart from each other. These areas are called mid-ocean ridges . New seafloor is created at the bottom, or rift , of a mid-ocean ridge . Ocean basins that have mid-ocean ridges are expanding. The Atlantic basin , for instance, is expanding because of seafloor spreading . Subduction happens along the boundaries of tectonic plates that are crashing into each other. In these subduction zones, the heavier plate moves underneath, or subducts , the lighter one. Ocean basins that experience subduction , such as the Pacific basin , are shrinking. Even though ocean basins make up more than 70 percent of the total land on Earth, scientists know relatively little about them. Some oceanographers (and some astronomers !) say that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the surface of the ocean floor. It is very difficult to get information about landforms of the ocean basin , such as trenches and mid-ocean ridges . These landforms are thousands of feet below the surface of the water. Few instruments can endure the intense pressure, cold, and dark at the bottom of ocean basins . Occasionally, researchers themselves explore ocean basins in special submarines called submersibles .

Pacific Ocean Basin: Ring Of Fire The Pacific Ocean basin is the largest in the world. It is more than 155 million square kilometers (59 million square miles)all of the continents could fit into it. It is also the oldest basin; researchers say its rocks are 200 million years old. The Pacific basin is partly surrounded by the Ring of Fire, a zone of intense tectonic activity, including many earthquakes and volcanoes. The Ring of Fire touches Alaska, the Americas, New Zealand, and eastern Asia.

What's your basin? Everyone lives in a watershed or river basin, even if they don't live near water. What is the name of the watershed or river basin you live in?

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29 The Atlantic Ocean Basin

Alan L. Karras is Senior Lecturer in the International and Area Studies Teaching program at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This article argues that historians ought to have two main goals: reconstructing the past in a way that demonstrates how those who lived life in times before our own understood and interacted with the world that they inhabited and ascribing meaning to these past experiences so that they are relevant to those in the present. Atlantic history, at least for the last few decades, has held out tremendous potential for modern world historians. This article describes expanding time and integrating space by considering the Atlantic world as a single entity from the time that the four continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean became linked though exploration. It also discusses community, migration, and the need for political economy; and globalizing Atlantic history.

Musings from the Irritated

In general, historians ought to have two main goals: (1) reconstructing the past in a way that demonstrates how those who lived life in times before our own understood and interacted with the world that they inhabited and (2) ascribing meaning to these past experiences so that they are relevant to those of us in the present. These large questions do not require scholars to work solely within a particular national or linguistic boundary, though most historians are trained to do exactly that. Atlantic history can provide a cure for such nationalistic tendencies, though it will not be easy. Atlantic history, a once-promising field of study, has become a bit down-at-heel, suffering from malaise and, perhaps, terminal ennui . Despite this seemingly grim assessment of the patient's health, the longer-term prognosis might still remain promising.

Atlantic history, at least for the last several decades, has held out tremendous potential for modern world historians. Such scholars, who tend not to have had extensive training in the western hemisphere's history, nevertheless need familiarity with many historical processes that, arguably, first appeared during the modern period in the context of the Atlantic world. These world-historical processes, such as transoceanic migration, intercontinental and inter-imperial trade, religious proselytization, democratic revolution, and enlightened state-building point to a significance for Atlantic world history that cannot be underestimated; without the Atlantic world's history, in fact, there would be no global history.

The Atlantic world's vast spaces—four continents that border an ocean, in addition to the ocean itself—beg scholars to explore the interactions, exchanges, and connections between societies with an Atlantic shore. Moreover, the exchanges, interactions, and connections between these societies and others that are outside this geographic space, such as China, also affected the political, economic, cultural, and social developments within Atlantic societies. Tea, for example, played something more than a symbolic part in the American Revolution. It was also an essential product in the global spread of industrialization, as well as in commercial exchange within the Atlantic world's spaces, yet it generally remains unstudied. 1 Instead, to most scholars now working on the Atlantic world, tea appears as something that is dumped into Boston Harbor in the run-up to the War for Independence between Britain and its colonies. 2 Scholars' focus, in other words, generally remains on local and nationalist historical narratives, even when connections to a broader regional history like the Atlantic world, let alone to world history, are easy to make.

The reason that the historical focus continues to be fixed in place is worrisome. North American historians of mainland British North America, formerly known as early Americanists, have colonized Atlantic history. In doing so, they have hijacked the field's promising internationalist tendencies and turned them upside-down. They have minimized the role that more distant societies around the world played in the social, economic, and cultural life of those societies that border the Atlantic in North America, except insofar as that role can either be related to the development of a creole colonial identity or somehow connected to the metropolitan area in Europe that controlled a particular colonial society. Africa continues to be an afterthought, usually appearing in scholarship solely as a source of ‘necessary’ labor for plantation societies. 3 Studies of the flow of people, goods, and ideas in the Atlantic world are, therefore, limited—and they often tend to be written by those other than academic historians. 4

To advance the field, then, and counteract its early American colonization, it is essential that historians of one of the other European countries to colonize the Americas begin to write histories that explore the interaction between all of the societies that bordered the Atlantic's shores. This does not yet appear to be happening: the Spanish world remains the Spanish world, so too does the Portuguese, and the Dutch, and the French. Historians are, in other words, limited by language and ethnicity. 5 When a work does appear from these quarters, such as J. H. Elliott's Empires of the Atlantic World , British North American historians immediately pronounce it ‘magisterial,’ while lamenting their own inability to produce such scholarship. Such lamentations do not help; rather scholars should simply devote more energy to engaging the Atlantic world's internationalist axes. 6

The current situation is not entirely the fault of historians of colonial British America. Substitute Spanish or French or Dutch for British, and you will find scholars who are comfortable working with Spanish or French or Dutch historical sources, but who also remain unwilling or unable to approach neighboring geographic spaces that communicated in different languages. Most historians who do original archival research exhibit discomfort when writing about history that transcends national or linguistic boundaries; those who produce syntheses, moreover, are reticent to take on an existing literature with which they are relatively unfamiliar.

In a sense, who can blame them? Yet that is precisely the kind of risk that Atlantic history most requires. Until such time as training in world history becomes more widespread, if ever it does, it will be difficult to change the current state of affairs. The historical profession would need to be fundamentally reorganized, which seems increasingly unlikely, given both professional resistance and scarce budgetary resources. It is, then, no wonder that the field of Atlantic history is likely to continue drifting through the doldrums, much like many of the New World's first visitors from the Atlantic's eastern shores did centuries ago.

There is, moreover, an additional problem to be overcome. Just as language has proven to be a barrier for much Atlantic scholarship, so has chronological breadth. I argue here that Atlantic history has become synonymous with early American history; in a few cases, it has been pushed, somewhat uncomfortably, into the nineteenth century. 7 Within that time frame, three periods are usually ascribed to Atlantic world history. Though not all scholars agree on what dates the periods shift from one to the next, it nevertheless remains common for them to end in the nineteenth century, usually early, but sometimes middle or late. For example, in 1992, J. R. McNeill and I tried to push as far out as we could from the usual early American comfort zone. Given our own Caribbean and Latin American training, we got as far as the 1880s, when the last slave societies in the Americas were eliminated. 8 But even this now seems insufficient, given events of the twentieth century, and the role that a variety of interactions between the Atlantic-bordering societies have played in world history. In short, the Atlantic world concept needs to be pushed into the twentieth century, so that the region's transformation from a ‘new world’ to one that became integrated in various ways into other, shifting and sometimes opposing, regional blocs can be clearly articulated and explained, especially in relationship to existing national and world histories.

The political alliances between northern European states, like France and Britain, with the United States gave rise to a kind of north Atlantic world, not quite NATO, but something close, early in the twentieth century. The former colonies of Latin America continued their connection with Spain, and expanded contacts to southern Europe in, for example, the migration between Italy and Argentina. Africa, colonized in the post-slavery period by northern Europeans, also participated in the Atlantic world, but, as Peter Coclanis has indicated, this was also part of a newly expanding global history. 9 In other words, during the twentieth century the Atlantic world and its constituent parts became more closely connected to the rest of the world, using the Atlantic as one vector of connection among several. That this story remains largely untold except insofar as it can be related to a particular national historical literature is again understandable; it could easily be remedied with some innovative scholarly approaches.

Nevertheless, despite my general pessimism with the current direction of much Atlantic history, there are still reasons to argue for a coherent and expanded historical field. The first signs of such invigoration are even present. Textbooks and courses are dutifully appearing. But while these textbooks and courses generally grapple with the themes of Atlantic history, they generally read like a series of national and regional histories that are connected thematically. 10 They are not yet integrated into a single, or singularly distinctive, historical narrative. This is, of course, difficult to do, but it is absolutely essential if Atlantic history is to have a chance at overcoming the deeply ingrained temptation to tell the historical narrative of the United States (or any other society) through an Atlantic lens, while calling this revised national narrative Atlantic history. If historians can make this leap of faith, and accept a revised conceptual framework, Atlantic history indeed has a future. If scholars fail to rise to the challenge, Atlantic history will cease to provide a meaningful historical lens through which to view past societies.

Expanding Time and Integrating Space

It is probably best to consider the Atlantic world as a single entity from the time that the four continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean became linked through exploration, migration, and commerce. This points to the late fifteenth century or the early sixteenth century. While there is no doubt that earlier interactions between parts of the Atlantic world, such as that between the Vikings and the Americas, took place, Africans were not included in this round of interactions. And, regardless of what one thinks about Ivan Van Sertima's work, They Came before Columbus , which boldly argues that interaction between Africa and the Americas took place long before Europeans arrived, clear connections between all four of the Atlantic's continents did not emerge before Columbus's voyages of the late fifteenth century. Indeed, this is why there is general agreement among scholars that the Atlantic world, as a unit of historical analysis, becomes possible only after 1500. 11

Given the clear connections between the four continents that emerged after that date, the promise of Atlantic history was initially realized in works like Alfred Crosby's The Columbian Exchange . The concept is now so familiar that it needs almost no explanation; the book's title and argument refer to the exchanges of crops, animals, and diseases that took place among the various residents of the Atlantic's continents after the first European voyages of exploration. Other scholars have since taken up the important task of writing an Atlantic world environmental history, as a way of illuminating the interactions among the Atlantic's disparate peoples and explaining the dramatic decline of the indigenous American populations at the hands of those from across the sea. 12 From the Atlantic world's inception, demographics and environment can be easily used to illustrate the utility of the broad regional conceptualization.

