Word: watered
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Deep & Narrow. Before the war, even such well-known currents had not been thoroughly mapped in detail. For Woods Hole oceanographers, the first order of business was a new study of the great Gulf Stream, which exports tropical water to northern Europe. With the aid of loran, the new Atlantis surveys proved that it is not a wide, steady stream, but a jet that whips from side to side over hundreds of miles and sometimes curls into eddies. It may run fast or slow or backward, and only the general sum of its motion carries warm water to Europe...
...opposite direction. Later investigation revealed that the Cromwell Current is a tremendous thing. It is 250 miles wide, at least 3,500 miles long. Three hundred feet below the surface, its high-speed core flows eastward at up to 3 knots, carrying 1,000 times as much water as the Mississippi...
Years of patient measurements of water temperature, salinity and density have begun to pay off by providing oceanography with a substructure of theory. Doubting the conventional view that ocean currents are simply streams of water pushed around by prevailing winds, Henry Stommel of Woods Hole analyzed thousands of such observations, predicted that a current would be found flowing under the Gulf Stream in the opposite direction. In 1957 the Atlantis and the British oceanographic ship Discovery II went looking for this current. Their tool was an ingenious buoy invented by British Oceanographer John C. Swallow, which sinks slowly until...
...live, rather than almost impossible the way it is now." The ocean will also grow warmer, and will be forced to release dissolved carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This will increase the greenhouse effect. At some point in this chain reaction, the Antarctic icecap will melt, adding enough water to the ocean to drown nearly all of the earth's great cities...
Oceanographers are helping the hunters by plotting the trails fish follow, which are mostly determined by shifting ocean currents and the consequent shift in water temperatures. But they are also thinking about the possibility of fertilizing the ocean. Some parts of it are naturally rich and boiling with life. The water of breaking waves in such areas is green and turbid because it is full of microscopic plants and animals grazing on them. But large parts of the ocean are deserts with hardly any life. Their breaking waves are sapphire blue, the color of clear and lifeless water. Fish migrate...