Word: oceaneering
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...evidence, check out the wall-to-wall patrons (Asian and non-Asian alike) enjoying dim sum, from chicken feet to coconut cake, at Ocean Palace, a cavernous banquet hall in the Bellaire neighborhood at the western end of Houston's Chinatown. The steamed buns filled with barbecued pork are as light as clouds; slivers of custard-soft tofu are immersed in a light ginger syrup; and the chili oil at every table is made by the chef. Waiters cruise the place with carts of delicacies; just point to the ones you want...
Very early on the morning of May 10, 1883, a lighthouse keeper gazing out at the Sunda Strait, which separates Sumatra from Java, saw the surface of the ocean suddenly whiten, go still, then become oil-slick smooth. Like an unsuspecting sorority girl in a horror movie, he shrugged it off as insignificant--just part of the region's usual seismic background noise. Ninety-nine days later, the nearby volcanic island of Krakatoa exploded, producing probably the loudest sound heard in human history and killing more than 36,000 people...
...this threat is a recently discovered vulnerability of the Gulf Stream. The current, dubbed the Blue God by author William MacLeisch, warms much of Europe and eastern North America by bringing enormous amounts of tropical water northward as part of the "great ocean conveyor" that distributes heat around the world. As this warm water moves north, evaporation makes it saltier and heavier. By the time the stream has reached the far northern waters between Norway and Greenland it has given up most of its heat, and this salty, heavy water plunges into the abyss, pulling more water behind...
...screw things up, according to scientists such as Robert Gagosian, president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The melting of glaciers and increased precipitation in the north has poured fresh water into the Atlantic, in some places leaving a ten foot thick layer on the ocean surface, according to Terence Joyce, also of Woods Hole. As the lighter fresh water slows the sinking of the Gulf Stream as it hits these northern latitudes it reduces the pull that brings warm water northward. Scientists estimate that the speed of the conveyor in the far north has diminished...
...this signals the beginning of an abrupt change in climate, instabilities that dwarf the threat of terrorism lie in our future. If these great ocean currents are interrupted, temperatures in the Northeast might drop 10 degrees F (this winter represented a drop of about 2.5 degrees F) in less than a decade. Naturally, one winter does not an ice age make, and maybe our cold winter represents nothing more than a byproduct of regularly recurring cycles such as the North Atlantic Oscillation and El Nino. At the moment we don't know...