Word: oceanic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sound waves were bent by this temperature gradient, hiding a sub as effectively as if it were behind a hill. Equipped with a gadget of Woods Hole's devising, a bathythermograph, many a U.S. sub saved itself during World War II by finding a temperature "hill" in the ocean and slip ping behind...
...Frontier. With the ocean now transformed from a barrier to a new and menacing frontier from which guided missiles could be launched upon U.S. cities, the Navy's concern with oceanography has expanded. That concern has brought U.S. oceanographers money, men and resources they never dreamed of before the war, made their specialty perhaps the fastest-growing science in the world. The oceanographic fleet has grown to twelve ocean-going vessels backed by a swarm of small craft and expanding shore establishments full of expensive apparatus. The Russians have proved equally alert to the ocean's dangers...
What's more, other scientists have abruptly rediscovered the ocean. Geographers and geophysicists now realize that most of the world's surface lies beneath the ocean, and can now recite glibly the truism that the bottom of the ocean is not as well known as the near side of the moon. Discoveries follow every voyage. Under the Pacific, oceanographers have found deep trenches, at least one of them big enough to contain seven Grand Canyons, and a 1,000-mile range of high mountains that no one knew existed until just one year...
Above its still mysterious floor, the ocean is not homogeneous but is a vast, intricate structure of separate and distinct layers, each with its own character and individuality. In some places the layers curl up and mix; in other places they do not. Through the layers mighty rivers stream on largely unknown courses, often flowing in opposite directions close to one another. Exploration of this huge anatomy is just beginning. Realizing ever more clearly that most weather originates over the oceans, meteorologists are studying its mighty motions as the key to the world's climate. A change...
...world going through the throes of a population explosion, earth scientists have rediscovered the sea, remember that the ocean contains the bulk of the earth's life, and that it is probably capable of producing more food than all of the earth's land. Says one oceanographer: "The ocean represents an inner space as important as outer space, but different...