Ocean Engineering

Ocean engineering is the branch of engineering concerned with structures and systems in or adjacent to the ocean, including offshore platforms, coastal structures such as piers and harbors, and underwater systems generally, distinguishing it from marine engineering, whose own scope is the propulsion plants and equipment aboard a ship, and from naval architecture, which addresses a ship's overall hull design and how it moves through the water. Where a marine engineer ensures a vessel's own systems function as designed, an ocean engineer works on infrastructure that stays largely stationary or semi-stationary within the marine environment itself, from a fixed offshore drilling platform to a permanent harbor structure to an autonomous underwater vehicle. The three fields share underlying tools, hydrodynamics and marine materials science chief among them, and the terminology blurs in practice outside the United States, where ocean and marine engineering sometimes operate under one shared umbrella term; in standard American usage, though, ocean engineering is understood as its own discipline built around structures that live in the ocean rather than around the ships that move across it.