Word: oceaneering
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...that rate could accelerate. Starting in the 1990s, say scientists, ocean temperatures have been increasing at a faster clip--enough to more than double their contribution to sea-level rise. At the same time, the global warming has dramatically increased the meltwater and ice discharged by glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets. It's still unclear whether other factors--such as changes in the amount of snow that falls on Antarctica or the amount of water trapped in reservoirs--will speed the rise in ocean levels or slow it, or even send it into reverse...
...Maldives have remained the same over time. Twenty thousand years ago, at the height of the last Ice Age, says Abdulla Naseer, director of the Marine Research Center in Malé, the Maldives were not the low-lying coral islands we see today. Due to frigid ocean temperatures and vast amounts of water locked up as ice, sea levels were some 400 ft. lower then, and the reef crests loomed above the sea's surface as sheer-sided limestone pinnacles. Then, as the earth warmed and the ice melted, the rising ocean overtopped these pinnacles, providing new surfaces for the corals...
...that protection became clear in 1987 after Malé expanded out to the edge of its reef, burying it beneath a thick layer of coral sand and gravel. In April of that year, an armada of giant waves--stirred up, some think, by a distant cyclone in the Indian Ocean--attacked the city, gouging out big chunks of landfill and nearly washing away the car in which Gayoom was riding. A short time later, he gave the first of a series of famous speeches that invoked the image of the Maldives being swallowed...
...living coral breakwaters that shield the rest of the island chain. Among other things, it has banned the mining of coral stone that for centuries has been used by villagers to construct mosques and houses. But what the government can't control is the temperature of the surrounding ocean--and that does not bode well for the future...
...reason? Healthy reefs are capable of growing upward in response to higher sea levels. But when ocean temperatures rise too high, coral polyps become susceptible to a disease known as bleaching, so-called because it involves loss of the symbiotic algae that not only provide the polyps with essential nutrition but also color their tissues. Like a fever, bleaching is not necessarily fatal, but can be if ocean temperatures stay too high for too long. That's what happened seven years ago, when a prolonged heightening of sea-surface temperatures, triggered by the 1997-1998 El Niño, ripped through...