Word: gulf
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...survive such storms, early residents quickly learned that they would have to build carefully, particularly in low-lying New Orleans. Eighteenth century settlers established the famed French Quarter on some of the highest ground they could find, one of the reasons it remained relatively dry last week. As the Gulf, the lake and the river periodically overflowed, the growing city retreated behind an ever expanding web of soil, concrete and metal levees. Today there are 350 miles of those barricades snaking through the city and 22 massive pumping stations that are supposed to kick into action whenever the water sloshes...
...cities on the Gulf Coast have always been potential deathtraps, they have always been gold mines too--great natural ports on a warm-water gulf, perfectly situated to profit from the traffic moving up and down one of the world's most important shipping lanes: the Mississippi River. The port of South Louisiana moves more tonnage each year than any other in the nation. Add to that the commodities the Gulf produces, including nearly 30% of the nation's oil, 20% of its natural gas and a third of its fish and shellfish, and it is clear--as many have...
...role in the disaster. If it's true that human activity had a lot to do with making the region vulnerable to a hit by a hurricane like Katrina, it's also true that we knew all along the kind of environmental damage we have been doing to the Gulf. Now that we're paying the price for our recklessness, what are we going to do about...
...always evident that the Gulf of Mexico was a sweet spot for cyclones, but it took modern meteorology to explain just why. You need a lot of things to get a hurricane going, most important among them an existing storm with a bit of spin to it wedged between warm ocean water and a colder band of air above it. Locate all that at least 300 miles north or south of the equator--where the rotation of the Earth's slightly narrower circumference exacerbates the spin of the storm--and you have everything you need to sustain a hurricane...
Geology has only made things worse. Gulf land is squishy stuff, made mostly of silt deposited by eons of free-flowing rivers and periodic floods. When the high water recedes, the sedimentary layer remains, growing heavier and heavier and ultimately subsiding under its own weight. The only way to keep the land from sinking altogether is to let the soil replenish itself with each flood. Human beings have done just the opposite, walling off New Orleans and re-engineering the Mississippi River to flow around the growing metropolis, effectively choking off the silt supply...