In 1932 the New York City composer and lyricist Irving Berlin (1888-1989) wrote the song How Deep is the Ocean?  Berlin was fantasizing about the unending depth of attraction that people in love have for one another. Thirty-five years later in 1957 Roger Revelle (1909-91) and his colleagues at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, asked the same question but in an entirely different context. They found that the ocean wasn’t very deep in carbon dioxide. Contrary to what most scientists believed at that time the oceans did not absorb and dissolve an unending quantity of carbon dioxide, a known greenhouse gas. Instead the dissolved carbon dioxide formed a thin layer at the ocean’s surface and prevented additional carbon dioxide from dissolving. The oceans were buffered solutions. Much of the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide passing into the atmosphere remained in the atmosphere, increasing the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide and the rate of global warming. This paper will examine the research that led Revelle to this startling conclusion and the impact his research had on the scientific community’s understanding of global warming.