The explosion of interest, effort, and information about the ocean since about 1950 has produced many thousand scientific articles and many hun dred books. In fact, the outpouring has been so large that authors have been unable to read much of what has been published, so they have tended to concentrate their own work within smaller and smaller subfields of oceanog raphy. Summaries of information published in books have taken two main paths. One is the grouping of separately authored chapters into symposia type books, with their inevitable overlaps and gaps between chapters. The other is production of lightly researched books containing drawings and tables from previous pUblications, with due credit given but showing assem bly-line writing with little penetration of the unknown. Only a few books have combined new and previous data and thoughts into new maps and syntheses that relate the contributions of observed biological, chemical, geological, and physical processes to solve broad problems associated with the shape, composition, and history of the oceans. Such a broad synthesis is the objective of this book, in which we tried to bring together many of the pieces of research that were deemed to be of manageable size by their originators. The composite may form a sort of plateau above which later studies can rise, possibly benefited by our assem bly of data in the form of new maps and figures.

The Atlantic is also relatively deeper and less cumbered with islands than the Pacific, which has the higher ridges near its shores, constituting what some visitors to the Pacific coast of America have not inaptly called the "back of the world," while the wider slopes face the narrower ocean, into which for this reason the greater part of the drainage of the land is poured... a) What has at first determined the position and form of the Atlantic ocean? b) What changes has it experienced in the lapse of geological time? c) What relations have these changes borne to the development of life on the land and in the water? d) What is its probable future?

Text To Accompany The Physiographic Diagram Of The North Atlantic. The Geological Society Of America Special Paper, No. 65.