Word: oceaneering
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...Years before the world heard of Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, the Tigers were pioneering a new method of guerrilla warfare in their fight against Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese for a tiny separate state in the north of the small Indian Ocean island. The first Tiger killed himself attacking the Sri Lankan army in 1987. Hundreds followed, and when they signed a cease-fire with the Sri Lankan government in February 2002, the Tigers accounted for around a third of all suicide attacks in the world. A Western diplomat based in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo describes...
...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. The Gulf...
...forces that have caused the coast to subside are pretty well understood. What's far less clear is the possible role of global warming. That rising temperatures heat the ocean and melt ice caps is undisputed. Most climate models also predict that turning up the worldwide thermometer will lead to more extreme weather patterns--hotter hots, colder colds, harder rains. Hurricanes would seem to be especially sensitive to climate changes, since warm ocean waters are the fuel that drives the storms...
...that doesn't take into account blockbusters like Katrina or 1992's Andrew. But the period from 1991 to 1994 was one of the quietest in history. And while the Pacific has seen an increase in hurricanes and typhoons in recent years, the southwestern Indian Ocean has remained stable and the northern Indian Ocean has actually seen a drop. Around the world, all that amounts to a statistical wash. "It's an unresolved issue," says atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "but we do not see any increase at all in the frequency of hurricanes globally...
...SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA: The view of the Pacific Ocean from the 1,500-m Point Lookout platform is just one of the joys awaiting hikers in New England National Park (nationalparks.nsw.gov.au)?an ecological wonderland of soaring cliffs and World Heritage rain forest. If time is limited, the 2.5-km Eagle's Nest circuit, along the edge of a sheer drop, offers adrenaline in a jiffy...