The Origin of Weird: Mary Sears and Thermocline

Welcome To The Origin Of Weird

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Oh hey there.

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Oh hey there.

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How are you today?

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Good. What was that?

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I don't know. But I'm Bradley.

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I'm Kate.

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And this is The Origin of Weird.

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By the History Buffoons.

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And we are currently recording at Kate's home. And I just wanted you to know, I already got cat hair on my microphone.

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Yep.

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It's been down at the podloft for the last couple weeks. Didn't take long, and here we are. Anywho.

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So if you notice us coughing, it's probably on cat hair.

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Yeah. Let's go with that.

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So I'm gonna start with.

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Are you? Because you keep saying sewing.

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I'm gonna sew it a needle

Hunting A Ghost U-Boat

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pulling thread. A US destroyer is plowing through rough black water.

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Okay.

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While the atmosphere inside the control room feels quite intense.

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Okay.

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The crew is hunting a German U-boat.

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Oh no.

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But it's starting to feel impossible.

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Why is that?

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Suddenly, the sonar operator yanks off his headset.

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Just so everyone knows she did it.

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And says, We've lost him again, Captain.

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Fucking hell. And then the captain goes, Well, call it a night.

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The last two hours, they've been circling the same stretch of the North Atlantic where a merchant ship was just torpedoed.

unknown 2:00

Okay.

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They know the submer submarine is nearby. Right. They can practically feel it. They can't see it though. Because they're underwater. But every time they think that they have it pinned down, it disappears into the ocean like a ghost.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Well, I don't think it disappears into the ocean. I think it's in the ocean already.

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But it disappears in the ocean.

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Okay.

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What the captain doesn't realize is that chasing a whale.

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That'd be awful. That'd be awesome.

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What they the captain doesn't realize is that the German commander is not just relying on evasive maneuvers or luck.

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He's relying on witchcraft.

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He is hiding behind science.

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Well, like I said, witchcraft.

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More specifically, he's hiding beneath a an invisible layer of water that bends sonar waves and turns American detection equipment into useless nonsense.

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Fuck all, basically.

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Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Okay, so how did he learn of this layer of water that bends sonar?

SPEAKER_02 3:12

I don't know. I didn't get the German perspective on this. But nine. In this part of World War II, the deadliest weapon at this time on the sea wasn't a torpedo or a machine gun. It was information and data.

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Yeah.

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Um, so they they need to know precise, classified information about ocean temperature, depth, and salinity, which is the assault content.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Correct.

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Okay. And early in the war, the US Nate the US Navy was really unprepared to fight the actual physics of the ocean. So in the early years of the Atlantic um war, early years on the Atlantic, war was really brutal for the Allies. Sure. Okay. German U-boats operated in coordinated wolf packs.

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Yeah, they were pretty fucking dangerous. Yeah, they were.

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And they ripped through Allied shipping lanes faster than ships could be replaced. Right. So every ship that went down meant less food reaching Britain, less fuel for tanks and aircraft, and few fewer troops making it safely across the Atlantic. Correct. And the U-boat threat was just catastrophic. Right. So for a while, the U United States Navy had no real answer.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Didn't they actually have to like, I don't know if you came across this at all. Didn't they have to like take an alternate route to try and get around them? If I'm not mistaken.

SPEAKER_02 4:41

Not in this particular story.

SPEAKER_00 4:43

No, I know, but just in general, I want to say it. That was something I remember reading or hearing once. They actually had to uh alter just to try and trick the Germans so they couldn't find them.

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Was was this post-Enigma?

SPEAKER_00 4:58

I don't remember. Um, I could be making this shit up too. I swore I read that or heard that somewhere once, though. Yeah. Anyways.

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Um, so they had destroyers and escorts and sonar systems and mount manpower, but they were still losing all these ships at an alarming rate.

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Right.

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So the problem came down to an assumption. American naval strategy treated the ocean like one giant uniform body of water, and the Germans knew better than that.

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Right.

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They understood the Atlantic was layered and unpredictable and full of environmental quirks.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Do you think it's funny that they exploited that the Germans we at least share a coastline with that body of water? They're landlocked.

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Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

So it's like it's funny how they understood it better. Yeah. I understand it's I don't even know how wide the Atlantic is from like New York to um the coast of Europe, but it's funny how they wouldn't understand that better. I guess I just you wouldn't think that just because of their proximity to it compared to like us. Yeah. I guess is what it's like.

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It is interesting. Yeah. I didn't think about that.

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Yeah.