The Atlantic world concept's historical utility was further expanded when the lack of an adequate labor supply in the Americas, a lack created by the imposition of European forms of social organization combined with disease explained by the Columbian exchange, required new sources of labor. Workers came initially, at least in some cases, from Europe, as well as from Africa but the vast majority of such labor was coerced, perhaps better known as slavery. Of course, the introduction of African slavery to the Americas, as well as its effects in Africa, was subjected to numerical analysis, most famously by Philip Curtin, whose estimates of the total size and scope of the slave trade have proven over time to be remarkably resilient. 13 The Atlantic slave trade, in fact, provided the labor that built large chunks of the Americas, making it especially important to Atlantic history. Moreover, through its monopoly system of labor, the slave trade yielded profits to Europeans that, if Eric Williams's general argument about slavery's profitability is correct, led to the availability of capital in Europe, which in turn fueled industrialization. 14

Though the environmental and demographic approach to studying the Atlantic world has generally proven productive, especially in earlier historical periods, there is still much work remaining to be done. In particular, such avenues of inquiry need to be pushed forward into later chronological periods. For example, world historians have pointed to the role of industrialization in the Atlantic world in creating various kinds of pollution that have spread to other quarters. Greenhouse gases from North America and Europe have begun to demonstrate quite negative consequences in other places around the (Atlantic) world, especially those in the southern hemisphere. 15 Diseases, too, continue to spread from one part of the Atlantic world to others; HIV/AIDS is one prominent example, yet historical scholarship on these more recent human-pathogen interactions is generally limited.

If considering the Columbian exchange comes naturally, and has been clearly associated with Atlantic world history from its inception, it still remains somewhat more difficult for those other than world historians to imagine the roles that quinine or rubber played in shaping the nature of Atlantic historical interactions, especially after the abolition of the African slave trade. The growth of tropical medicine did after all allow the colonization of the rest of the world to proceed apace, which in turn changed the fundamental relationship between societies—including those in the Atlantic basin. 16 Yet, this story is often left out of Atlantic history, because of the general lack of attention to events and developments post-1800, let alone post-1900. Of course, this also means that these stories are not in the textbooks. That strikes me as unfortunate.

Pushing the story of Atlantic interactions into later periods ought also to have salubrious effects, especially concerning the role of Africa. Far too often, Africans are omitted from the Atlantic world's historiography. This seems a bit odd, since it was after all their labor, through slavery, that built much of the capital that circulated in the Atlantic basin. Though slavery in the Americas ended at various points in the nineteenth century (depending on both local and imperial conditions in each society), the role of Africa in the Atlantic did not end when the last slave had been freed. Instead, the role of African societies changed. New states created in the nineteenth century, such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, came into existence, in part modeled on the Enlightenment principles that the American, French, and Haitian revolutions attempted to codify and put into practice. The history of state building in this part of West Africa is not often connected to those earlier stories of revolution or the application of Enlightenment ideology that played so great a role in the Atlantic's history after 1760 or so.

Even so, this is not the extent of Africa's changing relationship with the rest of the Atlantic world. The British conquered the Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, making this southern settlement a base from where they could push into the African interior, paving the way for the eventual colonization of the African continent. Of course, this colonization was intimately linked to industrialization elsewhere in the Atlantic world, especially Europe and the Americas. In the few circumstances when Africans appear in the historical literature of the Atlantic world after 1850, they tend to be seen as participants in some kind of African diaspora, which is at least in part a misnomer. There was never any clear African identity that linked together people in Africa, let alone those of African descent who toiled in the rest of the continents and islands that bordered the ocean.

Paul Gilroy, in The Black Atlantic , makes a strong case for the cultural connections that existed among Africans who were scattered around the Atlantic world after slavery ended. Nevertheless, his work remains singular, as others have not generally attempted such an approach. The more important story, still largely untold, remains in the ways that the African continent changed its interaction with other Atlantic societies, especially after the slave trade ended and into the twentieth century. 17

Community, Migration, and the Need for Political Economy

One of the great changes to the historical profession to come about after 1970 was a new focus on social history, especially in early (British North) America. This has all been well and good, as it has led to some important community studies which consider issues of demography, labor, social constructions, and even economic developments within these societal subsets. Such research tends to explore a particular place, for instance a town or region, at a particular time. Some historians also sought to expand such community studies by focusing on migration, and illuminating the relationships between societies in different places. A few of these migration studies even recognized that talking about migration required considering not just the westward migration of Europeans and Africans to the Americas, but also the eastward migrations of those in the New World to the Old World. 18

In the Atlantic world, migration must be the starting point; there would be no Atlantic history, nor for that matter would there be global history, without it. Of course, there was migration of Europeans. The familiar story, at least familiar to those who studied British North American history, is that individuals migrated either for religious freedom (say, in Massachusetts or early Pennsylvania) or for new economic opportunities (say, everywhere else, but Virginia would be a good example). What the colonial migrants found was something rather different from what they expected and the rest, as they say, is history. The fact is that Europeans did migrate, but most of them, in all colonies including those from countries other than the United Kingdom, were single young men in search of greater economic opportunity than they would have had if they had remained at home. Not all of them were prepared for the hardships they would face in the mainland and island colonies and not all of them were even interested in working to improve their lives. Many of them wanted to earn quick profits and, when they could, return to live a more genteel existence in Europe. What this dictated was a certain kind of behavior in the colonies that might not have been tolerated at home, but which was just fine with an ocean between them and home. There has been a bit of work on this for all of the colonies, British and non-British, but an effective synthesis has yet to be produced. 19

As importantly, the existence of all this transoceanic migration ought not to diminish the observation that there was plenty of indigenous migration, as a result of native displacement. The movement of peoples within Atlantic societies has largely fallen to those who study a particular area or territory; it has never been effectively linked to the larger processes that have been used to explain migration across the Atlantic World. 20 Moreover, there is a long tradition of arguing that blacks built America, as indicated earlier in this chapter, but there has not been a large-scale study of the ways in which Africans sacrificed themselves not just in the western hemisphere, but also in Africa, for the building of the Americas. Work by Walter Rodney, in the middle of the twentieth century, asserted that Europe underdeveloped Africa, but such work sometimes painted the Africans as purely passive, a fact that continues to make many social historians uncomfortable, just as it formerly provided succor for slavery's apologists. 21

Parallel literatures for each of the various societies around the Americas exist. Some are even comparative, in that they look at two places, occasionally even in different regions. These studies ought to be considered building blocks for future Atlantic world scholarship; indeed it is essential for the field's health that broader thinking takes place. While local studies are often interesting, and demonstrate a particular author's research acumen, they demonstrate greatest utility as bricks that can be used in ways that the author might either have overlooked or not intended. This implies that they can be synthesized into larger historical narratives over broader geographical spaces. Such syntheses must, of course, traverse linguistic as well as geographical boundaries, just as residents of the Atlantic world themselves regularly did.

When one considers this broader transnational perspective, one has also to realize that there were entire groups of people who existed in the early Atlantic world as a kind of permanent migrant. I refer now to pirates; sometimes they were stateless, and at other times they were not. But all of them transgressed against not just their victims, but through their statelessness and far-flung wanderings, the various regional and demographic categories to which historians cling. In many ways, they connected the Atlantic world through their criminal political economy. A group of violent people who pillaged from European states, perhaps especially Spain, as they operated across the Atlantic basin, pirates managed to create societies because they had (stolen) money which just needed to be spent. Capital in these criminals' hands led to the formation of societies, such as English Jamaica, to service their needs and separate them from their ill-gotten cash. Their actions attacked the operation of the region's political economy—the relationship between the state, individuals who lived under its authority, and the economy—just as those same actions led to new societies across parts of the Americas. 22 There has been some scholarly interest in this subject for the last couple of decades, but perhaps none is more well known than Marcus Rediker's work in the early Anglophone Atlantic world. 23

Seeing pirates as a group of people, largely men, from European underclasses, Rediker maintains that pirates created a kind of alternate reality to the miserable European existences that they then had. The pirate ship became a kind of community, a floating utopia, where both camaraderie and equality existed. Of course, there was also violence—pirates were after all robbers on the high seas—but such brutality has tended to be minimized in many such studies. Even so, pirates clearly were connected to the state-building enterprise.

When the Golden Age of piracy ended in the first third of the eighteenth century, pirates were fewer in number, but by no means eradicated. Indeed, they continued to serve some of the same political economy functions that they had earlier, such as the transfer of wealth from one state to another. There was, in fact, a thin line between pirates and privateers, who were nothing more than pirates that the state licensed to attack their enemies. A lack of systematic study of this phenomenon unfortunately exists; existing scholarship does not generally relate pirates to an emerging transnational (and global) political economy. Nor is earlier piracy usually connected to modern versions of the same crime elsewhere around the world, though it ought to be.

Pirates and migrants, of all kinds, require additional study, but not just to characterize another community that operated in the Atlantic world. Instead, they are significant for their roles in furthering a regional (and a global) political economy. While it is true that some of the work done earlier in the twentieth century, again largely focused on European empires, dealt with states, the mechanisms of government and economic policies, there has not been much recent scholarship that has explicitly dealt with the political economy of the Atlantic world. Lauren Benton's excellent work on legal regimes is one recent effort and my own work on smuggling another step in that direction, but more such transnational and synthetic work is long overdue. 24

The Final Frontier: Globalizing Atlantic History

The preponderance of early American (social) historians from North America in Atlantic history, along with these historians' inability to see large historical processes at work, led me to claim earlier that the field had itself been colonized. Just as significantly, as I also claimed earlier, one of Atlantic history's biggest failings has been its reluctance to move into the twentieth century. Compounding this, of course, has been a general reluctance to transcend national and imperial boundaries. Even conceptualizing an English Atlantic, or a French Atlantic, or a Portuguese Atlantic does not allow scholars an adequate glimpse of the connections between people across the Atlantic world, which those people themselves understood.

