Word: vessels
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...miles down the island's coast. Greenpeace bought the boat somewhat casually at dockside in Papeete and equipped it in four days, without sea testing and without including a long-range radio transmitter or receiver. (The diesel engine died four hours into the voyage, so the vessel also lacked electric power, except a little generated by solar panels, and thus had no functioning refrigerator or electric bilge pump.) A tiny shortwave radio occasionally brought in a scrap of intelligence. Somebody had reached the quarter-finals at the U.S. Open. An Australian-rules football team had lost...
Since the northern sea route was opened to commercial foreign traffic in 1992, however, only one vessel has made the complete trip. Big insurers are loath to underwrite these ventures, given the severity of the northern weather and uncertainty over Russia's ability to keep the route open. Indeed, instead of charging minimal fees to grab market share, the Russian authority responsible for the sea route set the administration fees at $6 a ton, eating up most of the savings that might come from taking the route...
Sometime this fall, if all goes well, a revolutionary new undersea vessel will be lowered gently into the waters of Monterey Bay for its maiden voyage. Named Deep Flight I, the 14-ft.-long, 2,900-lb. vehicle is shaped like a chubby, winged torpedo but flies like an underwater bird. Compared with the hard-to-maneuver submersibles that now haul deep-sea explorers sluggishly around the oceans, Deep Flight is an aquatic F-16 fighter. It can perform barrel rolls, race a fast-moving pod of whales or leap vertically right out of the sea. With a touch...
...eventually took Barton and zoologist William Beebe to a record 3,028 ft., off Bermuda. But it wasn't at all maneuverable: it could only go straight down and straight back up again. Swiss engineer Auguste Piccard solved the mobility problem with the first true submersible, a dirigible-like vessel called a bathyscaphe, which consisted of a spherical watertight cabin suspended below a buoyant gasoline-filled pontoon. (A submersible is simply a small, mobile undersea vessel used for science...
...built the Shinkai 6500 submersible, which can go deeper than any other piloted craft in the world. On its very first series of missions in 1991, Shinkai found unsuspected deep fissures on the edge of the Pacific plate, which presses in on the island nation from the east. The vessel has also discovered the world's deepest known colony of clams (at a depth of more than 20,000 ft.) and a series of thickly populated hydrothermal vents...