Word: oceanic
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Even greater climate change could be on the way. Growing numbers of scientists fear that the warming trend will so disrupt ocean circulation patterns that the Gulf Stream, the current that warms large parts of the northern hemisphere, could temporarily shut down. If that happens, global warming would, ironically, produce global cooling--and bring on a deep freeze...
...Arctic is part of the thermostat of the earth itself. The difference in temperatures between the tropics and the poles drives the global climate system. The excess heat that collects in the tropics is dissipated at the poles, about half of it through what has been nicknamed the ocean conveyor, a vast deepwater current equivalent to 100 Amazon Rivers. Much of the rest of the heat is conveyed as energy in the storms that move north from the tropics. If the poles continue to warm faster than the tropics, the vigor of this planetary circulatory system may diminish, radically altering...
...turbines still delivering power to its twin screws. In seconds, the sub would have pounded into the seabed some 350 ft. beneath the storm-driven surface of the Barents Sea with a shock that would have hurled survivors against equipment and bulkheads. Finally, as the boat settled onto the ocean floor, openings along the keel would probably no longer have been able to draw in seawater needed to cool the reactors. Automatic systems would have "scrammed" the reactors, pushing control rods into the core and shutting them down. The Kursk, its shattered bow shoved into a furrow of sand...
Nothing so chills the U.S. Navy as an incoming cable sounding the alarm over a DISSUB--a disabled U.S. submarine--stranded somewhere on the ocean floor. That's why, following the loss of the U.S.S. Thresher in 1963 with 129 men aboard, the Navy launched its SUBSAFE program. It's designed to wring as much danger as possible out of the inherently risky business of prowling the world's oceans. The program isn't perfect. In 1968, the U.S.S. Scorpion went down, killing all 99 aboard. But those 228 Americans lost are fewer than half the number of Russians killed...
...afford the cost of decommissioning them. But nobody would have expected the accident, when it came, to strike the Kursk, a spanking new Oscar II-class nuclear sub that only went into service in 1995. Yet it is the Kursk that languishes 350 feet down on the ocean floor, stricken after what the Russian navy calls a "big and serious collision." And despite a dramatic rescue effort, Moscow rates its chances of rescuing the 100-odd crewmen aboard as "not very high...