Using at least two of the big ideas that now explain world history and its approach, religious proselytization and political engagement, it is possible to advance the field. I shall deal with each of these two ideas in turn. The first, proselytization, is certainly a subject that has already taken a great deal of space in Latin American historiography. Not only has there been work that looks at the spread of Catholicism and the missionary impulse into the Americas, but there has also been some scholarship that explores the ways in which syncretic beliefs have emerged, with both indigenous and African forms of religion. So too has there been similar work on the spread of some Protestant denominations, like the Quakers, Puritans, and Huguenots into some of the English colonies, especially those in North America. 25

Moreover, proselytization has also been explored with later missionary impulses in the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century—first in the settlements of former slaves (Sierra Leone and Liberia), but also more broadly in the years before (and even after) the Scramble for Africa. 26 But these two missionary moments have not been effectively or systematically connected to each other, to the rest of the Atlantic world's history, nor even are they explicitly tied to world history. If connections are made, it is to the history of colonization and imperialism in a particular empire. Though this may well be a start towards connecting the theme to a temporally expanded Atlantic history, much work yet remains to be done. The same could also be said for the twentieth-century religious connections between Africa and the Caribbean, especially, say with regards to Rastafarianism. Similarly, there has been limited work on the Jewish Atlantic, though there are plenty of connections between Jewish networks in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas, both north and south. While not a proselytizing religion, Judaism can be another lens through which to see the transnational connections between Jews in Europe, the Americas (including the Caribbean and Brazil), and, later, those in South Africa. 27

Just as discussions of religious diffusion need to be expanded and infused into an extended Atlantic world, so do the commercial and political connections, which are at the core of Atlantic world history, need bolder assertion. This is especially true given that so much of the work of those now practicing Atlantic history has been in social history. When ideology and politics do enter into their work, it tends to be in only a few places. These might include the American Revolution (or War for Independence, a much more accurate depiction), the slave uprising in Saint-Domingue (which is frequently called the Haitian Revolution), and the French Revolution. Some Latin American historians have written about their own country's independence movements, along with those in other Spanish speaking regions, but all of the western hemisphere's independence movements have not been tied to each other, let alone to the European Enlightenment ideology from which they derived.

The process of decolonization in the modern world began in the Americas, ca. 1776, and it proceeded around the Atlantic world in the Americas in the nineteenth century and in Africa in the twentieth, which oddly enough also saw the colonization of Africa. But few scholars of the Atlantic world seem to have noticed. In other words, the world-historical process of decolonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries needs to be more explicitly linked with the Atlantic's period of ‘revolution’ in the eighteenth century. Not only will this show the prevalence and persistence of Enlightenment ideologies as motivating factors for these revolts, but it will also show the ways in which the Atlantic's history can be neatly fit together—over a much longer period of time.

The problem is that the national historians, some more nationalist than others, avoid making these connections explicit, which eats away at the Atlantic world's constructive fibers. For example, Cuba's independence movement was long and drawn out; it involved multiple countries (Spain, Cuba, the United States, and others). It is deeply connected to the Enlightenment ideology and the early nineteenth-century independence movements but, at the same time, it is also deeply connected to North American history and, later, the Cold War (which is an Atlantic phenomenon, though it tends to get separated from the rest of the Atlantic world's history). Yet, far too often the story that gets told is one of Cuban independence from a Cuban nationalist's perspective. As a result, Cuba's connection to the Atlantic world seems tangential, even peripheral, especially after the abolition of slavery.

In fact, the Cold War's story ought to be a significant part of Atlantic history, but it is not. It is possible to assert that NATO and the Cold War have long played a central part in understanding geopolitics in the second part of the twentieth century; few would object to the Cold War as one of the central organizing principles of history and politics (or political economy for that matter) in the second half of the twentieth century. But in order to understand the ways in which the Cold War developed as it did in the postcolonial world, it becomes imperative to understand the relationships that predated it in the colonial world. This is no less true in the Atlantic world as it is in Vietnam or Eastern Africa.

Even so, only a few diplomatic historians, who work on NATO, have bothered to take on the Atlantic world concept as a twentieth-century phenomenon. Without a broader historical perspective, however, their work can appear to be somewhat parochial. 28 Its narratives are confined to particular places and institutions, without much contextualization of what came before. But it is precisely this story, the narrative of the rise of a former set of backwater colonies into a global superpower, which can be so instructive to other former colonies within the Atlantic world as well as former colonies elsewhere around the world. Yet historians regularly present the decolonization struggle and postcolonial states that emerged from it in purely nationalist terms. This is unfortunate.

After the American War for Independence ended in 1783 the new United States became a kind of mimic of European ways, even more so than the thirteen colonies were in the several decades before the war. Taxation policies, oddly enough, were not dissimilar in the United States from those in European states, for example—despite widespread merchant dissatisfaction with British taxation policies. And cultural forms clearly emulated those of Europeans, at least for a time. As a result, the relationship between the United States and Europe evolved to be more one of similarity than of difference. This marked a changed relationship with the colonies, one that emerged over time. Moreover, the former colonies, in the guise of the United States, would rise to the former colonial powers' defense, in the years during and after World War I. This marked the transition of the former colonies into major players on the world stage. Europe, in a sense, would have destroyed itself, at least without the help of its former colonial subjects. Rather than being a predictive model for other societies across the Atlantic world, either in Africa or the Americas, the story of the United States is much more an exception, an outlier.

I mean to suggest here that the former colonies in the Caribbean and in Latin America changed their economic relationship to their former colonial powers relatively little, despite having similar ideas about ending colonial rule. The independent states of Latin America developed transportation and communication infrastructures in the nineteenth century, it is true, but largely these were used to facilitate an export economy, one that was closely tied to European (and American) marketplaces. The Caribbean colonies remained sugar producers, or suppliers of other agricultural products, even after the demand for these products diminished with the introduction of the sugar beet in Europe and alternative sources for the other products were found elsewhere. After slavery ended, migrations from Asia, especially India and China, brought new migrants to these colonies, which had the effect of perpetuating racial and class divisions within the region. Economic development was, as a result, not especially great, which led to the exacerbation of the same kinds of racial problems that existed during the period of slavery and, perhaps, contributed to the underdevelopment of the region's colonies into the twentieth century. Moreover, the United States increasingly played the part of a neo-colonial power, one that took on the role that the European powers did, by providing capital to regimes and economies in exchange for economically beneficial commercial relationships and the products that they brought with them. Atlantic America, thus, increasingly became divided between those in the north and those in the south.

Atlantic Africa, for its part, went through a period of colonization while the western hemisphere was operating ‘independently’ or was being decolonized. When Africa's own decolonization took place in the second half of the twentieth century, as before, much of Atlantic Africa remained a supplier of minerals, fuels, and other raw materials necessary for industrial economies elsewhere in the Atlantic world, and even more recently in Asia, especially China. No longer was the continent forced to supply human capital. But, as in Latin America, the roads and other infrastructure that were built existed primarily to get extracted products from the interior to the coast, from where they could be exported by sea, just as they were before. This seems to me to be a new iteration of the very same idea of African sacrifice that Patrick Manning earlier used in his discussion of the African slave trade.

In short, the Atlantic world's patterns of development continued into the twentieth century more or less as they were before it. Slavery was replaced with other forms of formally free labor, much of it exploitative. Markets remained in the north, but now the United States was included in that category. Exports continued to dominate many of the economies on the Atlantic's western shores, at least in the south. Political and legal regimes resembled those in Europe and, where they did not, efforts to inculcate democracy, formulated and applied in the Atlantic world itself, were promulgated by, at the very least, the United States—along with several other Cold War allies as the individual cases dictated. It was, in a sense, as if little had changed. Roles seemed, at least superficially, to have been maintained.

The question, however, nevertheless must be asked: to what degree did the Atlantic world operate as a unit in the twentieth century? The answer is less than clear, but it is by no means completely opaque. By this I mean to suggest that the Atlantic world continued its patterns and relationships as have been described above. But where the Atlantic world began to change is that it became more integrated into the rest of world history, and global networks of exchange. 29 In short, the Atlantic world's story became quite clearly linked to the ongoing narratives that are associated with world history. Its distinctiveness, such that there ever was distinctiveness, faded, and its integration into a truly global economy continued apace. Commercial, cultural, and political relationships across the Atlantic world in the twentieth century became only a subset of those same kinds of relationships on a global stage. Where one ocean joined societies together at its inception, several oceanic spaces were now connecting the Atlantic's societies.

Perhaps it is for this reason that I find the Atlantic world's colonization by early American historians to be so deeply troubling. While it may well be useful for American historians to see the connection of their country to the rest of the world, especially in the early period and only marginally less so in later periods, it is nevertheless important not to think of the Atlantic world solely from this perspective or for that matter from any single national perspective. Instead, visualizing Atlantic history from a transnational perspective, that is one that clearly focuses on world-historical processes, will take the historian much closer to how people at the time understood their world. They knew from where their foodstuffs came, and they understood the relationships between the price they paid for consumables and the governments under which they lived. They might have, for example, purchased smuggled flour or slaves, and through that transaction participated in several legal transgressions that connected them to other legal regimes than the one in which they lived—and they surely understood what they were doing, in just the same way that people in 2010 purchase products whose provenance is unclear, for reasons that are very clear.

