Word: currently
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...coast of Labrador with a crew of college students on his first oceanographic trip. The student-scientists fraternized with Eskimos, exploded firecrackers in one another's beds, and otherwise acted their ages, but the Chance, loaded with real scientific apparatus, came back with useful data on the Labrador Current that chills the New England coast as far south as Cape...
Classic example of just how much difference a change in current can make occurs on the coast of Peru, which owes its cool, foggy but almost rainless climate to the cold Peru Current sweeping up from Antarctica. Once in every ten years or so, a current of warm water called El Nino (because it appears near Christmas, the birthday of El Nino, the Christ child) creeps stealthily down the coast. With it come tropical rains and disaster. Floods roar through dry valleys. Buildings not designed for rain leak or collapse. Worst of all, the warm water, which is only...
...major discovery of postwar oceanographers was that huge currents flow far below the surface; often these currents move faster than their surface counterparts. One such discovery came in 1951, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sent a ship west of the Galapagos Islands to experiment with a Japanese technique of fishing for deep-swimming tuna. The scientists were surprised to see the fish lines drifting eastward while their ship was carried westward on the well-known equatorial surface current. The next year the Service's Townsend Cromwell established the reason: a hitherto unsuspected current, deep below the surface...
Years of patient measurements of water temperature, salinity and density have begun to pay off by providing oceanography with a substructure of theory. Doubting the conventional view that ocean currents are simply streams of water pushed around by prevailing winds, Henry Stommel of Woods Hole analyzed thousands of such observations, predicted that a current would be found flowing under the Gulf Stream in the opposite direction. In 1957 the Atlantis and the British oceanographic ship Discovery II went looking for this current. Their tool was an ingenious buoy invented by British Oceanographer John C. Swallow, which sinks slowly until...
...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...