Word: geologist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Scientists at J.P.L. seemed most fascinated by Voyager's close-up views of the five major Uranian moons. By far the most exotic was Miranda, about 300 miles across and the closest of the large moons to the planet. Miranda, Geologist Laurence Soderblom explained, "is a bizarre hybrid," combining at least ten different types of terrain, some similar to the "valleys and layered deposits of Mars . . . the grooved terrain of Ganymede (a moon of Jupiter) and the depression faults of Mercury." The crusts of Miranda and three of the four other major moons, Soderblom said, "have been tectonically shuffled...
...wine scattered on the ocean floor. A gaping hole where once a giant smokestack had stood. The ship's bridge, damaged by a falling boom. These and other poignant images of disaster, all in Picasso blue, were distributed in Washington last week at a news conference held by Marine Geologist Robert Ballard, leader of the expedition that early this month located and photographed the sunken liner Titanic. They were only a few of the 12,000 photos shot at the bottom of the Atlantic by the unmanned submersibles Argo and Angus after they had been lowered 13,000 ft. beneath...
...Edwardian-era relics have been shielded from the destructive effects of sunlight, heat, algae and parasites. "If you had your wildest dream of how you were going to find that ship, that is exactly how we found it," said an ebullient Robert Ballard, expedition leader and a marine geologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "It is a museum piece...
Among the undaunted was Jack Grimm, a restless Texas oil millionaire who previously had searched for quarries less tangible than the Titanic: Noah's Ark, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. Between 1980 and 1983 he lavished $2 million on three elaborate Titanic expeditions, masterminded by Columbia University Marine Geologist William Ryan and Fred Spiess of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Using prototypes of the Knorr- Suroit sonar technology and submersible cameras, Ryan and Spiess mapped large swatches of ocean floor and took intriguing images of something that Grimm, at least, is convinced resembled the propeller...
...revolution began with an unassuming element known as iridium, a rare and hard silvery-white metal related to platinum and gold. In the spring of 1977, Geologist Walter Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley, was carefully chiseling through the rocks outside Gubbio, a medieval Italian town halfway between Florence and Rome, seeking clues to continental drift. Gubbio has long been an appealing site to geologists and paleontologists because its rocks provide a complete geological record of the critical boundary line between the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs disappeared, and the Tertiary period, which followed...