In other words, those who participated in the Atlantic world understood that they were contributing to a transnational enterprise with many of their actions in the same ways that those in the present do. Of course, it was clear when they embarked on a dock and disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. But one did not have to travel in order to participate in the Atlantic world. One need only have been a consumer. And, it goes almost without saying—everyone was a consumer, just as everyone is now a consumer. People were never purely national consumers, despite efforts to make them so, and they knew it. It is, therefore, especially important for those of us who study Atlantic history to refrain from allowing any single country's historians from colonizing the field and making it a simple extension of a national history. The history of the Atlantic world is, by definition, transnational, and scholars must strive for it to remain so, even as they push to stretch its boundaries farther.

With this final plea, scholars should be moved away from conceptualizing the Atlantic as simply a study of European countries and their respective colonies, just as they should be reminded to include Africa more centrally in the Atlantic's story. World historians have a special role to play in these struggles, as they must remind those who study any of the colonies that would become the United States that the story of the Atlantic is much more than an effort to internationalize American history (which is, of course, its own worthy undertaking). World historians must do more to push forward the Atlantic's temporal boundaries, and grapple with the changes—as well as the continuities—that began to take place with industrialization and were furthered by the World Wars. Scholars of the Atlantic world must, for their part, do more to embrace the world historical enterprise, so that they remain relevant, insightful, and different from American historians. Atlantic historians must ask broader questions than has hitherto been the case, and they must be willing to use historical sources in multiple languages, or at least be willing to synthesize better the secondary literature that grapples with non-English-speaking places, in whatever language they might have been written. In this way, Atlantic world historians can better communicate what transpired in the Atlantic world's spaces, as well as in those that existed beyond it. In fact, Atlantic world historians must do everything in their power to relate the Atlantic world's history to that which took place around the world's other ocean basins. 30

1. Brief references to tea and its association with sugar and industrialization can be found in David S. Landes , The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York, 1999) , esp. 226, 426, 446. See also John Griffiths , Tea: The Drink That Changed the World (London: Andre Deutsch, 2008) .

2. A perfect example of this point can be found in Thomas Benjamin , The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Their Shared History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 528–9 .

3. I realize that this will be a somewhat contentious point, but I stand by it. The general point can be seen in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole's   Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) , and more recently in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan's edited collection, Atlantic History: A Critical Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) . The role of Africa is peripheral to much of this Atlantic history, except as it impacted slavery in the Americas. Scholars of African societies have responded with their own work. See, for example, John Thornton , Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Joseph C. Miller , Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1800 (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988) .

4. See, for example, the work of Mark Kurlansky , A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny (Reading, Mass.: Da Capo, 1992) and Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Penguin, 1998). Also see the important work by Sidney Mintz , Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985) ; Mintz is not a historian at all, but an anthropologist.

This can certainly be easily demonstrated, for it is the way in which Greene and Morgan organized their recent Atlantic History . The essays turn around what seems an old-fashioned idea: that of a Portuguese Atlantic, or a Dutch Atlantic. In short, this totally obscures a basic point; people across the Atlantic, then as now, did not solely interact with those in their own national territory, even though it was the way in which their European states intended them to act. Moreover, this approach also fails the world historian's relevance test, in that what happened in the Atlantic world as a single unit directly bears on what is happening in today's globalizing world.

6. In Greene and Morgan, J. H. Elliot's   Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006) is regularly referred to in these terms by multiple authors: see esp. 10, 57, 124, 309–10. The work is significant, but only because it accomplishes one part of what Atlantic history ought to do, and that is make broader arguments than the colonies of one country would otherwise generate.

See, for example, Philip D. Morgan and Jack P. Greene, ‘Introduction: The Present State of Atlantic History,’ in Atlantic History , esp. 18–21. The authors recognize the significance of this, even as they are aware that the field itself has not yet progressed there.

8. See J. R. McNeill , ‘The End of the Old Atlantic World: America, Africa, Europe, 1770–1888,’ in Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus to Abolition, 1492–1888 (New York: Routledge, 1992) , 245–68.

9. For a brief example of this, see Peter A. Coclanis , ‘Beyond Atlantic History,’ in Morgan and Greene, eds., Atlantic History , 337–56 .

10. See Benjamin, Atlantic World , and Douglas R. Egerton et al. , The Atlantic World, 1400–1888 (New York: Harlan Davidson, 2007) .

11. Ivan Van Sertima , They Came before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (New York: Random House, 1976) . This in no way negates the idea that history did not exist within the various groups of people who lived in Atlantic societies, but it is their interaction with the ocean that must determine considering something Atlantic history.

12. See, for example, Alfred Crosby , The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973) and, for examples on the literature on demographic disaster, Noble David Cook , Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook , The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1963) .

13. Philip D. Curtin , The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) .

14. Eric Williams , Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) ; also see the debate that Seymour Drescher had with Williams in Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977) and Robin Blackburn's excellent series on Atlantic slavery, abolition, profitability and industrialization in The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997)   and The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988). There is a large debate about the exact correlation between slavery, profitability, abolition, and industrialization around the Atlantic world. That debate is best explored by those who are most interested in it.

15. For a brief, and thoroughly depressing, examination of these subjects, see John R. McNeill , Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 2000) .

16. See, for example, Alfred W. Crosby , Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) ; John R. McNeill , Mosquito Empires: Ecology, Epidemics, War and Revolutions in the Great Caribbean, 1620–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) ; and Richard Sheridan , Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) .

17. Paul Gilroy , The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) , esp. chapters 5 and 6 .

18. For an example of this kind of work, see Alan L. Karras , Sojourners in the Sun: Scots Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740–1820 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992) . For another kind of approach see Bernard Bailyn , Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1986) and Alison Games , Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) . All of this work is nevertheless incomplete; a fuller synthesis is clearly required.

19. See Edmund Morgan's ‘The Labor Problem at Jamestown,’ American Historical Review 76: 3 (1971), 595–611 , as well as his American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1975). Also see Richard S. Dunn , Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1972) . Others have done a bit of work on this in other areas: for example, see Ida Altman and James Horn , eds., ‘To Make America:’ European Emigration in the Early Modern Period, (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1991) .

Indeed, this is exactly one of Amy Turner Bushnell's main points in ‘Indigenous America and the Limits of the Atlantic World,’ in Morgan and Greene, eds., Atlantic History , 191–222. Just because the internal migration did not take place across an ocean that does not mean the Atlantic did not affect the internal migration. There is, therefore, room in the national histories of large territories, such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and the United States, for such migration studies to get connected to the Atlantic's processes, if they were, in fact, actually connected to them at the time.

21. This is an argument that was first made in Patrick Manning's S lavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) . It has since been taken up elsewhere but not as widely, in my opinion, as the idea merits. Cf. Walter Rodney , How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1981) .

I have discussed this in greater length in Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), esp. chapter 2.

23. See Marcus Rediker , Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon, 2004) , and Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

24 The best recent treatment of this kind of problem is Lauren A. Benton , Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and her article ‘Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the origins of ocean regionalism,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 47: 4 (2005), 700–24. My own work on smuggling attempts to build upon this: Karras, Smuggling .

25. For one example, see Nancy M. Farriss , Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) . For another, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall , Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1992) .

26. Some of this is discussed in Olaudah Equiano , The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African, ed. by Paul Edwards (New York: Harlow, 1989) . Other editions cover the same territory, and explore the connections between the anti-slavery movements in Britain and the colonization of Sierra Leone. Also see Alexander X. Byrd , Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2008) .

27. One example is Stephen A. Fortune's   Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650–1750 (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1984) ; another is Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan , eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) .

28. For one example, see John Lewis Gaddis , The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005) . Another could be found in Stewart Patrick , Best Laid Plans: The Origins of American Multilateralism and the Dawn of the Cold War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009) . Also see Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts , eds., The Atlantic World, 1450–2000 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2008) . This work is notable for pushing the Atlantic world into the twentieth century.

This is the argument that Peter Coclanis has made in ‘Beyond Atlantic History’ and elsewhere, and it is one that needs to be addressed for earlier periods. Even so, it is clear that the Atlantic world in the twentieth century was connected to non-Atlantic regions, such as Asia and, in terms of geopolitics of the Cold War, Russia.

30. See, for example, Jerry H. Bentley , ‘Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,’ The Geographical Review , 89 (April 1999), 215–24 . Also see Kären Wigen , ‘Cartographies of Connection: Ocean Maps as Metaphors of Interarea History,’ in Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Anand A. Yang, eds., Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2005), 150–66 .

Bailyn, Bernard . Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of North America . New York: Vintage, 1986 .

Benton, Lauren A.   Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 .

Blackburn, Robin . The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 . London: Verso, 1997 .

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Coclanis, Peter A. ‘ Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?, ’ The William and Mary Quarterly 63: 4 ( 2006 ).

Curtin, Philip D.   The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 .

Elliott, J. H.   Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492–1830 . New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007 .

Games, Alison . ‘ Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities, ’ American Historical Review 111: 3 ( 2006 ), 741–57.

Greene, Jack P. , and Philip D. Morgan , eds. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal . New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 .

Karras, Alan L.   Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History . Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009 .

McNeill, John R.   Mosquito Empires: Ecology, Epidemics, War, and Revolutions in the Great Caribbean, 1620–1920 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010 .

Miller, Joseph . Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade . Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997 .

Mintz, Sidney W.   Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History . New York: Penguin, 1985 .

Rediker, Marcus . Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age . New York: Beacon, 2004 .

Thornton, John . African and Africans in the Formation of the Atlantic World . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 .

Williams, Eric . Capitalism and Slavery . Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1944 .

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Ocean Currents and Climate

Scientists across the globe are trying to figure out why the ocean is becoming more violent and what, if anything, can be done about it. Ocean currents, including the ocean conveyor belt, play a key role in determining how the ocean distributes heat energy throughout the planet, thereby regulating and stabilizing climate patterns.

Earth Science, Oceanography

Mass flows of water, or currents , are essential to understanding how heat energy moves between Earth’s water bodies, landmasses, and atmosphere. The ocean covers 71 percent of the planet and holds 97 percent of its water, making the ocean a key factor in the storage and transfer of heat energy across the globe. The movement of this heat through local and global ocean currents affects the regulation of local weather conditions and temperature extremes, stabilization of global climate patterns, cycling of gases, and delivery of nutrients and larva to marine ecosystems.

