Word: earthing
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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...
Another risky experiment with the oceans may have already been tried inadvertently. The temperature of the earth's surface depends to a considerable extent on the atmosphere's small content of carbon dioxide (about .03%), which permits short-wave sunlight to pass but impedes the escape of longer heat waves into space -the so-called '"greenhouse" effect. Since 1860 modern man's furnaces and auto exhausts have spewed out 360 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Warns Revelle: "By 2005 we will have added to the atmosphere some 1,700 billion tons of carbon dioxide-about...
...ocean will also grow warmer, and will be forced to release dissolved carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This will increase the greenhouse effect. At some point in this chain reaction, the Antarctic icecap will melt, adding enough water to the ocean to drown nearly all of the earth's great cities...
...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...
Mysterious Trenches. An ocean-bottom problem that fascinates all oceanographers is the origin of the deep troughs that are found mostly in the Pacific. The deepest ones, e.g., the Tonga Trench, the Marianas Trench, have narrow V bottoms that are clear of sediment. They are uneasy parts of the earth's crust. Deep-focus earthquakes rumble out of them, and generally volcanoes spout near...