Scripps Institution of Oceanography

History

Founding

Scripps Institution of Oceanography traces its beginnings back to William Ritter, a biologist originally from Wisconsin. In 1891, Ritter was offered a job teaching biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and married Mary Bennett. Their honeymoon and subsequent biological studies took them to San Diego, where Ritter met a local physician and naturalist, Fred Baker, who would later encourage him to build a marine biological laboratory in San Diego.

Ritter searched for eleven years for an appropriate place for a permanent marine biological laboratory. He spent summers at various places along the coast with students. His goal was frustrated by lack of money and lack of an appropriate place. During this time, research was being conducted at the boathouse of Hotel del Coronado on San Diego Bay.

In 1903, Ritter was introduced to newspaper magnate E. W. Scripps. Together with Scripps' half-sister Ellen Browning Scripps and Baker, they formed the Marine Biological Association of San Diego with Ritter as the Scientific Director. They fully funded the institution for its first decade. E. W. Scripps gave the biological association the use of his yacht, the Loma, in 1904 and served as the first research vessel in the history of the institution. In 1905, they moved to a small laboratory in La Jolla Cove until they arranged for the purchase of a 170-acre (0.69 km2) site in La Jolla, north of San Diego. The land was purchased for $1,000 at a public auction from the city of San Diego (the same site where the SIO main campus is today). However, construction cost estimates for a permanent building were around $50,000. Funding was secured through E. W. and E. B. Scripps, and the first permanent building (today known as the Old Scripps Building) was constructed in 1910.

The Marine Biological Association's first seafaring vessel, the Loma, ran aground in Point Loma in 1906 and prompted the search for a new one. With funds secured from Ellen Browning Scripps, the association was able to have a ship built by Lawrence Jensen strictly for oceanographic research - among the first for an American nongovernmental institution. The new vessel was acquired on April 21st, 1907 and was named the Alexander Agassiz after the Harvard biologist who had visited in 1905. The 85-foot Alexander Agassiz, a sailing vessel with twin gasoline engines, served the institution for ten years.

In 1912, the Biological Association became incorporated into the University of California and was renamed the Scripps Institution for Biological Research.

Wartime

When World War II broke out Scripps created the University of California Division of War Research (UCDWR) in Point Loma, focusing on acoustics and waves to support the US Navy. Collaborative research between the UCDWR and the Navy led to the discovery of the deep scattering layer, a region from 300 - 500 m deep filled with organisms. The UCDWR would continue to research sound beacons and sonar until being absorbed into the Navy Electronics Laboratory and Scripps Marine Physical Laboratory between 1945 and 1948.

With Harald Sverdrup as the SIO director, recent graduate student Walter Munk was recalled from the army and together they were tasked with aiding Allied amphibious landings off the coast of Africa. The goal was to predict coastal surf and sea state for Allied landings in Africa, though their model was also applied to the Allied landings in Normandy, Sicily, and in the Pacific. SIO's UCDWR would train over 200 American and British military officers on swell forecasting techniques throughout the war. Though Sverdrup was initially intending on holding the position of SIO director for only 3 years until 1939, Nazi occupation of Norway prolonged his assumption of the role until 1948. Though Sverdrup's family became US citizens during the war, he struggled with Navy clearance which gave him an awkward relationship to the projects he was overseeing.

Wartime changed the funding dynamic for Scripps. Prior to the war, the only federal support for SIO came from the Navy seeking to protect the hulls of their ships. Threatened by German submarines, concepts within physical oceanography were researched for submarine warfare. By summer 1942, Roger Revelle was appointed as a Navy liaison for oceanography and the sonar head of the Navy Bureau of Ships. UCDWR research led to rapid development of bathythermographs, as well as the understanding of the thermocline and benthic sediments in the context of underwater warfare. Research on biofouling organisms were led by Dennis Fox and Claude ZoBell, with the goal to develop biological deterrents for seaplanes and vessels.

