Word: midocean
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...decade later, deep-diving submersibles scanning the midocean ridge near the Galapagos Islands stumbled on something totally unexpected: plumes of toxic water spewing from cracks in the sea floor. Huddled around these awful oases were entire ecosystems made up of hundreds of hitherto unknown species, ranging from bright red tube worms to ghost-white crabs and anemones...
...miles alone across the Pacific from San Francisco. He had abandoned a successful photography business and left a girlfriend ashore, and he recalls fretting for months about why he was risking his life. "I invented all sorts of answers, but none of them was honest." The truth dawned in midocean, as he was listening to a radio interview with a man who, as he remembers, had resailed the route Captain Bligh followed after he was cast adrift from the Bounty by mutineers. "He had come up with all these reasons, to prove Bligh's logs were right, to prove...
What triggered these changes, however, remains unclear. Namias notes that water temperatures in the Pacific rose a few degrees higher than normal last fall off the west coast of North America, while dropping off in midocean. He believes that these temperature shifts influence the winds and determine the course of storms that work their way up to the jet-stream level. Harry Geise, a California meteorologist, blames the storms and frigid temperatures on a high-pressure zone of warm air hovering off the country's Pacific coast and sometimes shifting over land...
Last week the Glomar Challenger again made news. Another team of geologists announced that in July a drill lowered from the ship in midocean, about 200 miles southwest of the Azores, had penetrated 1,910 ft. into the earth's hard crust under the Atlantic bottom sediment. It returned core samples from depths never before explored; the previous record penetration was 260 ft. into the submarine crustal rock. Said Geochemist William Melson of the Smithsonian Institution: "It was like probing into the unknown, getting samples we had thought about for years but had never been able to reach...
Other human pollutants showed up in the remotest areas. After sailing across the Atlantic in a reed boat last summer, Explorer Thor Heyerdahl reported that stinking nodules of oil covered a 1,400-mile stretch of midocean. Apparently the oil was dumped by ships cleaning their tanks. Since 1950, warned Jacques-Yves Cousteau, pollution and overfishing have killed 40% of marine life in the oceans. Meeting in Malta and Rome, scientists charted ways to save the seas ?provided international cooperation can be achieved...