Ocean currents are located at the ocean surface and in deep water below 300 meters (984 feet). They can move water horizontally and vertically, which occurs on local and global scales. The ocean has an interconnected current, or circulation, system powered by wind, tides, Earth’s rotation ( Coriolis effect ), the sun ( solar energy ), and water density differences. The topography and shape of ocean basins and nearby landmasses also influence ocean currents. These forces and physical characteristics affect the size, shape, speed, and direction of ocean currents.

Surface ocean currents can occur on local and global scales and are typically wind-driven, resulting in horizontal and vertical water movement. Horizontal surface currents that are local and typically short term include rip currents , longshore currents, and tidal currents. In upwelling currents, vertical water movement and mixing brings cold, nutrient-rich water toward the surface while pushing warmer, less dense water downward, where it condenses and sinks. This creates a cycle of upwelling and downwelling. Prevailing winds, ocean-surface currents, and the associated mixing influence the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of the ocean, as well as global climate.

Deep ocean currents are density -driven and differ from surface currents in scale, speed, and energy. Water density is affected by the temperature, salinity (saltiness), and depth of the water. The colder and saltier the ocean water, the denser it is. The greater the density differences between different layers in the water column, the greater the mixing and circulation. Density differences in ocean water contribute to a global-scale circulation system, also called the global conveyor belt.

The global conveyor belt includes both surface and deep ocean currents that circulate the globe in a 1,000-year cycle. The global conveyor belt’s circulation is the result of two simultaneous processes: warm surface currents carrying less dense water away from the Equator toward the poles, and cold deep ocean currents carrying denser water away from the poles toward the Equator. The ocean’s global circulation system plays a key role in distributing heat energy, regulating weather and climate, and cycling vital nutrients and gases.

• The volume of water transported by the global conveyor belt is equal to 100 Amazon Rivers or 16 times the flow of all the world’s rivers combined.
• It would take a single water molecule approximately 1,000 years to complete one full cycle of the global conveyor belt. In that time, the water molecule would travel through the waters of all the major ocean basins: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, and Arctic.
• Climate change leading to increases in ocean temperatures, evaporation of seawater, and glacial and sea ice melting could create an influx of warm freshwater onto the ocean surface. This would further block the formation of sea ice and disrupt the sinking of denser cold, salty water. These events could slow or even stop the ocean conveyor belt, which would result in global climate changes that could include drastic decreases in Europe’s temperatures due to a disruption of the Gulf Stream.

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• Published: 20 September 2023

Assessing the global ocean science community: understanding international collaboration, concerns and the current state of ocean basin research

• Ross W. K. Potter   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1338-5910 1 &
• Brodie C. Pearson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0202-0481 2  

npj Ocean Sustainability volume  2 , Article number:  14 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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• Ocean sciences
• Scientific community

Web of Science data covering 2000–2020 was used to analyse trends in ocean research, specific to the five ocean basins (Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, Southern), to investigate its state and any underlying concerns for addressing UN Decade of Ocean Science goals and UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 “Life Below Water”. Though Atlantic research has dominated, Pacific research is nearing parity with its neighbour due to significant output growth by China and is soon likely to become the most researched basin. International collaboration, built around G7 countries and China, has increased by 10 percentage points since 2000 but research remains mainly domestic. Outside these countries, there has been growth in collaborations involving Small Island Developing States and a doubling of South America’s global share of ocean basin papers. However, sub-Saharan African research output has not mirrored this expansion. Further growth could be catalysed by increased support for educational efforts and infrastructure development, particularly given the highly specialised and institutionally driven nature of ocean basin research.

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Atlantic Ocean science diplomacy in action: the pole-to-pole All Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance

An evolution towards scientific consensus for a sustainable ocean future

A blueprint for integrating scientific approaches and international communities to assess basin-wide ocean ecosystem status

Introduction.

The fate of our Earth is tied inextricably to our oceans. Given the toll that humans have exacted on the marine environment within a relative handful of decades 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , the need for detailed, globally networked, scientific scrutiny of our ocean basins has never been more acute. Oceans are now under even greater pressure due to the human-accelerated changes in climate and ocean systems as well as the rapidly growing blue economy 5 , 6 , which supports tens of millions of jobs in sectors including fishing, tourism and transport and has a GDP of trillions of dollars 7 .

The intersection between these areas motivates the UN Decade of Ocean Science 8 (UNDOS) projected to run through 2030, with the mission of ensuring sustainable ocean development using transformative ocean science. The accomplishment of these outcomes will require a global community of ocean scientists to work together to both quantify the global oceans and develop region-specific knowledge. There is, however, a severe imbalance between countries with developed ocean science programmes (e.g., G7 countries) and those most affected by ocean changes, which tend to be Small Island Developing States 9 (SIDS) as well as larger continental countries that have limited resources for adaptation, for example, countries in Africa and Southeast Asia. Many of these countries are heavily reliant on the blue economy for their livelihood and growth, and additional factors such as small land mass, remoteness, fragile ecosystems and dependence on foreign imports increase their vulnerability to ocean changes. Island countries with a low GDP per capita, high population density and/or a long coastline, such as Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, have been identified as the least resilient to ocean changes 10 .

UNDOS is one of several programmes that fall within the UNs 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 11 , the core of which are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): a set of seventeen call-to-action goals to produce a more sustainable future for all Earth by 2030 12 . Sustainable Development Goal 14 “Life Below Water” deals specifically with oceans to protect and manage this heavily abused resource more effectively. SDG 14 has several defined targets including “(14.7) [increasing] the economic benefits to Small Island Developing States and least developed countries from the sustainable use of marine resources”.

The global state of ocean science has previously been summarised by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 13 , as part of the UNs 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Another report, by IOC-UNESCO 14 , was published in anticipation of the UNDOS launch, as well as a major integrated assessment of world oceans 15 at environmental, economic, and social levels. Additionally, two UN ocean conferences in New York City (2017) and Lisbon (2022) to mobilise action on SDG 14 and UNDOS, respectively, and to present innovative solutions have taken place thus far; an assessment of the impact of voluntary commitments from the 2017 conference has also been published 16 .

These UN reports used various degrees of bibliometrics (“the application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other forms of written communication” 17 ) and scientometrics (“quantitative aspects of science and scientific research” 18 ) to understand the global publication patterns of ocean science. More academic work has continued this approach, including a study of publications funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Ocean Exploration and Research 19 ; a comparison of different countries’ contributions to the International Ocean Discovery Programme 20 ; a survey of research activity in oceanography and marine geoscience since the end of the Second World War 21 ; and an analysis of ocean remote-sensing research over the last three decades 22 . Papers serve as a proxy for activity in terms of research output and the sweep and depth of research themes illustrate one of the benefits of scientometric analysis: a top-down view derived from analysis of the global research literature offers insights that are beyond even the knowledge and experience of researchers themselves.

This work provides scientometric analysis of global ocean basin science literature across the 21st century, to quantify the structure of the ocean science community and identify how to increase the sustainability and global connectedness of this community. Ocean science represents a broad collection of research topics, which range from the biological, chemical, geological, and physical aspects of oceanography to the various human-ocean interacting systems (politics, economics, health, archaeology, engineering etc.) and various multi-disciplinary research amongst these realms. We identify the number and geographical (basin-level) focus of published ocean science papers (over 100,000) at an institutional and international level, and how this has changed between 2000 and 2020. We map international collaborative networks and identify which basin-/country-specific research is reliant on a small number of research institutes, or countries, with significant infrastructure. Together, these results could inform scientists and funding agencies in targeting effort and resources to create a more sustainable and diverse global ocean science network.

Ocean basin output

The totality of ocean basin research has increased since 2000 at a greater rate than total research indexed within the entire Web of Science (three times compared to 2.5). The Atlantic Ocean is the most studied basin over the entire period (Fig. 1 ; 47,368 articles overall), though its relative share has decreased from almost 50 to 40%. This lost share is primarily due to a rapid increase in Pacific Ocean studies (40,275 articles), which have seen a fourfold increase in output over the period (all other basins increased threefold) and is now nearing parity with the Atlantic study numbers. Indian Ocean research has accounted for around 9–14% of output over the period (11,079 articles) and in the most recent year published ~1000 papers, up from ~500 papers in 2010 and ~270 in 2000. Research output in each of the polar (Arctic and Southern) oceans has remained around 5% of total output throughout the period and now number around 300 to 400 papers per year (totalling 5185 and 4008 articles, respectively, across the entire analysis period).

Top panel presents absolute output (i.e., articles) and the bottom panel presents relative output (i.e., percentage).

Country output

At the country level, USA is the greatest producer of ocean basin research (Fig. 2 ), having more than doubled its output since 2000. However, as with the Atlantic, its relative share over the period has decreased from almost 40% in the early 2000s to 25% by 2020. Output is dominated by G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, USA; Italy ranked 15 th in publication output), however, their relative share of papers have either stagnated or decreased. Conversely, China (including Macau and Hong Kong) has rapidly increased its output, particularly since 2010, surpassing United Kingdom as the second-largest producer in 2011, and has consequently seen its relative share of papers increase from only a few percent in 2000 to almost 20% in 2020, ranking only behind USA. This growth is largely due to its increasing focus on the Pacific, where its share has increased from about 5% in 2000 to over 40% in 2020 (Supplementary Fig. 1 ), making it the largest contributor for the most recent year of analysis. USA, on the other hand, has seen its Pacific share decrease from 45% in 2000 to 30% by 2020. Though less significant than China, Brazil’s relative share of overall output also increased over the period from less than 2% to above 6%. This growth is largely attributable to its increasing focus on Atlantic Ocean research, where its output share increased from ~4% in 2000 to 13% in 2020, ranking it second behind USA in contribution (Supplementary Fig. 1 ). Year-on-year data is aggregated in Table 1 to illustrate the overall distribution of research by ocean using the G20 countries and five comparators, in terms of research output and GERD (gross domestic expenditure on research and development; Supplementary Table 1 ), with prominent coastal locations. Ocean basin research output of USA stands at about a third of world output (slightly more than its world share of Web of Science articles over the same period), for all but the Indian Ocean. China’s output is generally below its world share (about 12%), except in the Pacific, where its share is greater and second to USA. The G7 countries of Germany, France, and UK have a sizeable share of output across all oceans.

