Word: bottomly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Artery & Stabilizer. Ocean currents are of interest not just to navigators. They are the arteries of the ocean; they carry warm and cold water around the earth; they churn up and interchange cold bottom water for warm surface water. The so-called deepwater-comprising about 90% of all the ocean's water-hovers around 40° F., and acts as a huge stabilizer of the atmosphere's temperature. If, through some imbalance of nature, the earth received an extra 1% of heat in the course of a year, it would, applied to the air alone, raise the atmosphere...
...Quiet Place. This discovery gave a wholly new look to theories about the circulation of the Atlantic. The long-established notion of nearly stagnant ocean depths is now doubtful. Photographs taken of the bottom show ripple marks much like those caused by tidal currents on bathing beaches. Ocean basins with ripple marks on their bottoms must have been stirred by currents at some time in their past, and they may be stirred still...
...fertile parts of the sea, the surface water is kept supplied with nutrients by some sort of upwelling that brings rich bottom water to the surface. In far northern and far southern parts of the ocean,-the surface water gets so cold and heavy in winter that it sinks and is replaced by bottom water that contains plant nutrients. Currents carry these nutrients to other seas, e.g., the Labrador Current off the Newfoundland banks, the Peru Current off the coast of South America, and produce rich fishing grounds...
Unless they are fertilized by currents from colder areas, tropical seas are largely sterile. Since the richest harvests of the sea derive from bottom water rising to the surface, oceanographers have long had the notion of creating artificial upwelling in sterile parts of the ocean. One possibility is a nuclear reactor sitting on the bottom and slightly warming the water around it. The warmed water will rise, carrying nutrients to the surface and turning clear water, admired only by tourists, into rich, turbid pastures. Another way would be to pump deep water into some closed area, such as a Pacific...
Fossil Volcanoes. Geologists and oceanographers who look to the ocean's bottom have found that the ocean is a gigantic museum, where geological specimens are preserved like flies in amber. Among the most interesting of these geological fossils are the guyots, the flat-topped extinct volcanoes that dot the Pacific floor. How did they get down there, the oceanographer asks. Did their weight force them into the earth's crust, like corks pushed into putty? Did the ocean increase in volume and rise above them...