Word: reefs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...charming island. It's also extremely small, not much more than a quarter-mile across. From the sandy street that runs through the center of town, you can see both the brilliant turquoise of the interior lagoon and, on the other side, waves breaking on the shallow reef that faces the Indian Ocean. There are dozens of islands like Naalaafushi in the Maldives--too many, say government officials, to provide with essential services, let alone shore up against the sea. In time, they hope, the residents of these islands (some of which have populations of not much more than...
...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...