Word: piccards
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...recent weeks, Cousteau and other worried specialists have been spelling out just how polluted the seas and oceans have become. Testifying before a United Nations symposium on the environment in Geneva, Swiss Marine Explorer Jacques Piccard warned that if nothing is done, all the oceans will be dead before the end of the century. Cousteau, who speaks with the authority of numerous dives made in virtually all of the planet's deep waters, told Senator Ernest Rolling's subcommittee on oceans and atmosphere that even the remote reef off Madagascar is "frankly dead today." In a very...
...point out that while water covers 70% of the earth's surface, it is a covering only, quite thin when compared with the bulk of the globe as a whole. It cannot be treated as a bottomless sewer, capable of absorbing any amount of pollution. In fact, says Piccard, "Phytoplankton, the primitive plant life that generates most of the earth's oxygen, is surface matter. It absorbs dirt and acts as a sort of pollution filter. Thus all you need to knock out is the surface phytoplankton, and the entire marine life cycle is fatally disrupted." That disruption...
...Piccard estimated that what he calls Homo technicus releases between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 tons of polluting petroleum products every year to float on the seas' sensitive surface. Up to 1.8 million tons come from automobile exhaust emissions which rise into the atmosphere and eventually precipitate onto the ocean surface. Tankers spill another million. The world's polluted rivers spew out the rest...
...point, an outraged swordfish attacked the underwater craft; another time, a monstrous 30-foot jellyfish with four-inch-thick tentacles loomed alongside. Those were only two of the incidents that famed Swiss Explorer Jacques Piccard and his crew of scientists had to report when their 50-foot submarine Ben Franklin surfaced off Nova Scotia after a 31-day, 1,650-mile drift up the Atlantic coast in the Gulf Stream. Piccard and his five companions spoke of massive undersea waves caused by the swirling of the Gulf Stream's powerful current around uncharted "hills" on the ocean floor. Their...
Maybe it was all those deep dives into the ocean, but Swiss Scientist Jacques Piccard, 45, son of the inventor of the bathyscaphe, saw in the immediate future nothing but an abyss of human self-destruction. He was, he said, "seriously doubtful" about whether mankind would last out the century. Atomic weapons are perilous enough, Piccard told a symposium at Hoboken's Stevens Institute, but man's whole technology "is little else than a widespread suicidal pollution affecting the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land we till. Every infant born in America today...