Word: watered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...likely source of mischief making: clouds of ice particles in the polar stratosphere. Explains Rowland: "Mostly, you don't get clouds in the stratosphere because most of the water has been frozen out earlier. But if the temperature gets low enough, you start freezing out the rest." Indeed, ice may prove to be a central cause of the ozone hole, since it provides surfaces for a kind of chemistry only recently associated with reactions in the atmosphere. In a gaseous state, molecules bounce around and eventually some hit one another. But adding a surface for the molecules to collect...
Clouds, which shade about half the earth's surface at any given time, are another important climatic factor. Says James Coakley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research: "If you heat up the atmosphere and pump more water in, clouds will change. But how? We don't know." Water vapor, for example, is yet another greenhouse gas, but the white-gray surfaces of clouds reflect solar energy. Which effect predominates? Answer: it depends on the cloud. The bright, low-level stratocumulus clouds reflect 60% of incoming solar rays. But long, thin monsoon clouds let solar heat in while preventing infrared...
Hearing the sound of a small plane overhead, some of the 15 to 20 swimmers in the open sea 20 miles off the Dominican Republic gestured frantically for help. The plane was unable to put down on water, however, and its occupants could only look on in helpless horror at the scene unfolding beneath them. The swimmers, passengers on a sinking people-smuggling ship bound for Puerto Rico, were under siege by dozens of sharks. "In one instance we saw a shark literally throw someone in the air and then attack the person," recalled one of the witnesses, Eugenio Cabral...
...made it. At 9 a.m. a man identified only as Rubio staggered ashore in Nagua and provided the first word of the tragedy. Others drifted with the current as far as 20 miles out to sea and into shark-filled waters. Some of the victims might have been saved had prompt measures been taken after Rubio's alert. Yet military authorities, complained Civil Defense Director Cabral, did not respond to his call for rescue helicopters. In a desperate effort to locate the survivors himself, he commandeered a private plane, from which he watched the sickening scene. Said Cabral...
...stays out late anymore. By 10:30 p.m., even on Fridays, the streets of Port-au-Prince are empty. That is when the shooting begins. In the fancy neighborhoods on the hill and in the slums down by the water, armed men, often in uniform, sometimes in civilian clothes, break into houses, beat the residents, ransack the premises. They steal whatever suits them. No one really knows who they are, what they are looking for. But almost every morning, someone finds a fresh body lying on the street, a bullet through the head. The violence is making everyone wary...