Word: oceaneering
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When I was young, my family would spend the summer in Long Beach Island (LBI), a half-mile-wide tourist haven in Ocean County, New Jersey. My memories of LBI are of miniature golf, of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream cones, and of long walks along the sand with my parents. Consider this along with—though my Irish name does its best to obfuscate it—my Sicilian heritage, and I’m perhaps as entitled as anyone to be offended by MTV’s “Jersey Shore...
...Seymour, the eldest of the Glass children. It's the last day of his life, and he appears in just the final pages, talking with a little girl on a beach in Florida - one of the many radiant children in Salinger's work - and bringing her out into the ocean in a fond but also slightly dangerous way, and then returning to the hotel room where his new bride, who has been on the phone earlier assuring her mother that Seymour is not crazy, lies sleeping. The last line reads: "Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied...
...scientists feared the record-thin Arctic ice cover might melt away. But it didn't, because of unusually favorable ocean currents and weather patterns. "Early in the 2009 season it looked like we might be on the way to a record melt," says Julienne Stroeve, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colo., "but then winds spread the ice out, so the overall coverage ended up being greater than in 2007." Without those winds, in other words, 2009 might have set a new record for open water. But as it happened, ice cover...
...were developed a long time ago," says Stroeve, "based on what 'typical' ice looked like at that time. We know there are errors with the measurements." The weakness in multiyear ice also suggests that if the unfavorable winds and currents that caused the 2007 meltback should recur, the Arctic Ocean could undergo another especially dramatic summer melt. Not just the first-year ice might go, but also some of the "rotten" multiyear ice that Barber encountered...
That in turn would trigger one of the many positive feedback mechanisms that could speed up the warming effects of greenhouse gases. Open ocean reflects less of the Sun's energy than ice does, so a large-scale summer melt would mean more absorption of heat in the ocean. The warmer ocean would heat the air above it, which would slow the refreezing of ice in winter, which would in turn become even more susceptible to melting in summer...