Word: deepest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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More than 35 years after the bathyscaphe Trieste took two men, for the first and last time, 35,800 ft. down to the deepest spot in the world--the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep just off Guam in the western Pacific--undersea adventurers are preparing to go back. Last March a Japanese robot scouted a tiny section of the bottom of the 1,584-mile-long crevasse and sent back the first real-time video images of deepest-sea life. And in laboratories around the world, engineers are hard at work on an armada of sophisticated craft designed to explore...
...thousands of years is not lost on oceanographers. More than 100 expeditions have reached Everest, the 29,028-ft. pinnacle of the Himalayas; manned voyages to space have become commonplace; and robot probes have ventured to the outer reaches of the solar system. But only now are the deepest parts of the ocean coming within reach. "I think there's a perception that we have already explored the sea," says marine biologist Sylvia Earle, a former chief scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and a co-founder of Deep Ocean Engineering, the San Leandro, California, company where construction...
...purge the blood of nitrogen (which can form bubbles as a diver returns to the surface and cause the excruciating and sometimes fatal condition known as the bends). And pressurized diving suits make it possible for humans to descend only to 1,440 ft.--far short of the deepest reaches of the oceans...
That includes some scientists. Although he has never been to the very deepest trenches, ocean explorer Robert Ballard of Woods Hole, who is best known for discovering the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, is convinced that the action lies in the relative shallows. "I believe that the deep sea has very little to offer," he says. "I've been there. I've spent a career there. I don't see the future there." The French have decided not even to bother trying to break the 20,000 ft. barrier--the range of their deepest-diving submersible, the three-person...
Dolly's pretty mouth has other things to teach him as well. The girl and her twin brother (Gordon Rand) have evolved a rapid-fire patter that tongue-ties everyone around them. Smith and Rand do a nifty job of depicting the deepest sibling affinities. They can finish each other's sentences because they are, finally, one creature: that familiar Shaw character, the Bright Young Upstart, whose iconoclasm glides and shimmers rather than pounds and thunders. Unfortunately, others in the cast (Helen Taylor as the twins' icy sister Gloria, with whom the dentist falls in love; Jack Medley...