Word: seafloor
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...permafrost is on dry land either. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a vast expanse of shallow seafloor off Russia's northeast coast, was once wetland as well. It was submerged as melting glaciers drove sea level up at the end of the last ice age, but it still contains methane-rich permafrost, which Shakhova believes may now be becoming unstable. The numbers are not alarmingly large, she agrees, but what is worrisome is that no leakage was expected here. (See TIME's special report on the environment...
...acoustic waves. Airguns, which are towed underwater at the back of the ship, cause loud, explosive sounds at a low frequency made when their pressurized air gets released into the water. The sound waves they generate are used to help build a picture of the rock structure beneath the seafloor, delineating fault lines, cracks or underwater volcanoes...
...this is literally just what Bush has done. Last Tuesday, the President designated three new stretches of the Pacific as Marine National Monuments, which effectively bans commercial fishing, seafloor mining, oil exploration, and other commercial exploitation. The act builds upon Bush’s 2006 decree that created a similar monument near the Northern Hawaiian islands, Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (which seems to have a syllable for each of its 139,800 square miles). At the time, Papahanaumokuakea was the largest patch of ocean ever preserved, a record broken only by Tuesday’s act, which encompasses...
...Once we stop burning fossil fuels, it could take as long as 100,000 years for the carbon dioxide we've been pouring into the atmosphere to be gone. Most of it will have settled into the ocean, on its way to becoming new limestone beds on the seafloor; the rest will have been absorbed by the land, some of it eventually forming new deposits of coal. Even now, the water and soil are acting like great sponges, soaking up at least some of the carbon our industrial species emits every day and slowing--if not preventing--the climate-changing...
...break that compound in two, you create an acid and a base. Remove some of the acid, and you change ocean chemistry in such a way that atmospheric CO2 dissolves into the water, where it is taken up in the shells of marine creatures, which fall to the seafloor and become limestone. Essentially, says Kurt House, a Harvard graduate student who came up with the idea when he was jogging by the Charles River, the ocean "could become a giant carbon dioxide collector...