It was during 1942 that Sverdrup, along with Martin Johnson and Richard Fleming, completed the first comprehensive textbook of oceanography, The Oceans. The textbook was considered a first of its kind and of such military importance that it was forbidden from distribution outside of the United States.

SIO's first scientific diver was biologist Cheng Kwai Tseng, who used equipment to collect algae off the coast of San Diego in 1944. Tseng took red algae samples of Gelidium cartilagineum and cultured them to reduce the US dependence on Japanese agar, which was important to hospitals at the time.

The Golden Age of Oceanography

Following the war, Roger Revelle continued to act as a liaison for oceanographers and was consulted during Operation Crossroads in 1945. He noted significant difficulties during the project, stemming from the difficulty of civilian research to access naval research vessels and naval bureaucracy. To remedy this, Revelle championed joint research of the newly-established Office of Naval Research (ONR), the US Hydrographic Office, and Navy Bureau of Ships and Scripps was receiving around $900,000 annually from federal funding.

The Navy bestowed the operation of a number of vessels to SIO ushering in a "Golden Age" of oceanographic research and discoveries. Between 1947 and 1949 three post-war vessels were acquired and modified for scientific research: The Crest, Paolina-T, and Horizon. These vessels, combined with the overlap of expertise from the ONR in 1946, provided additional resources for ocean exploration. The three new vessels were put to work on the new Marine Life Research Program in 1950 (now CalCOFI), which sought to investigate the collapse of the California sardine population. In doing so, approximately 670,000 square miles (1,700,000 km2) of ocean would need to be surveyed.

When Aqua-Lung was made available in the US in 1948, UCLA graduates Conrad Limbaugh and Andy Rechnitzer were able to convince Boyd W. Walker, their marine biology advisor at the time, to purchase one. Together, they introduced the Aqua-Lung to SIO in 1950 (with Limbaugh studying under Carl Hubbs) and began the Scripps Diving Program. Roger Revelle took over the director role at SIO in 1951 from Carl Eckart and, following a diving fatality at La Jolla in 1950, requested that Limbaugh develop a scuba training program for SIO, which debuted in 1951 and was heavily influenced by practices of the U.S. Navy's Underwater Demolition Team. It was also during this time that Hugh Bradner, a physicist at UC Berkeley, became an advisor at SIO and developed the wetsuit in 1952. Bradner would go on to become a professor at SIO's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics in 1961. The SIO Diving Program would continue to innovate and expand up to more than 160 affiliated divers in 2015.

The Vaughan Aquarium-Museum opened at the University's Charter Day in March 1951 to replace the prior aquarium, which had been in a consistent state of disrepair since at least 1925. Named to honor former institution director T. Wayland Vaughan, museum curator Percy S. Barnhart planned a replacement up until his retirement in 1946, passing the project along to Sam Hinton. Hinton would go on to collect specimens aboard the E. W. Scripps until the building was completed and occupied in 1950. While nearly three times the size of the previous aquarium, the building also housed the director's offices on the second floor and the preserved specimens in the basement. The seawater supply from Scripps Pier was renovated in 1964 to increase capacity and improve filtration.

International projects and modern history

The Old Scripps Building, designed by Irving Gill, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1982. Architect Barton Myers designed the current Scripps Building for the Institution of Oceanography in 1998.

In 1998, Scripps director Charles Kennel and former director William Nierenberg approached Jesse Ausubel to discuss the formation and funding for an international consortium of oceanographic institutions. Together with John Shepherd, a proposal was made for the Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean (or POGO), which held its first meeting in 1999 in Paris.

In 2007, the family and wife of late Roger Revelle donated 2.5 million dollars toward the Roger Revelle Chair endowed position, which Shang-Ping Xie now holds.

In 2014, SIO received a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to test the use of biofuels on one of its ships, the Robert Gordon Sproul. The vessel operated from September 2014 to December 2015 on 100% biofuels which reduced nitrous oxide emissions, but increased particle emissions. However, the fuel source provided a proof of concept that research operations could be completed using biofuels rather than conventional diesel.

