Word: mud
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...claims of the rival pro-Taft delegation. Tuttle had been in battle before: in World War II, he was an artillery battalion commander in the Pacific. An ex-officer who served under him remembers him as "the kind of guy who never got ruffled. He could wade through mud and keep clean, be under fire and keep cool...
...more recent theory has it that the gorges were cut by "turbidity currents," i.e., rivers of mud on the bottom. When a slope of loose material is disturbed-by an earthquake, for example-mud and sand get mixed with the water. Since the turbid mixture is heavier than clear water, it flows down the slope, eroding a valley just as a river does on land. This was known to happen in lakes, and many oceanographers believed that the same thing happened deep under the ocean...
...cable failed, the exact second of its failure was recorded by instruments on land. Other instruments determined accurately the position of each break. More information came from the repair crews. Long sections of some of the cables had been carried away and lost. Other cables were buried deep under mud and sand...
...Racing Mud. The trouble did not stop there. The stirred-up mud and sand got mixed with water, and the heavy turbid fluid raced down the continental slope like an enormous river more than 100 miles wide, cutting cable after cable. By plotting the time and place of each cable break, the oceanographers could estimate closely how fast the turbidity current flowed. On the sloping continental rise (at the foot of the continental slope), it raced at 50 knots (57.6 m.p.h.). More than 13 hours later, when it cut the last cable 300 miles to the southeast, the mud...
This reasoning is supported by the fact that many cables were not merely broken but buried by the mud flow. Heezen and Ewing believe that many such flows, racing for hundreds of miles through the still depths of the ocean, have carved the gorges on their slopes. The "deltas," where their finest material finally settles down, are the flat plains that form the floors of many deep ocean basins...