Word: sedimenting
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...biologist, Alain Bombard, says that the sea can handle human sewage. "But," he adds, "this process of purification is easily and seriously disrupted by the introduction of the chemical byproducts of civilization." Near Marseille, a pair of big aluminum refineries each day discharge 6,000 tons of a red sediment into the Mediterranean. Though 80% of it funnels into a deep submarine trench, the remainder settles elsewhere on the bottom. "The problem," says Bombard, "is that this waste, though not toxic in itself, blankets and kills all living things. Moreover, this is an area where it is essential to have...
...water temperatures near these ridges are considerably higher than those elsewhere in the ocean. In addition, there are ocean-floor fault lines or cracks that were apparently caused by movement of the seabed itself. Although the oceans are billions of years old, sonar measurement of the depth of accumulated sediment indicated that the sea floor is no more than a few hundred million years old; the deposit of sediment should be much thicker...
...hardens into a more rigid layer called the lithosphere. When new lava oozes out, it attaches itself to the older lithosphere and continues to move laterally from the mid-ocean ridges. Millions of years and thousands of miles later, the moving lithosphere plunges back into the earth, carrying its sediment with it and forming the deep ocean trenches found at the edge of continents. Hess's theory at last had provided a workable mechanism needed by continental-drift theorists. It was the sea floor itself that moved. Like giant conveyor belts, the ocean bottoms transported the earth...
...actually rising from the ridges and dropping back into the earth through the trenches, they reasoned, there should be more seismic shocks in these regions than in surrounding areas. Tests proved them right. The U.S. oceanographic vessel Glomar Challenger has provided even more persuasive evidence. All 135 cores of sediment it has collected from the ocean floor fit into a neat pattern: the farther from the mid-ocean ridge they were drilled, the older they proved...
...scientist last week dispelled fears that a new Ice Age is about to engulf the world. Some climatologists had predicted that the Arctic pack ice would some day unfreeze. However,after examining sediment thought to be 4,000,000 years old at latitude 80° N., longitude 158°W., the University of Wisconsin's David Clark confidently predicted that no pack ice will chill Key Biscayne very soon. It was one of the few pieces of unequivocally good news heard lately, and it recalled Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, which described...