Record of Gravity Determinations Made By a Dutch Submarine

Record of gravity determinations made at sea in a Dutch submarine during Autumn 1923 by Meinesz. Taken in harbour at Colombo.

These gravity determinations were made by Prof Meinesz as part of an extensive series of experiments which he carried out by using pedulum balances on submarines during his 'Gravity Expeditions at Sea' between 1923 and 1958. Meinesz performed most of these experiments himself until 1939, when his students took over.

These particular determinations were measured in 1923 during Prof Meinesz's maiden expedition aboard the Royal Netherlands Navy submarine K II, which travelled through the waters of Portugal, the Mediterranean, India, Sri Lanka, before ending somewhere in Indonesia.

These gravity determinations, like those taken by Prof Meinesz, illustrated irregular gravtiational anomolies along ocean trenches, co-insiding with active volcanism and sharp terrain elevations.

What Prof Meinesz did not entirely realise at the time, was that he had been charting and mapping the fault lines of the Earth's vast tectonic plates, and his work provided some of the foundations for the development of the theory of plate tectonics in the late 1950s.