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Um, so the ocean itself had basically become a weapon and the Germans knew how to use it.

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Right.

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So the solution didn't come from um admirals or ship designers, it came from a quiet scientific institution on the Massachusetts coast called Woods Hole Ocean Oceanographic Institution.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

That's a mouthful.

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Oceanographic is by itself is a mouthful. Yeah. But more specifically, we're gonna talk about a scientist named Mary

Thermocline And The Acoustic Shadow

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Sears.

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Mary Sears.

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Like the store. Sears.

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I figured that, yeah. Okay.

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She's probably got a softer side.

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Of Sears.

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The softer side of Sears.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

You've said that once before, I think, on the podcast, and I don't ever remember.

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Because wasn't Sears always about like the appliances and stuff? And then they started introducing clothing and shoes and jewelry and but man, I always I remember the softer side of Sears.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

I remember or or they offered that, but most people didn't recognize that, and then that was their advertising campaign. It could be that. I don't know. Yeah. Because I always remember them having clothes and and whatever. I mean, we used to go to Sears all the time when I was younger.

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Yeah.

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I think my dad bought some appliances from the harder side of Sears.

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So Mary Sears had been fascinat fascinated by nature since childhood. She collected frogs and studied wildlife and eventually attended Radcliffe College.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Where's that?

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There wasn't a part of my wreath. I'm gonna say it's in Massachusetts.

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Because that's where where Mary is from. Uh-huh.

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Well, that's where she worked.

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Oh, okay.

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Cambridge. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

So wait, where where is she from?

SPEAKER_02 8:06

I didn't look into that. Okay. This is just about a specific time in Mary Sears' life.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

We've uh yep, noted. All right. Let's let's get it. But yeah, we're talking about frogs when she was a kid. So, you know, you can understand my confusion.

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So at Radfill Radcliffe College, uh, she earned advanced degrees in marine zoology.

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Okay.

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So by the time that World War II broke out, she had a deep understanding of how the ocean actually behaved beneath the surface. Right. So her background had absolutely nothing to do with naval combat, but the Navy was about to ask her to to turn science into a wartime weapon.

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Right. Makes sense.

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So at the center of this problem was something called thermocline.

SPEAKER_00 8:57

Thermocline?

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Yes, thermocline.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

It sounds like, hey George, give me some more of that thermocline off the shelf. I mean, thermocline, that's Thermocline. Okay.

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The easiest way to picture it is like jumping into a lake in summer and suddenly hitting a layer of freezing water underneath the warm surface.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

I was like, jumping into a lake in summer, but coming out the other side in winter.

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So that sudden temperature drop is thermocline.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Okay. Gotcha. I mean, I've I've I've felt I would like to say I've felt that because you go in, it's warm, because the initial surface layer?

SPEAKER_02 9:41

Surface, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Um, because sun, all that good stuff. But then you get down just, I don't know, I couldn't tell you how far, but then it's like, ooh, that's nice. And then whatever. Yeah. Okay, so that's what that's called.

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Yeah.

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Thermocline.

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So out in the open ocean, the temperature shift also changes water density. Sure. And that density change bends sonar waves.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

That's wild.

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Isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 10:05

So, do you think our sonar today, you would assume, is way more advanced than it was, you know, eight years ago, could get through this layer now. I would think so. I would think so. Yeah. Okay.

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So instead of like that sonar being sent straight downward, yeah, the signals like scatter and refract, creating what sailors called an acoustic shadow.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

I don't trust sailors. They thought manatees were mermaids. So acoustic shadow. Interesting.

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So U-boat uh German U-boat commanders figured out how to use this to their advantage. Sure. So if they slipped beneath the thermocline and stayed quiet, American sonar often couldn't detect them properly.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

So silent running. She's rigged for silent. You've never heard that?

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Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Silent running, so they can't be detected. Yeah. Yeah, that's what silent running means.

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I feel like we need to like listen to the hunt for Red October. Listen to, watch.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

So the funny thing is, um, the the movie that I'm actually like referencing in my brain when I say that line is Star Trek and they're in space. But they're about to shoot a torpedo, and I think as Lieutenant Uhura says, they're rigged for silent running, which is what a uh submarine would do. Cool. She was referencing what a submarine basically did.

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So cool.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Yeah, it's a good movie. Star Trek Star Trek 4, Voyage Home. No, Undiscovered Country, 6. My bad.

