Word: oceanic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...crust, getting progressively hotter. It doesn't boil, despite temperatures reaching up to 400 degrees C, because it is under terrific pressure. Finally, the hot water gushes back up in murky clouds that cool rapidly, dumping dissolved minerals, including zinc, copper, iron, sulfur compounds and silica, onto the ocean floor. The material hardens into chimneys, known as "black smokers" (one, nicknamed Godzilla, towers 148 ft. above the bottom...
That includes some scientists. Although he has never been to the very deepest trenches, ocean explorer Robert Ballard of Woods Hole, who is best known for discovering the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, is convinced that the action lies in the relative shallows. "I believe that the deep sea has very little to offer," he says. "I've been there. I've spent a career there. I don't see the future there." The French have decided not even to bother trying to break the 20,000 ft. barrier--the range of their deepest-diving submersible, the three-person...
...that attitude is far from universal. Biologist Greg Stone, of the New England Aquarium in Boston, compares reaching the deepest abyss with Christopher Columbus' search for the New World. "Why should we care about the deepest 3% of the oceans, and why do we need to reach it?" he asks rhetorically. "For one, we won't know what it holds until we've been there. There will certainly be new creatures. We'll be able to learn where gases from the atmosphere go in the ocean. We'll be able to get closest to where the geological action...
...program, Russia--are always aware of who's ahead in the quest for the bottom. At the moment, it's probably Japan, not least because of the triumphant touchdown in the Challenge Deep last March of its 10.5-ton, $41.5 million ROV called Kaiko. The Japanese got into ocean research well after the French, Americans and Russians. But the country has made up for lost time. Says Brian Taylor, a marine geologist at the University of Hawaii and a sometime visiting scientist at the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC): "The Japanese are on the leading edge...
...Japanese, to be sure, are always interested in new market opportunities. But they have a more compelling need to understand the ocean floor: the southern part of the island nation has the bad luck to sit on the meeting place of three tectonic plates. As these plates grind against each other, they generate about one-tenth of the world's annual allotment of earthquakes, including plenty of lethal quakes like the one that killed 5,500 people in Kobe in January and the famous 1923 Tokyo temblor in which more than 142,000 perished...