Word: oceanic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...That revolution reached its highest point only last fortnight, when the nuclear submarine Skate poked up in a North Pole ice gap within atom-armed Polaris range of the Soviet Union (TIME, Aug. 25). In its atomic-age revolution, the submarine is no longer a mere marauder against ocean-borne commerce; it is a potential offensive weapons carrier of the first strategic importance...
...months as a goblin killer, Thach has perfected techniques aimed at the mind of the submarine skipper, imprisoned in the ocean's depths. One of Thach's favorite tactics is nicknamed The Other Shoe, and it is designed to take advantage of the submariner's insatiable curiosity about what is happening on the surface. Instead of the expected salvo of two depth charges, Thach heaves only one from a destroyer. The submarine skipper waits anxiously for the second charge-just as a man in bed, hearing his upstairs neighbor drop one shoe, frets sleepily as he listens...
...Thach's worst problem is neither the submarine nor the submariner. It is the submarine's element, the sea itself-12 million sq. mi. of ocean surface in the North Atlantic alone. Surface surveillance, given enough men and equipment as well as allied cooperation, is a technical possibility. But it is of the unknown depths of the sea, the mysteries of the 2 billion-year-old undersea world, that man knows pitifully little. More is known of the near side of the moon than of the ocean floor...
...deeper-diving submarines. Knowledge of this topography as well as of the mysterious currents that flow there will decide the future's underwater wars. Though the seas cover 70% of the earth's surface, oceanographers have carefully mapped only about a third of the world's ocean floor. The Russians have gone full steam on oceanography, have built the world's biggest fleet of floating oceanographic laboratories-14 large vessels v. the U.S.'s half-dozen*-and have explored much of the floor of the Arctic Ocean...
...ocean floor, fortunately, is a fixed topography; its changes are minute in time. But detecting the underwater enemy is the first job of Thach and his ASW team, and like the submariner, Thach faces the bewildering phenomenon of the sea itself: its lack of homogeneity, its massive motion, its madness, its strange, deep rivers. One undercurrent, recently discovered in the Pacific, is 200 miles wide, 500 to 1,000 ft. deep, flows east along the equator, 100 ft. below the westerly-flowing surface...