Word: coral
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Darwin went on to explain, these islands are more substantial than they seem. They are in fact the visible crests of massive limestone reefs that extend from the sea floor to the surface. The limestone is made of the consolidated skeletons of tiny marine organisms, including untold generations of coral polyps that millions of years ago began growing on the slopes of a long-vanished volcanic mountain chain--and have kept pace with sea level ever since...
This is not to say the Maldives have remained the same over time. Twenty thousand years ago, at the height of the last Ice Age, says Abdulla Naseer, director of the Marine Research Center in Malé, the Maldives were not the low-lying coral islands we see today. Due to frigid ocean temperatures and vast amounts of water locked up as ice, sea levels were some 400 ft. lower then, and the reef crests loomed above the sea's surface as sheer-sided limestone pinnacles. Then, as the earth warmed and the ice melted, the rising ocean overtopped these pinnacles...
...course, the people who live on such islands want protection from marauding waves, and for millenniums the islands' reefs have provided it. The value of that protection became clear in 1987 after Malé expanded out to the edge of its reef, burying it beneath a thick layer of coral sand and gravel. In April of that year, an armada of giant waves--stirred up, some think, by a distant cyclone in the Indian Ocean--attacked the city, gouging out big chunks of landfill and nearly washing away the car in which Gayoom was riding. A short time later, he gave...
...Brown ’05 has danced on Broadway at Radio City Music Hall, Katie W. Johnson ’07 is taking next year off to dance in the national tour of “Cats,” Coral X. Day-Davis ’05 spent her first two years at Harvard on the varsity diving team, and Markham was a competitive figure skater before she came to Harvard...
...visitors to the PTC's website is "Because our children are watching." But for some decency advocates, the problem is also that someone else's children are watching--it's the problem, which both liberal and conservative parents experience, of being exposed to "secondhand smut." Jack Thompson is a Coral Gables, Fla., attorney who filed a series of complaints against Stern that resulted in a $495,000 fine against Clear Channel Communications. A decency hard-liner--he thinks shock jock Stern should be in jail--Thompson doesn't buy the argument that parents should just turn...