Also, 2014 was the first year of cruises for the international GO-SHIP program, a repeat hydrography program focusing on straight transects across major ocean basins and a follow-up to the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, which ran until 2002. Scripps, along with NOAA as the sole American members of the science committee, has overseen and advised many expeditions to contribute to the global data set.

In 2019, Scripps received $1.2 million of philanthropic funding for a 42-foot (13 m) research vessel, named after John Beyster and his wife Betty. Though the vessel was secured in spring of 2019, plans for the vessel's acquisition began in 2017.

From January to May of 2019, SIO directed a study at Imperial Beach to collect samples of sewage pollution from the Tijuana River and found elevated levels of harmful bacteria and aerosols. In 2024, Scripps was added to a task force including researchers from San Diego State University and regional doctors to better understand health impacts from the pollution. While collecting samples later in 2024, the task force had to evacuate the area due to elevated levels of toxic gases.

Campus

Main campus

The SIO main campus is located in La Jolla, situated between La Jolla Shores and Black's Beach. La Jolla Shores Drive provides access to greater La Jolla to the south, while continuing north through campus to the main UC San Diego campus.

Mass transit service to the main campus is handled by MTS line 30 (coming every 15 minutes) and UC San Diego's SIO bus route (every 10 minutes). Route 30 has stops exclusively on La Jolla Shores Drive, heading north to UTC Transit Center and south to Old Town Transit Center. The SIO route offers more comprehensive coverage of campus grounds, starting in Pawka Green, then La Jolla Shores Drive, Shellback Way, Birch Aquarium, and then north to Gilman Transit Center at UCSD's main campus.

Three sites on campus (the Seaside Forum, the Martin Johnson House, and Birch Aquarium) are available to the general public for rental.

Biological Grade is the street running North to South parallel to La Jolla Shores drive, connecting a number of laboratories, libraries, and research halls. It was built between 1910 and 1912 with the original Old Scripps Building and was part of the main highway between San Diego and Los Angeles. As the campus grew, La Jolla Shores Drive was constructed to reroute through traffic for automobiles. Biological Grade connects to Shellback Way on the other side of La Jolla Shores Drive via the La Jolla Shores Pedestrian Bridge (also known as Scripps Crossing), erected in 1993.

The Scripps Coastal Meander trail (part of the California Coastal Trail) starts at the northern end of Biological Grade and connects to other trails, eventually terminating at Black's Beach.

South of Biological Grade is the Pawka Green, named after Steven Pawka. The bordering Naga Way separates the labs from Biological Grade from the halls around Pawka Green, which are more oriented towards administration and instruction. The Naga Way street is named after the Naga Expedition, which took place in 1959 studying the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea.

Shellback Way connects a series of halls and labs on the east side of La Jolla Shores Drive, with greater emphasis on atmospheric science and fisheries. It connects to Biological Grade via the La Jolla Shores Pedestrian Bridge. Shellback Way is named after the Shellback Expedition which studied the deep Pacific off the coast of Peru, running from May to August 1952.

Nimitz Marine Facility

The Nimitz Marine Facility is the home port of all SIO research vessels and is accessible by land via Rosecrans Street in Point Loma. The facility is serviced hourly by bus route 84 of the San Diego MTS, running from the Navy Base to Shelter Island and Cabrillo National Monument.

The facility borders the Point Loma Navy Base, operated by the NIWC. As of 2008, a TWIC card is required for access to the waterfront at MarFac as required by the United States Coast Guard.

Buildings at the Nimitz Marine Facility are numbered in increasing order from the waterfront approaching Rosecrans Street.

Research programs

The institution's research programs encompass biological, physical, chemical, geological, and geophysical studies of the oceans and land. Scripps also studies the interaction of the oceans with both the atmospheric climate and environmental concerns on terra firma. Related to this research, Scripps offers undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Today, the Scripps staff of 1,300 includes approximately 235 faculty, 180 other scientists and some 350 graduate students, with an annual budget of more than $281 million. The institution operates a fleet of four oceanographic research vessels.

