Reflections on international cooperation in oceanography

These reflections on past and present trends in international cooperation in marine sciences are dedicated to Gerold Siedler, the former President of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR). Over the years Gerold Siedler promoted international cooperation on various scales. Inter alia he was in charge of the bilateral Brazilian–German Programme in Marine Science in the 1970s, and he was deeply involved in the planning of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment WOCE and in its execution, particularly in the South-western Atlantic (Siedler et al., 1996) as well as in the formation of the marine science sector of the Framework Programmes of the European Union. Apart from his leading role in international committees he has countless personal links over the oceans and across political borders. There are always foreign students around him in Kiel, and more than once he has made good-will tours to coastal states bordering the South Atlantic in order to pave the way for Meteor cruises in their EEZs and to encourage their local scientists to join those cruises.Gerold Siedler is one of the leading oceanographers devoted to the idea of the global community of oceanographers. He puts much effort in establishing new and maintaining old contacts between scientists in various parts of the World and he pushes for joining forces in cooperative programmes wherever individual research vessels and institutes cannot solve problems of the understanding, prediction and sustainable exploitation of the oceans and their coastal seas.My contribution to this Festschrift is heavily biassed towards biological oceanography in the Atlantic and to the European and German part in international cooperation. The biological inclination originates from my personal background, the geographical bias pays tribute to the fact that Gerold Siedler is a global minded German European who has mainly worked in the Atlantic. I will concentrate on some historical reflections, on the growing collaboration in Europe and on North–South partnerships.