Word: oceaneering
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...castaway has put a message in a bottle and cast it out to sea, hoping it would someday reach land. Sorry, all you modern-day Robinson Crusoes, try that with a plastic bottle in real life, and your message will probably end up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, bobbing in a floating collection of trash known as the Plastic Vortex. It's an accumulation of plastic debris swept into the Pacific - whether directly from beaches or flowing out of rivers - and carried by equatorial currents into a swirling pattern to one spot between Hawaii and the mainland...
...shifting vortex, which some scientists estimate to be twice the size of Texas. And as plastic use increases, especially in rapidly growing developing nations on the western end of the Pacific, that vortex will continue to grow. "It's huge," notes Doug Woodring, an entrepreneur and ocean conservationist in Hong Kong. But "unfortunately the ocean is a big place, and once it's out of sight, it's out of mind." (See TIME's photos: Fragile Planet...
...Woodring is trying to change that. With help from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Woodring and several colleagues in ocean conservation are launching a two-ship expedition to the plastic vortex to explore it, take photographs and video and alert the public about the growing threat of ocean waste. "We need to make people realize what we are doing to our ocean," says Woodring...
...study published in the July 24 issue of Science is clearing the haze. A group of researchers from the University of Miami and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied cloud data of the northeast Pacific Ocean - both from satellites and from the human eye - over the past 50 years and combined that with climate models. They found that low-level clouds tend to dissipate as the ocean warms - which means a warmer world could well have less cloud cover. "That would create positive feedback, a reinforcing cycle that continues to warm the climate," says Amy Clement, a climate scientist...
...data showed that as the Pacific Ocean has warmed over the past several decades - part of the gradual process of global warming - low-level cloud cover has lessened. That might be due to the fact that as the earth's surface warms, the atmosphere becomes more unstable and draws up water vapor from low altitudes to form deep clouds high in the sky. (Those types of high-altitude clouds don't have the same cooling effect.) The Science study also found that as the oceans warmed, the trade winds - the easterly surface winds that blow near the equator - weakened, which...