Word: oceanic
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...waters of Monterey Bay for its maiden voyage. Named Deep Flight I, the 14-ft.-long, 2,900-lb. vehicle is shaped like a chubby, winged torpedo but flies like an underwater bird. Compared with the hard-to-maneuver submersibles that now haul deep-sea explorers sluggishly around the oceans, Deep Flight is an aquatic F-16 fighter. It can perform barrel rolls, race a fast-moving pod of whales or leap vertically right out of the sea. With a touch on the controls, a skilled pilot--who lies prone in a body harness, his or her head protruding into...
...lost on oceanographers. More than 100 expeditions have reached Everest, the 29,028-ft. pinnacle of the Himalayas; manned voyages to space have become commonplace; and robot probes have ventured to the outer reaches of the solar system. But only now are the deepest parts of the ocean coming within reach. "I think there's a perception that we have already explored the sea," says marine biologist Sylvia Earle, a former chief scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and a co-founder of Deep Ocean Engineering, the San Leandro, California, company where construction of Deep Flight I began...
...economic potential is equally enormous. Majestically swirling ocean currents influence much of the world's weather patterns; figuring out how they operate could save trillions of dollars in weather-related disasters. The oceans also have vast reserves of commercially valuable minerals, including nickel, iron, manganese, copper and cobalt. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are already analyzing deep-sea bacteria, fish and marine plants looking for substances that they might someday turn into miracle drugs. Says Bruce Robison, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California: "I can guarantee you that the discoveries beneficial to mankind will far outweigh those...
Thus began a remarkable period of undersea discovery that transformed biology, geology and oceanography. Scientists have started to understand, for example, how year-to-year changes in wind patterns and ocean currents that lead to phenomena like the Pacific's El Nino can not only devastate populations of commercially valuable fish but also trigger dramatic shifts in weather patterns. Oceanic fluctuations over much longer time scales, combined with major currents like the Gulf Stream, may start (and bring to an end) planet-wide climatic changes like the Ice Ages...
When geologists first visited the mid-ocean range in the late 1970s, they were convinced that it supported the then new theory of plate tectonics. According to this theory, the surface of the earth is not a single, rocky shell but a series of hard "plates," perhaps 80 km thick and up to thousands of kilometers across, floating on a bed of partly molten rock. The mid-ocean ridges, geologists argued, were likely locations for planetary crust to be created: the new plate material would be pushed upward by forces from below before it settled back down to form...