Research themes

Scripps follows a number of interdisciplinary research themes:

Climate change impacts and adaption

Resilience to hazards

Human health and the oceans

Innovative technology

Polar science

Biodiversity and conservation

National security

CalCOFI program

The California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program, established in 1949, is an ongoing partnership between SIO, NOAA Fisheries, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to study sardine population collapse and the marine environment off the coast of Southern California. Data are collected on routine research cruises and are able to be compared over many decades in a large service area.

The Keeling Curve

The Keeling Curve is the longest-running time series of atmospheric CO2, beginning in 1958. Spearheaded by Charles David Keeling, SIO established a research center in Mauna Loa, Hawaii to record atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Since then, SIO researchers have expanded the dataset into numerous other sampling locations and analytical parameters to monitor climate change.

Argo program

The Argo program is an international effort to survey ocean temperature, salinity, and currents. The program was developed in the late 1990s and chaired by SIO's Dean Roemmich and SIO researchers helped design the SOLO and SOLO-II float designs. SIO is also involved in Argo-related programs, such as GO-BGC (biogeochemical) and SOCCOM, and hosts Argo data on the Argo Global Marine Atlas.

Oceanographic collections

SIO maintains a large collection of marine and benthic organism collections, tracing back to William Ritter's samples from 1902. When ichthyologist Carl Hubbs arrived at SIO in 1944, the collections grew rapidly and expanded by around 9,000 samples in 2014 when SIO inherited collections from UCLA's Department of Ecology. SIO also has a geological collection of thousands of ocean cores, sea dredge hauls, microfossil slides, and rock samples.

Collection samples are commonly used for instruction at SIO and for public outreach at Birch Aquarium.

Organizational structure

Research sections

Scripps Oceanography is divided into three research sections, each with its own subdivisions:

Biology

Center for Marine Biotechnology & Biomedicine (CMBB)

Integrative Oceanography Division (IOD)

Marine Biology Research Division (MBRD)

Earth

Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP)

Geosciences Research Division (GRD)

Oceans & Atmosphere

Climate, Atmospheric Science & Physical Oceanography (CASPO)

Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL)

Directors

Meenakshi Wadhwa took office as the director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences, and Dean of the Graduate School of Marine Sciences on October 1, 2025.

The following persons served as director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography:

Research vessels

Scripps owns and operates several research vessels and platforms:

RV Roger Revelle

RV Sally Ride

RV Robert Gordon Sproul

RV Bob and Betty Beyster

Current and previous vessels larger than 50 ft (15 m)

Hybrid Hydrogen Research Vessel

In 2021, Scripps was awarded $35 million for the development of a new coastal research vessel as a replacement for the RV Robert Gordon Sproul, in service since 1984. The proposed vessel would be 125 feet long and take 3 years to build, becoming the first hybrid-hydrogen research vessel in the UNOLS fleet and aiding in the University of California's Carbon Neutrality Initiative. Scripps chose Seattle-based architect Glosten as the ship's designer, having work experience from numerous other SIO vessels. It is expected that the research vessel will operate on hydrogen power for 75% of its operations.

Birch Aquarium

Birch Aquarium, the public exploration center for the institution, features a Hall of Fishes with more than 60 tanks of Pacific fishes and invertebrates from the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest to the tropical waters of Mexico and the IndoPacific, a 13,000-gallon local shark and ray exhibit, interactive tide pools, and interactive science exhibits. In 2022, the aquarium opened a new exhibit for blue penguins.

Awards by SIO

SIO confers a number of awards for scientific advancement or betterment of society.

Popular culture

In 2014, the institution and its Keeling Curve measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were featured as a plot point in an episode of HBO's The Newsroom.

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography is frequently mentioned or used as a setting in fiction novels. The name is often abbreviated or fictionalized, borrowing from other identifying personalities or sights in La Jolla.