Word: mid-ocean
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...mantle is really a giant convection system. Like hot air in a room, he suggested, material heated by radioactive elements in the earth's interior slowly rises out of a relatively fluid layer of the earth's mantle called the asthenosphere. This lava surfaces at the mid-ocean ridges; hence, the higher water temperatures. As it flows away from the ridges, it hardens into a more rigid layer called the lithosphere. When new lava oozes out, it attaches itself to the older lithosphere and continues to move laterally from the mid-ocean ridges. Millions of years and thousands...
...theory was so unorthodox and tenuous that Hess cautiously called it "geopoetry." It was soon to become geo-fact. After studying Hess's work, a 24-year-old Cambridge University graduate student, Frederick J. Vine, proposed an ingenious test. The iron in the lava from the mid-ocean ridges, he suggested, should be imprinted with the direction of the earth's magnetic field prevailing at the time that the lava cooled off. But patterns in land rocks had already shown that the magnetic field has inexplicably reversed itself as many as 171 times in the past 76 million...
...Central America in a boat made of papyrus reeds, which he was forced to abandon last month 600 miles from his goal, Heyerdahl's old thrill was replaced by shock. In Manhattan last week, he reported to the Norwegian Mission at the United Nations: "Large surface areas in mid-ocean as well as nearer the continental shores on both sides were visibly polluted by human activity...
What mind can compass, what tongue relate the baroque doings which surround a Hasty Pudding opening--that manic cross between a mid-ocean gala and a run on the bank? The searchlights, the celebrities, the spilled drinks, the crowd's frenzied yelps of mutual recognition: the scene suggests unwitting passage into a claustrophobe's vision of the Apocalypse...
There was space, lots of space, in the starry skies above, but Astronaut Scott Carpenter, 39, discovered that the dawn comes up with a thundering herd in Bermuda. Buzzing along on one of those mid-ocean motor bikes at 5:30 a.m. to the U.S. Navy base where he was temporarily stationed for some underwater training, Carpenter met two cars passing on a narrow road, and when he sheered aside to avoid them, bounced into a doral wall just the way the tourists do. Toll: a compound fracture of the left arm that may take surgery for a proper...