Word: oceanic
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Eventually he secured a bungalow on a manicured, middle-class street in Santa Monica and made that his office. It was just a little two-bedroom deal, and he worked there until a few months ago, when he moved to grander surroundings closer to the ocean. He cites the need for space, not success, as the reason, and is almost apologetic about the splendor of the present arrangement. Compared with the old office, this new place has majestic scale; there are university presidents with smaller offices than one of the bathrooms in this house. "It doesn't have a Hollywood...
...volcanoes that began erupting 250 million years ago reported that according to radioactive dating, the eruptions coincided in geologic time with one of the great unexplained cataclysms in earth's history--a mass extinction at the end of the Permian period that wiped out up to 95% of all ocean-dwelling species and at least 70% of land-dwelling vertebrates...
What could have caused such indiscriminate carnage? Marauding comets, exploding stars, greenhouse warming, ice-age cooling, sea-level drops, sea-level rises, ocean stagnation, oxygen depletion--every calamity imaginable has been invoked to explain the Permian extinction. But none of these agents of doom, argues geologist Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochron ol ogy Center in California (and lead author of the Science article), comes as close to explaining what happened at the end of the Permian as the rampant, prolonged volcanism that created the terrace-like formations known as the Siberian Traps...
...hours after dropping off Whiting and Baker, La Rebaude reaches a flotilla of protest boats at a spot in the open blue ocean--139.05 degrees W, 22.30 degrees S--about 15 miles off Mururoa. One-masters and two-masters crowd the site; the Manutea, a Greenpeace boat carrying journalists, heaves into view. French picket boats motor slowly at the line of the exclusion zone. A French jet labeled MARINE mock-strafes the boats one by one, diving from about 1,000 ft. to not more than 150 ft., then rising and diving again. Military helicopters buzz about, low enough...
OTHER FACTORS-VARIATIONS IN ocean temperatures and in high-altitude prevailing winds-are also involved. Nobody can say with any certainty why these me teorological influences come and go as they do. Gray favors a mechanism known as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt, a vast, and so far poorly understood, undersea current that carries warm water from the Pacific and Indian oceans into the Atlantic. When the conveyor belt runs faster for unknown reasons, there is more warm water available to generate both rain in the Sahel and storms over the North Atlantic. Or so the reasoning goes...