Word: oceaneering
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...Ocean Living with Dead Zones According to a report published in the journal Science, the number of dead zones--areas of the ocean with oxygen levels so low that marine life can barely survive--has doubled every 10 years since the 1960s as a result of a runoff polluted with nitrogen-rich crop fertilizer. There are now more than 400 such zones--from the Gulf of Mexico to the Black Sea (see map above)--which, the report's authors say, pose as great a threat to coastal ecosystems as overfishing and habitat loss...
Dead zones are created when excess nitrogen and other pollutants in ocean water promote large blooms of algae and phytoplankton on the surface. The nitrogen gets there in a couple of ways: through river water filled with fertilizer from farm runoff and from air polluted with tailpipe and smokestack emissions. When the algae die and sink to the ocean floor, bacteria there break them down, while consuming pretty much all of the available oxygen in the water. The bacteria also proliferate wildly, taking over the ecosystem and exacerbating the oxygen depletion. If conditions like strong currents, which are common...
...best way to prevent this from happening would be to reduce the amount of nitrogen introduced into the ocean. The technology already exists to do that. If, for example, farmers in the upper part of the U.S. were given a financial incentive to plant crops like winter wheat, rather than leaving their fields fallow after the fall harvest, says marine ecologist Robert Howarth of Cornell University, much of the nitrogenous fertilizer that would normally get washed into waterways by spring thaws could instead be absorbed into winter grain crops. Measures of this sort, if uniformly implemented, could all but eliminate...
...cross-cultural exchange (Townsville, 1988), contemporary art (Noumea, 2000) and, most recently, the arts of the northern Pacific (Palau, 2004), to become what the Secretariat of the Pacific Community's Linda Petersen calls "the most important cultural event of the region." This year's theme has been "threading the Oceanic ula," the distinctive floral necklace common to most Pacific welcomings. "We compare islands in the ocean to flowers in a garden," said American Samoa governor Togiola Tulafono on opening night. "Each is distinct in its beauty and sweet scent. All that is needed is a strong thread...
When Barack Obama was last in Hawaii to visit his grandmother and sister, it was December 2006, and he was still a relatively unknown junior Senator from Illinois deciding whether to run for President. Obama was shocked, then, when a paparazzi shot of him emerging from the Pacific Ocean on one of his favorite Oahu beaches ended up in PEOPLE magazine. The episode added privacy concerns to his deliberations and gave him a taste of the fishbowl that is the Oval Office (as well as the campaign to get there...