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So by 1942, after devastating

Mary Sears Builds Ocean Intelligence

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shipping losses, the na Navy finally realized they were effectively blind. So they turned to Woods Hole, the institution, for help. So one day a Navy courier arrived at Mary Sears' office carrying maps covered in the locations of recently sunk Allied ships.

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Right.

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And the request was figure out where the submarines are hiding.

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Okay.

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So Sears immediately understood that the Navy didn't need like better maps, they needed predictive models showing where the thermocline would form, how deep it would sit, and how it could shift over time.

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So is this something that can obviously move and adapt and but also trackable? Apparently. Wow. I wouldn't have guessed that.

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Yeah. But the problem is that nobody has ever attempted to map the ocean this way before.

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Why would they? Yeah.

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So the knowledge existed only in scattered fragments buried in obscure scientific journals or old expedition reports. Wow. So every hour spent researching meant another hour, a U-boat would remain free and potentially sink something. Yes.

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Right, right, right.

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So Sears was a civilian.

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Right.

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And she joined the Navy's WAVES program. WAVES.

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Did that stand for something?

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Yes. Women accepted for volunteer emergency service. Wow. And she moved to Washington, D.C., where she began building what was essentially the world's first naval oceanographic intelligence unit. That's wild. How badass is that? That's pretty cool. Yeah. So she and her team, many of them other women scientists in the program, other mass mathematicians.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Well, I'd say I'd hope this other women. I mean, the first letter is for women.

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I meant her team was composed of joking, I'm joking. But they were also mathematicians and cartographers, and they became like detectives of the sea.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

The great sea detectives. Did one of them have a peg leg? That would have been great.

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So since wartime ocean data was extremely limited, they scavenged information from anywhere they could. Fishing logs, foreign academic papers, weather records, old expedition notes, just anything and everything.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Yeah. Anything that might reveal like a pattern in ocean temperature, salinity, or density. Wow. So they were basically trying to reconstruct the hidden structure of the ocean from scraps of forgotten information most people would have thrown away.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

Yeah, because they thought it was useful. Yeah. Yeah. Because they didn't think they needed to.

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But what they ended up doing was changing naval warfare.

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Right.

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Their classified guides called submarine supplements to the sailing directions didn't just map the ocean, they ended up predicting what that ocean would look like. That's impressive. So a Navy commander could now look at a chart and estimate where the thermocline would likely sit during a certain month in a specific region. That's crazy. Wow. So if sonar contacts suddenly disappeared, there was a good chance the U-boat had slipped underneath that invisible layer. Right. For veteran officers who trusted instincts and experience over like academics, this felt really bizarre and untrustworthy. Right, yeah, yeah. Um, so but the the data that they had, it kept proving correct. So one patrol aboard, the USS Buckley, showed how effective this new approach had become. This destroyer picked up a sonar contact with a German U-boat before abruptly losing it. Normally, the the crew would have dropped some depth charges near the last known location and hope for the best. But instead, the captain checked with Mary Sears' thermocline charts, and the charts suggested the thermocline in that area sat sat about 120 feet deep, meaning the submarine was probably hiding beneath that in the acoustic shadow.

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Correct.

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So trusting the charts this time

Charts That Sink A Submarine

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over instinct, the captain ordered the depth charges set much deeper than usual.

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Right.

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And moments after they detonated, the ocean erupted with oil and debris and wreckage. That's wild. So the U-boat had been destroyed. And as the war shifted into the Pacific, Sears and her team faced uh a new challenge. Right. The problem, a problem at Battle of Terua.

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Terua?

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Teruah.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Okay.

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Sorry, people. It's funny. Um, was that a US milit the US military underestimated the environment around this island.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Okay.

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So Terua was surrounded by shallow coral reefs, and the invasion plan depending on depended on landing aircraft carrying marines directly onto the beach. Oh dear. Military planners believed high tide would rise, raise the water enough for the boats to pass safely over the reefs.

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Not so much.

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But the tide ended up being lower than expected.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Oh shit.

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So as the landing craft approached, many got stuck on hidden coral reefs hundreds of yards from shore. Whoops. Marines had to climb out into deep water carrying heavy gear, their rifles, their ammunition, their radios, their flamethrowers. Hopefully they still worked. And then they had to wade the rest of the way to the beach under enemy fire.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

That's crazy. Could you imagine trying to do that? No. No, thank you.

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So the Japanese had heavily fortified the island with machine guns, artillery, and bunkers aimed directly at the shoreline.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Okay.

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And instead of arriving together in organized groups, the Marines became scattered and exhausted and exposed. Yeah. Some drowned under the weight of their equipment while others were killed before reaching shore.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

That's sad.