Top panel presents absolute output (i.e., articles) and the bottom panel presents relative output (i.e., percentage) for the top 10 most productive countries by publication count over the period 2000–2020.

Russia holds the largest share of Arctic research (30%), just ahead of USA (29%). Given the length of Russian coastline on the Arctic this is not surprising. However, Russia does not contribute much to research on any other ocean. Canada and Norway have a similar share of Arctic research (about 19%) which may be explained by extensive research networks and ocean proximity. In the Atlantic, behind USA, United Kingdom has the highest share (14%). Norway, Germany, France, Canada, and Brazil have a similar output (around 10%) demonstrating an Americas-European research dominance in this basin. Pacific research is dominated by its proximal, large research economies: USA, China, Japan, Australia, Mexico and Canada. Each command has at least a 5% share. United Kingdom and France’s shares are similar to that of Russia (about 4%).

There is little remarkable about India claiming the largest share for its namesake ocean basin (26%). France holds a 9% share, which is greater than established research economies that are far closer geographically, such as China (8%) and Australia (6%). USA, geographically remote from the Indian Ocean, nonetheless has a share of 20%. Iran (9%), Saudi Arabia (7%) and Egypt (6%) exhibit a focus on the Indian Ocean. Year-on-year, Iran and Saudi Arabia have increased their Indian Ocean research programmes at a similar rate, with both having a near zero share in 2000 and a roughly 13% share by 2020, ranking them behind only India, USA and China, having substantially surpassed countries including Germany, Japan and Australia (Supplementary Fig. 1 ).

The Southern Ocean is the only basin where research is not dominated by proximal countries. USA (37%) and United Kingdom (22%) have the largest shares of Southern Ocean research, despite their Northern hemisphere locations. Other countries with notable research shares are Germany (18%), Australia (17%), France (10%), Italy (8%), and New Zealand (7%); Norway (4%), Chile (2%) and Argentina (less than 1%) have more modest shares. These high rates of research output appear to be linked to the Southern Ocean research infrastructure of these countries and specific institutions (all the listed countries have at least one research base in Antarctica). Many of these countries also have territorial claims in Antarctica, with the notable exception of Germany which has the Southern Ocean as its largest relative contribution of any ocean basin. This is mainly due to the work of the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Sciences (see ‘Institutional output’ section, Table 3 ).

Despite the African continent’s extensive coastline on the Indian and Atlantic basins, only two African countries have a significant share of research output in any ocean basin: Egypt’s 5% in the Indian Ocean and South Africa’s 3% in both the Indian and Southern Oceans.

International collaboration network

The two largest countries by research output, USA and China, collaborate with international partners on just under 50 and 40%, respectively, of their total ocean output (see Supplementary Table 1 for all countries’ collaboration percentages). Both figures are far higher than their respective average academic collaboration rates 23 . G7 European countries average around 70% collaboration, as do Australia and Egypt. However, the large, populous G20 countries of Russia, Brazil and India have collaboration rates of 35 to 40%. Conversely, the G20 countries of South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia have collaboration rates of around 80%. Iran has the lowest collaboration rate of all countries at 31%. Of the internationally collaborative papers, two-thirds are international bilateral; 19% are international trilateral; and 10% involve four or more countries. Of all ocean basin science papers, the percentage of internationally collaborative papers increased from 27% in 2000 to 34% in 2010 and to 36% in 2020.

The global ocean research collaboration network is illustrated in Fig. 3 for country pairs with at least 100 collaborative papers (roughly five collaborative papers per year). These collaborations represent all types of international collaboration, ranging from bilateral to highly (>10 countries) and even hyper (>30 countries) multilateral collaborations. The network corroborates the previously described results, with USA the largest collaborator amongst a central Americas-European nexus containing countries such as United Kingdom, Germany and Canada. Around this network is a secondary group of European countries (e.g., Norway, Spain), including the landlocked countries of Austria and Switzerland, as well as Brazil and an Asian network, where China is the central partner.

Node size is scaled by the absolute number of collaborative articles (USA largest node with 16,483 collaborative articles in total); line thickness is scaled by the number of collaborative articles between country pairs. G7 country nodes are coloured red; South American countries purple; African countries cyan; SIDS (Small Island Developing States) green; other countries yellow.

A third, peripheral, layer of this network encompasses countries from all continents, including SIDS. For example, collaborations of New Caledonia with USA (136), Australia (135), and France (242, which is 61% of all New Caledonia’s collaborations); Fiji with Australia (137, or 60% of Fiji’s collaborations); Bermuda with USA (159, or 87% of Bermuda’s collaborations), demonstrate the global nature of ocean basin research. Singapore, also a SIDS, has a strong collaboration network with its East Asian neighbours albeit with a lower collaboration rate (40%) than many other SIDS (generally >50%). Countries from North Africa (Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia) are also represented in the network but there is a notable absence of countries from sub-Saharan Africa, save for South Africa.

Figure 3 will tend to highlight countries that have a substantial output (i.e., greater chances for collaboration); over 100 countries produced less than 100 articles (Supplementary Table 1 ). Lowering the collaboration threshold to at least 15 collaborations between country pairs, therefore, reveals the presence of a far larger network (Supplementary Fig. 2 ) illustrating sub-Saharan African contributions to the Atlantic (e.g., Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Namibia, Senegal) and the Indian (Kenya) oceans; contributions from SIDS in the Caribbean (e.g., St. Kitts and Nevis) and Pacific (Vanuatu, Palau) also appear at this level (see Supplementary Fig. 3 for individual ocean networks). Though these collaborations may represent a significant percentage of a country’s ocean basin output they are, ultimately, small in absolute terms.

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and coastal countries

As noted previously, island and coastal countries are particularly vulnerable to changing ocean systems. Figure 4 illustrates the evolving global share of ocean basin papers for South and Central American, as well as African, coastal countries and SIDS (countries are listed in Supplementary Table 1 ). South America has more than doubled its global share over the period from 2000 to 2020; no other region is comparable. This growth is largely due to an increase in the research activity of Brazil, as shown in Fig. 2 . Without Brazil’s contributions, South America, Africa and SIDS have similar initial evolution over the period, all starting with a ~ 2% global share and increasing steadily. However, in the last five to ten years, South America’s global share (reaching 5% in 2019) has distanced itself from SIDS and Africa, whose global shares appear to have plateaued at around 3%. Central America’s share has remained constant over the entire period around (1%).

South America data are presented with and without Brazil. See Supplementary Table 1 for a list of countries for each region.

To gain further insight into the geographic sub-group trends, Fig. 5 shows cumulative density plots conveying the fraction of countries (y-axis) within each geographic sub-group that were below a given publication count (x-axis) within two six-year periods (2000–2005 and 2015–2020). For example, in the period 2000–2005, the 50% of South American countries with the lowest publication counts produced ~10 total articles. By 2015–2020, the 50% of South American countries with the lowest publication counts (not necessarily the same countries) produced ~100 total articles.

Black lines show the global distribution of national publication counts for these periods, and coloured lines show specific sub-groups of countries. Lines to the left of the global distribution indicate that low-publication count countries in that sub-group are more prevalent than in the global dataset. Steeper lines indicate a larger number of that sub-group’s countries were responsible for producing a particular publication count (x-axis), and the x-axis value at which the lines reach the top of the figure indicates the publication count of the most research-productive country(ies) in the sub-region for that period.

The global publication count (i.e., across all countries) has increased over the past 20 years (2000–2005 vs. 2015–2020). The publication counts for the geographical sub-groups have increased at a faster relative (percentage) rate than the global counts over this period, as seen by the rightward shift of all lines, relative to the black line, in the more recent time period. For most regions, this increased publication count has moved absolute publication counts of both high- and low- publication-count countries closer to the global distribution. In South America, the growth in publication count distribution has grown to exceed the global average for almost the entire range of the plot (its largest producer, Brazil, published less than the largest global producers). The publication counts of the smallest producers in Central and South America are now high relative to the global smallest producers (10 vs. one research paper output).

Institutional output

Analysis at the institutional level by ocean basin (Table 2 ) permits a more granular analysis of research, providing a sub-national perspective as well as context for national trends. From an ocean basin viewpoint, research on the polar (Southern and Arctic) oceans is dominated by a few institutions with >10% contributions to the global literature. This is indicative of the infrastructure required to conduct in situ ocean science in these remote and challenging environments. The most diversified basin is the Atlantic, where only three institutes contribute more than 3% of global research.

From an institutional/national perspective, Table 2 elucidates the leading role of specific institutes and countries for every ocean basin. Arctic Ocean research is dominated by four institutions across Russia and Germany, with the Russian Academy of Sciences contributing over 20% of Arctic research. At the other pole, Southern Ocean research is dominated by three institutes in the United Kingdom and two in Germany. Interestingly, the same German institutes lead research at both poles (the Helmholtz Association and the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research; the former also contributes significantly to Atlantic Ocean research) while the Russian and United Kingdom’s institutes have dominance at one pole or the other.

Institutionally, the largest producer of Indian Ocean research is CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) in India, which covers a wide spectrum of scientific fields, accounting for 8% of output. Indian institutions (mostly government) are four of the top five largest producers, having shares of ~4.5–7%; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) of France has a share of almost 6%. In the Pacific, the institutions with the highest output are from the two main research-producing countries: USA and China. While the USA produced the largest country share of Pacific Ocean research over most of the analysis period (Supplementary Fig. 1 ), the Chinese Academy of Sciences is the largest institutional contributor in the Pacific, with an 11% share; NOAA has a share of ~6%. Research in the Atlantic appears more diversified. CNRS is the largest producer but accounts for less than 5.5% of output. One university, Université Bretagne Loire, accounts for nearly 3% of Atlantic output.

