Word: reef
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...says Abdulla Naseer, director of the Marine Research Center in Malé, the Maldives were not the low-lying coral islands we see today. Due to frigid ocean temperatures and vast amounts of water locked up as ice, sea levels were some 400 ft. lower then, and the reef crests loomed above the sea's surface as sheer-sided limestone pinnacles. Then, as the earth warmed and the ice melted, the rising ocean overtopped these pinnacles, providing new surfaces for the corals to colonize. Around 5,000 years ago, after the corals brought the reefs close enough...
...course, the people who live on such islands want protection from marauding waves, and for millenniums the islands' reefs have provided it. The value of that protection became clear in 1987 after Malé expanded out to the edge of its reef, burying it beneath a thick layer of coral sand and gravel. In April of that year, an armada of giant waves--stirred up, some think, by a distant cyclone in the Indian Ocean--attacked the city, gouging out big chunks of landfill and nearly washing away the car in which Gayoom was riding. A short time later, he gave...
...instruments to suit that predisposition. In a way, the Bomb may have curbed the killer instinct because of the immensity of its power. People will not, cannot use absolutely any weapons they choose anymore. But the instinct is there still, storming back and forth like a shark beyond the reef. Whatever fears the Bomb has brought, the fear of our murderous capacities is deeper. However monstrous our visions of the Bomb's future, they were only mirrors of what we did, and would probably do again, if we could get away alive. Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola...
...weeks ago, Fisher's persistence paid off. His divers, reconnoitering 54 ft. below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, 40 miles west of Key West, came upon what Bleth McHaley, vice president of Fisher's Treasure Salvors Inc., has since described as "a reef of silver bars with lobsters living in it." Many are now calling the find the largest ever recovered from a shipwreck. "They were jumping up and down and waving their hands at us in the water," says Kane Fisher, Mel's 26-year-old son, referring to the pair of divers who made the initial discovery...
Fisher immediately sent his divers to the area, and instructed them to investigate a 3-sq.-mi. patch of underwater reef ten miles southwest of the Marquesas. He was relying on the supposition that the Atocha had probably split asunder on the reef. But a small find that at first seemed encouraging led him astray. In 1973 Fisher's boat, the Virgalona, hauled up his first Atocha finds, an anchor and three silver bars, some two miles or so from the site that Fisher had targeted. Says McHaley: "I wish we had never found them. It was a false lead...