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Transcript for America\'s New Frontier, segment 03 of 11
Doctor Jim Gardner, a Marine geologist with the U. S. Department of the Interior Geological Survey, was part of a team of scientists who had already proposed to map a large area of ocean floor off California. Their timely proposal was expanded to include all of the ocean floor off the west coast and later the entire exclusive economic zone.
The U. S. G. S. decided to use GLORIA for the E. E. Z. studies because at the time that the E. E. Z. was declared in nineteen eighty-three, it was basically as remote as the back side of the moon. So we had to look into what was available to do the survey, and we had to get some kind of reconnaissance survey of this enormous acreage, and of the available systems, there was only one, really, that would allow us to quickly get a reconnaissance view of these huge areas and then take it the second step which would be a higher resolution view of it. We decided that if we started with a very high resolution view of the sea floor, what would happen is we would spend all of our time in one small area and all of our money in one small area, and we'd never cover the whole thing so GLORIA was the obvious choice.