Most of the top-producing institutions across all oceans are government or research institutes, with a relatively small number of universities. Government or research institutes also play a significant role in national-level research output (Table 3 ) where 12 institutions account for over 60% of their country’s ocean basin research (when considering countries with at least 100 publications). This list does however highlight that less developed research economies, which have a limited research capacity, are more likely to have their research concentrated in these institutes. For example, the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources accounts for 96% of Greenland’s ocean research output (though the country has only a handful of research institutions) and the various branches of the University of the West Indies account for 80% of Jamaica’s ocean basin research output. The most notable exception to this trend is Russia, where the Russian Academy of Sciences, which leads in Arctic Ocean research output (Table 2 ), is responsible for ~74% of Russia’s nearly 4500 papers. There is one comparator to this, CNRS produced almost 4800 papers, accounting for 61% of France’s total output. Other national academies in more populous countries have a notable proportion of their ocean basin research output: the Czech (53%), Polish (49%) and Ukraine (48%) Academies. The list also includes several SIDS institutions, including those from Jamaica, Singapore and New Caledonia.

The Atlantic and Pacific basins take the largest shares of ocean basin article output, consistent with them being the most voluminous basins and their proximity to well-established large research economies. China is leading a rapid growth in Pacific Ocean publications, which could see Pacific research surpass Atlantic in the coming years. China’s interest in the Pacific is likely manifold (science, political, technological), but its growth (in absolute and relative terms) mirrors that in other disciplines 24 , 25 , 26 . Though not on China’s scale, notable increases from near-zero global shares for Middle Eastern countries (Iran, Saudi Arabia) in the Indian Ocean could also signal multiple interests and motivations. Specific motivations would probably be elucidated by a topical analysis of research, which is outside the scope of this work.

The increase in international collaboration (27% in 2000 to 36% in 2020) for ocean basin research mirrors that of all research fields 27 . Ocean basin research is globally connected with the G7 countries in North America and Europe, as well as China, acting as regional hubs for other G20 countries as well as countries in North Africa, Central America and, importantly, SIDS such as Fiji, New Caledonia and Singapore, which are literally at the forefront of the ocean’s impact.

Collaboration can bring numerous benefits and these, as well as policy implications, have been discussed copiously 28 , 29 , 30 . Collaboration is a particularly important element of ocean science research, where the infrastructural needs to conduct research require significant resources. International collaborations are often the only way for researchers to access this required infrastructure. Based on these results, collaborations are likely driven by the proximity of well-established large research economies, with Australia being a collaborator hub for Pacific countries and USA for Atlantic countries. However, collaboration is not always effective and equitable, and can preclude positive outcomes 31 . Physical distance can negatively affect collaboration activities 30 as it requires additional costs to bridge the distance (and potentially time zones) as well as overcome institutional differences 32 , 33 , 34 and can increase conflict 32 . Furthermore, these costs tend to reduce the quality of communication, coordination and monitoring 34 . Consequently, some collaborations can create a closed-shop elite innovation network, where only specific institutions (and therefore countries) benefit, widening the gap between institutions 35 .

Collaborations are also likely built through common language from historical ties such as Spain with Latin America 36 and France and UK with African countries 37 , 38 . Other factors include regional partnerships such as Malaysia and Singapore, both part of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), and the Nordic countries as part of NordForsk (a body providing funding and facilitating for Nordic cooperation on research and research infrastructure).

Despite the global connectedness of ocean sciences, Sub-Saharan Africa (bar South Africa) is a notable exception in this global network despite its extensive coastline and historical relationships with numerous well-developed research economies. Many African countries are reliant on the ocean and its resources, so would be expected to have a greater presence in the global network. The lack of sub-Saharan African collaboration is likely due to three related factors: low research output, low GERD, and limited ocean science infrastructure. Other factors impacting research, and likely contributing to low collaboration, include unwillingness to collaborate 38 , a low number of researchers compounded by brain drain 39 , the vocational nature of universities 40 , an incomplete and under-resourced national institutional framework 40 , 41 , and poor internet and mobile data access 42 .

Research in sub-Saharan Africa is dominated by South Africa, which accounted for two-thirds of the region’s output. Outside of this, Kenya was the largest producing nation but with only 81 ocean basin science articles—a little over four articles a year on average over the period in question; 40 countries produced <50 papers each. This small article count limits opportunities for collaboration in terms of both research and absolute output. Even intra-African collaboration is sparse or haphazard, something that has been noted to affect other research areas of concern such as greenhouse gases 43 . This is further evidenced by Kapuka et al. 44 who found geographical imbalance and inadequate use of advanced methodologies restricted climate change research opportunities in southern Africa (countries below a latitude of approximately −6°). Outside of Africa, the USA is the largest collaborator for South Africa and Kenya (of countries producing >40 papers). France is generally the main collaborator for African countries, and this is likely due to historical relationships as noted above.

In 2014, the African Union Commission 45 agreed to invest 1% of GDP in research and development (GERD). However, the latest available data (Supplementary Table 1 ) suggest no country has met this. North African countries generally have the highest GERD—Egypt has almost reached this target (0.96%)—while values in Sub-Saharan Africa are generally <0.6% with Kenya’s 0.69% being the largest (Supplementary Table 1 ). Consequently, many countries do not have the funds available to invest in research and development. This may explain the large imbalance in ocean basin science research output between North and sub-Saharan Africa.

Lo Bue et al. 46 describe the importance of research infrastructures for extreme ocean events (cyclones, tsunamis, etc.) but many of their arguments can also be applied to continuous processes. Namely, events or processes generally exceed the study capabilities of a single country, requiring strong collaborations which likely include complex equipment and facilities, broad expertise, and high-quality data over a globally distributed network. Lo Bue et al. 46 note that large observational gaps, especially in Africa (as well as South America and South-East Asia), remain. Underinvestment in infrastructure across Africa is common 29 . South Africa, the largest African contributor, offers examples of infrastructure that will strengthen and improve its research: the shallow Marine and Coastal Research Infrastructure 47 and a concerted effort to develop capacity for deep sea research 48 .

The African continent is, however, aware of its research challenges and limitations in general 49 and in relation to ocean science 50 , such as limited marine and coastal ecosystems mapping, insufficient fundamental knowledge of species diversity and taxonomy, and ineffective marine ecosystem governance. This is evidenced by generally sparse African involvement in, and therefore progress toward achieving, UNDOS programmes, with none led by African institutions 50 . However, these are being addressed as part of Africa’s roadmap built around UNDOS 50 which consists of nine priority future Decade Actions including Sustainable Ocean Management, Unlocking the Blue Carbon Potential, and Ocean Observations and Forecasting Systems. Other African Union frameworks such as Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want 51 , Africa’s Integrated Maritime Strategy (2050 AIM Strategy) 52 , and Africa Blue Economy Strategy 53 and 2015–2025 Decade of African Seas and Oceans will also support the development of the ocean economy and the achievement of SDG targets.

Despite its current limitations, Africa’s long-term vision is to become a more independent research hub in terms of finances and resources through improved governance and intra-Africa collaboration 50 . Educational and early career development programmes such as Global Ocean Corps and Conveyer 54 , which aims to sustain “long-term education research collaborations between scientists from under-resourced nations and higher resourced nations” and the related COESSING 55 (Coastal Ocean Environment Summer School in Nigeria and Ghana), a summer school to educate ocean scientists in Africa and build collaborations with USA and other international scientists, will help this goal. For now, however, proactivity from larger research economies may be needed to better entrain low research output countries into the ocean-science fold; financial and social support for such activity could be stimulated by SDGs that target international progress or collaboration (e.g., SDG 14 targets 56 14.2, 14.3, 14.5, 14.7, 14.a, 14.c).

Despite the challenges described above for ocean science research, Africa’s global share of papers did show a modest increase (Fig. 4 ). This appears to be driven by a rapid increase in publication rate from countries in the middle of the ocean science production rankings for the continent (Fig. 5 ) while the increases in low- and high-producing countries have generally followed global output patterns.

South America has seen a significant increase (~150%) in its share of global output. This is largely due to the growth of output by Brazil. Given that Brazil has a population (~215 M) and GERD (1.21%, Supplementary Table 1 ) over four and two-and-a-half times bigger than the next largest countries (Colombia and Uruguay, respectively) this is not unexpected. However, South America’s global share increased 100% even when excluding Brazil. This growth has been particularly rapid in the last five years and stands in contrast to the lower growth rate of African ocean basin research. South American countries (excluding Brazil) do have a slightly higher average GERD (0.36%) than sub-Saharan Africa (0.30; Supplementary Table 1 ) but they generally have lower levels of international collaboration (35–40%) and fewer researchers per million inhabitants (Colombia had only 88 in 2017; South Africa, which produced a similar number of papers, had 484 in 2019; Supplementary Table 1 ). Colombia, Chile, and Argentina each produced over 1000 papers over the period (Brazil produced >5000) while only South Africa produced >1000 in sub-Saharan Africa. Seven of the eight South American countries producing >40 papers (in fact all eight produced >100 papers) have the USA as their main international collaborator, in contrast to African countries. Cumulatively, South America’s output grew faster than the global distribution between 2015–2020, particularly its lower paper-producing countries, which far exceeded the output rates of the lowest-producing countries globally (Fig. 5 ).

