Word: oceanic
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From his helicopter window, the President could see little last week except a brown ocean of muddy floodwater. In one area, all that protruded from the earth's watery surface were some straw roofs, treetops and a narrow stretch of broken dike-top roadway 20 miles long. At least 220,000 people had taken refuge on this chain of tiny islands, and were building makeshift shanties. Some had managed to bring along their cows and goats, which were being kept alive on a diet of water hyacinths. Elsewhere, survivors were obliged to fight off poisonous snakes that had sought refuge...
Once, wars were called off for the Olympic Games, but lately the Games have been lopped off for wars. Like a wreath bent out of shape by an ocean wave, one Olympic ring at a time, representing a continent or so, has dislodged itself in a snit and drifted away. The race was still won in 1976, but the Africans weren't in Montreal. The basket was still scored in 1980, but the Americans weren't in Moscow. The weights were still lifted and the punches still landed, but in 1984 the Soviets and Cubans weren't in Los Angeles...
...crowds in plainclothes to make sure that nothing bad happens. They've checked the backgrounds of all the people who live within 500 yards of the Olympic Village. Finally, there are four rings of security boats off the coast to make sure that nothing bad comes in from the ocean. I think the outermost ring is the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet...
...first saw the infrared image of the two cyclones. The picture, taken by a Japanese weather satellite, revealed two giant Pacific storms in temporary but exact alignment on opposite sides of the equator. That conjunction generated a massive burst of westerly winds across thousands of miles of the equatorial ocean, pushing a surge of warm water eastward. Miller, a Government oceanographer, abruptly realized he was looking at a mysterious natural engine that drives El Nino, the unruly fluctuation of weather that periodically afflicts places as widespread as South America, Asia, Alaska and Africa...
Most recent breakthroughs in remote sensing came from satellites launched in the late 1970s. NASA's Seasat 1, Tiros N and Nimbus 7 satellites took indirect measurements of ocean conditions, such as surface wind speed and direction, by gathering data on radiation scattered by waves. At first, scientists had to correct their data for errors introduced by everything from sunspot activity to changes in the ozone levels of the upper atmosphere. "It wasn't just getting bigger computers, better instruments, better physics or better computer languages," says Robert Evans, a physicist at the University of Miami's Remote Sensing Laboratory...