Word: cyclic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...number of theories have been floated to explain these irregular, rapid variations. The leading one, advanced by Lamont-Doherty's Wallace Broecker and George Denton of the University of Maine, involves a kind of cyclic ocean current that has been likened to a conveyer belt. Broecker and Denton note that a stream of unusually salty (and thus especially dense) water flows underneath the Gulf Stream as it moves from the tropics to the North Atlantic. When this salty stream reaches the far north, it is forced to the surface as water above it is blown aside by the winds...