The relatively rapid growth of ocean basin research output in South America compared to Africa may be due in part to its slightly higher average GERD and its collaborations with American institutions that may, but not always, provide access to infrastructure. Consequently, South America has improved its global share despite economic benchmarks being similar to or below those of Sub-Saharan Africa. Closer links between science and diplomacy 57 as well as policy 58 and greater support for early career scientists 59 may further strengthen ocean science in South America. Other initiatives, such as MetaDocencia 60 which aims to support scientific and technical capacity in Spanish-speaking communities across the globe, particularly in South America, are also beneficial. These educational and early career development efforts should be paired with infrastructural development to advance and sustain international collaborative research communities. South America does both and has shown strong growth, while Africa has not had the infrastructural development.

SIDS’ global world share was greater than that of Africa from 2005–2012 but its stagnation, especially since 2015 suggests these countries, which are most vulnerable to ocean and climate change, have not substantially increased their output, relative to other regions since the introduction of SDGs. However, collaborations with SIDS are abundant with most having collaboration rates of >50% (i.e., most articles with authors from these states also involve international collaborators; Supplementary Table 1 ). GERD values are mainly absent but, from those available, SIDS (except for Singapore: 1.89%), are comparable to both South American and sub-Saharan African (<0.5%) countries. This suggests that collaboration is needed to help these countries address SDG 14 goals.

Tables 2 and 3 illustrate that ocean basin research is mainly conducted by research institutes, national academies, or other governmental organisations. This is likely due to the highly specialised resource-intensive nature of ocean research. For example, the physical challenges when observing remote ocean regions, deep below the surface, or in challenging conditions (e.g., polar oceans) require cutting-edge technology alongside expensive research vessels and associated costs (crew, land-side facilities, maintenance, etc.). Even in fields such as computational oceanography, where high-performance computing (HPC) systems are often used to simulate the ocean and analyse large datasets, the required HPC resources are usually organised at a national or institutional level. This creates an access barrier for ocean scientists from institutions and countries that do not have this expensive infrastructure. However, there are ongoing efforts to create open-source computational resources and data access for ocean and climate science, e.g., Pangeo 61 .

A good example of this resource-dependent output boost, as well as the economic cost of these resources, is the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research which is one of the leading contributors in the polar oceans. Though only founded in 1980, the institute has substantial infrastructure including shipping vessels, aircraft, laboratories, research stations and observatories to operate and conduct research in these regions. It is a member of the Helmholtz Association, the largest scientific organisation in Germany. The Association’s 2021 budget was €5.8B with 70% of funding sourced from Germany’s federal and state governments; the budget for earth and environment research, which covers the Alfred Wegener Institute’s studies, was over €700M 62 .

For comparison, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, accounted for 75% of Panama’s ocean basin research. The institute has existed in various forms since 1910 and has research facilities and field stations throughout the country with many located along the Panama Canal, providing easy access to the highly contrasting ecosystems in the Caribbean and Pacific. The institute’s operating budget was around $30 M (~€27.5 M) in 2018 63 The Tropical Research Institute is one of the Smithsonian’s research facilities; the Smithsonian’s federal funding for the 2021 fiscal year was $1B (about €900 M), which was 62% of its total funding 64 . In the Atlantic, the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, founded in 1903, has an ocean class vessel for research purposes. In 2021 it had a net position of $40 M, as well as investments of $20 M and endowments of $20M 65 .

Generally, the infrastructure or federal or private funding for in-depth ocean basin research is not available at an institutional level, as noted in relation to Africa earlier. Leveraging the relevant SDGs and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 66 (UNCLOS), particularly Part XIII Section 2 (which governs “Marine Scientific Research: International Cooperation”) should help unite priorities with development assistance. However, even where ocean policies are well developed, such as the South Pacific, knowledge and awareness of initiatives and investment related to SDG 14 are negligible; better coherency in policy and investment is needed to effectively address SDG goals 67 as well as responsible financial use 68 .

This paper’s focus has been the volume of publications indexed within the Web of Science. This journal citation database has traditionally favoured international and influential English-language journals over those of national importance published in local language journals (e.g., Spanish or Portuguese in Latin America 69 , 70 , 71 ). Consequently, Web of Science, and other major Global North journal citation databases, provide an incomplete representation of research systems in the Global South. Regional journal citation databases such as the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) 72 for Latin America and the African Journal OnLine (AJOL) in Africa give greater visibility to research from these regions. These regional journals also contain significant Open Access content further increasing visibility. Simard et al. 73 showed that sub-Saharan Africa publishes and cites Open Access papers at a higher rate than the rest of the world concluding this may be because article processing charges are normally waived for low-income countries.

A direct assessment on the impact of the ocean basin research analysed here is outside its remit. However, highly multilateral collaborative papers receive more citations 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 and, consequently, gain a higher Category Normalised Citation Impact (CNCI: citation counts normalised by year of publication, subject category, and document type 74 , 78 , 79 ). It is generally held that there is a correlation between citation counts and peer judgements of quality (i.e., higher citation counts are associated with better peer judgement) in science and technology fields 80 , 81 and that highly cited publications contribute significantly to academic knowledge 82 . The citation of an article is therefore an indication of that article’s influence. This implies that the multilateral collaborations highlighted in Fig. 3 , will be more influential than purely domestic output. However, when citations are additionally normalised by collaboration type (e.g., international bilateral papers are compared only to other international bilateral papers) domestic research can be shown to be more influential than some types of internationally collaborative research 78 , 79 .

Research leaders, funders and other decision-makers must account for the inequitable structure of the ocean science research community, particularly in the context of the UN Decade of Ocean Science and UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 “Life Below Water”. By quantifying the structure and evolution of this community since 2000, the results presented here can aid in decision-making, such as targeting effort and resources, to support the growth and success of the global ocean science community.

Data source and retrieval

This work expanded upon material originally presented in a Clarivate Global Research Report 83 . The Web of Science, including its Expanded API 84 , was used to retrieve research articles and their associated metadata (e.g., journal, authors, affiliations, abstract) published between 2000 and 2020, inclusive, using specific title and abstract term searches relevant to the five ocean basins—Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, Southern (e.g., Barents Sea, Bering Strait, Gulf of Mexico; see Supplementary Methods for full search criteria and the GitHub repository 85 for code). Terms had to appear in both the title and abstract of a document for its inclusion. This yielded a total dataset of ~106,000 articles with very high precision in terms of ocean basin-relevant documents. This was more valued than a larger (i.e., higher recall) less-specific dataset, such as using the Web of Science subject category “Oceanography” which returned ~124,000 articles for the same period. Consequently, this analysis excluded studies with global or coastal foci, as well as studies investigating general ocean processes rather than regions. Both small and large research economies contribute to these topics so, while these remain important ocean science topics, their exclusion from this study did not bias the ocean basin science dataset in terms of countries involved. The method of using specific term searches is somewhat similar to that used in the IOC-UNESCO report 14 though that study used Elsevier’s citation database Scopus and had a more general scope.

Data classification

Each document was assigned to one (or more) ocean basins based on the search term criteria, i.e., an article that included ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in its title and abstract was assigned as an Atlantic Ocean paper. Most papers (98%) were assigned to one basin, though 2% were assigned to two; 19 papers were assigned to three basins. Institutional and national affiliations were taken from article author metadata. Affiliations for all authors on any given publication were extracted and then deduplicated. An internationally collaborative article was defined as any article that had at least two different countries present in the deduplicated list, regardless of the number of authors (e.g., a single-author paper could be internationally collaborative). International collaboration counts for each country pair were calculated using the number of articles on which both countries were present, regardless of the presence of any additional countries. Consequently, when considering output on the individual country level, some articles were counted multiple times—once for each collaborating country. This was also true when considering output at the ocean basin level, as articles could be relevant (via the search terms) to multiple basins. Conversely, when considering output on the global scale, each article was only counted once. Subsequently, collaboration percentages when viewed on the global scale were lower than many individual country collaboration percentages because each collaborative paper is counted multiple times in the latter, once for each collaborating country. Due to missing or unavailable data, some affiliation metadata were incomplete. However, previous studies 78 , 86 have shown that these cases will not affect outcomes given a large enough sample.

Article output was compared in terms of absolute output and world share. The population was not used as a normalising factor as some less (in relative terms) populous countries have notable research output (e.g., New Zealand: population ~5 M, output ~1800 articles) and more populous countries have little output (e.g., Algeria, population ~45 M, 58 articles). Where appropriate, gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD) and researchers per million inhabitants values (taken from UNESCOs Institute for Statistics website 87 ) were quoted as a proxy for research capability and to provide context on national output. Values for these indicators are provided, where available, in Supplementary Table 1 .

In the Web of Science, institutional affiliations can be unified under a parent institution. However, in some cases, affiliations can be unified to more than one parent institution (for example, MIT and Harvard University are both parents of the Broad Institute). This can lead to similarly named institutions, or divisions of institutions, being listed as parent affiliations. This is demonstrated in Table 3 where both the Smithsonian Institute and Smithsonian Institute of Tropical Research (a subdivision of the Smithsonian Institute) are both listed as Panamanian institutions. This is because both can be defined in the Web of Science as being a parent of the Smithsonian Institute of Tropical Research. Some affiliations, representing consortiums of institutions, were removed from the analysis as they did not truly represent a unified institution.

Data availability

Summary data supporting these findings are found in the Supplementary Information file. All background data are available to academic researchers in institutions that subscribe to the Web of Science.

Code availability

The underlying code for this study is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8270555 .

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Acknowledgements

Jupyter notebooks and Python libraries including Pandas and Seaborn were used for analysis purposes.

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Ross W. K. Potter

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Conceptualisation: R.W.K.P.; methodology: R.W.K.P., B.C.P.; data curation: R.W.K.P.; data analysis: R.W.K.P.; data consultation: B.C.P.; manuscript writing: R.W.K.P.; manuscript review and editing: R.W.K.P., B.C.P.

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Correspondence to Ross W. K. Potter .

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Potter, R.W.K., Pearson, B.C. Assessing the global ocean science community: understanding international collaboration, concerns and the current state of ocean basin research. npj Ocean Sustain 2 , 14 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-023-00020-y

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Received : 03 March 2023

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-023-00020-y

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