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Supplies and radios were often lost in the surf, uh, creating confusion before even the main fighting began.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yep.

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The disaster showed the U.S. military that understanding the ocean was just as important as understanding the enemy.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

Right.

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So after Terua, uh scientists like Mary Sears and her team began creating much more detailed four uh forecasts for tides, reefs, waves, and surf conditions. Makes sense. So future invasions could be planned more accurately. Right. So Terua became a um a harsh, harsh lesson for us um, that the environment itself could be just as deadly as actual battle.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

Right.

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So by the end of the war, what star started as like a small scientific office in Massachusetts had become one of the most important intelligence units in the American war effort.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

That's crazy. Oh dear,

Tarawa And The Cost Of Bad Tides

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sorry.

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When World War II ended in 1945, Mary Sears had risen to the rank of lieutenant commander through the WAVES program.

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Which is voluntarily, so does it matter?

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But most of her achievements actually stayed hidden for decades.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

Is it because she was a woman?

SPEAKER_02 19:03

The Navy classified the submarine supplements and forecasting manuals immediately, meaning sears.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Well, can you blame them though? I mean, this is highly useful information, and I'm sure they did not want it to leak out to Germans or whatever, you know, in case this fucking happened again.

SPEAKER_02 19:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

I mean, how far out did you did it come across at all? How far out this like would go? Like, was this like a recurring thing?

SPEAKER_02 19:33

What the prediction was? I'm assuming it since they were looking at what month it was, and so I'm assuming in March, this is gonna be a good one.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

This is where the thermocline should possibly could look like. Yeah, gotcha. Okay. Yeah. No, that makes sense. But so yeah, I can understand why they would classify it, and unfortunately for her, all that hard work, it's not for naught, but it you know, it's it goes unnoticed because, well, no one can talk about it.

SPEAKER_02 19:59

Yeah. So but yeah, she can't openly discuss or publish any of the work that she did.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

Right. No, that's crazy.

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So after the war, she returned to work with Woods Hole Oceano Oceanographic Institution.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

She became a So wait, say that what's the whole name again? One more time.

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Woods Hole.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Okay.

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Oceanographic institution.

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HUI.

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W-H-O-I. Yeah.

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Hui.

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Hui. Hoi. She became a major figure in deep sea research.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Okay.

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She helped organize and standardize oceanographic data internationally.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Wow.

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She worked on improving scientific communication between researchers around the world. One of her most important post-war accomplishments was helping found the journal Deep Sea Research, which became a major scientific publication for oceanography. Wow. Recognition came slowly, but in the year 2000, in the year two, sorry, that's right. The Navy launched the USNS Mary Sears, an ocean oceanographic research vessel named in her honor.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

That's cool. What uh when did she does she still alive? She passed, I would assume if she was working during the city. I didn't look that up. Oh.

SPEAKER_02 21:19

I just wanted to talk about this one thing.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

But yet you talked about how she collected frogs. That just doesn't fucking make sense to me. Seriously. Oh I want to talk about this one event, but some other shit too, but not the stuff that Bradley would ask. Jesus Christ. That's fine. Should I look it up? I would assume she has she's passed. If she was old enough to do stuff like that during World War II,

Legacy And How To Reach Us

SPEAKER_00 21:45

that was, you know, it ended 81 years ago.

SPEAKER_02 21:47

So she died September 2nd, 1997.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Oh, so she never even got to see her vessel. No bummer. September 2nd, 1997. That's when my brother turned 18.

SPEAKER_02 22:02

So that's um the origin of weird. Yeah, thermocline and Mary Sears.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Mary Sears and the Thermocline.

SPEAKER_02 22:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Wow. That's that's wild.

SPEAKER_02 22:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

I mean, it's amazing how something like so I don't know, you wouldn't think of, and then look what it did for for a lot of save a lot of people, probably. Yeah. By killing those German U-boats. Yeah. Um Wow. Go marry Sears.

SPEAKER_02 22:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Well, I suppose. All right, buffoons, that's it for today's episode.

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Buckle up because we've got another historical adventure waiting for you next time. Feeling hungry for more buffoonery? Or maybe you have a burning question or a wild historical theory for us to explore?

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Hit us up on social media. We're History Buffoons Podcast on YouTube, X, Instagram, and Facebook. You can also email us at History Buffoons Podcast at gmail.com. We are Bradley and Kate, music by Corey Akers.

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Until next time, stay curious and don't forget to rate and review us.

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Remember, the buffoonery never stops.