Why do you need to know math to be an oceanographer?

Answer 1

sorry im not the kind of person to awsner the queston but ask you parents or teacher how to do it

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If you are not the "kind of person to answer" then don't! Right, to answer the question.

Oceanography sprawls across a range of scientific disciplines - physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology and Biology being the main ones. Its studies are of ocean tidal and convective circulations, water chemistry and temperatures, sea-floor profiles and composition, wild-life distributions, the interactions between sea and sky - well, the atmosphere (for climate and weather).

Almost all of these require mathematics to a greater or lesser extent: the biology for example would probably rely mainly on statistics. The physics of the seas is formidably mathematical: you are looking at a vast and complex, ever-changing, three-dimensional system with all manner of boundaries; not just the sea-floor and coastal rocks and sediments but also subtle internal temperature and density layers. If you go in for sea-bed mapping then designing the sonar equipment is a specialist engineering field of its own with text-books full of very advanced "sums", but as surveyor you'd still need to appreciate how sound behaves in complicated water, and certainly to understand map-making, surveying and navigation. Similarly if you are tracking animals by their voices, since I think some instinctively exploit the ocean's physical characteristics for long-distance calling.*

Oceanography is a fascinating, beautiful and extremely important subject, fascinating not least because we cannot actually see much of what is below the surface that surface covers two-thirds of our planet's area; but you do need to understand Maths to Degree level and above to follow it as a career.

And by Maths I mean in full, not the curious Pick-'n'-Mix Topics approach that many Answers users appear to follow: Nature might give you real-life problems needing fluency in say, Logarithms, Calculus, Trigonometry and Algebra all at once. Yes, the computer physically does the arithmetic, but you still need to know the principles you want it to use. You will also need to show the formulae and equations in the research papers you write, so the peer-reviewers then your readers can be sure you understand what you are writing about and have not made mistakes in the analysis.

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*Animal calls. The sounds on whale recordings that make New Age mums go all doe-eyed and give birth in paddling-pools, are not "songs" as such. The marine animals' calls are just squawks, whistles and croaks - the plangency is an effect of the calls reverberating within the sea.