Word: waterized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...determining if that was the case may not be easy. Reconstructing the contents of a tape that has spent two weeks submerged under 250 feet of salt water could prove difficult. The NTSB will probably need translators since the last words of the Egyptian flight crew were likely in Arabic. And if in fact there was no mechanical problem, what went wrong? Did an intruder succeed in wrecking the plane? Or did the pilot himself somehow send the plane down, either through some kind of error or even deliberately? In the end, the questions may outnumber the answers provided...
...Even the flight-data analysis was incomplete, however. The last six seconds of tape, which had been damaged while under water, remain to be deciphered. But even then, investigators now know that the recorder stopped working late in the dive, but before - according to radar data - the plane climbed more than a mile and a half before its final plunge into the ocean. So Wednesday's press conference was mostly a heads-up to the media on the fact that investigators have more questions than answers...
Daily, weapons of mass destruction are deployed in seas the world over: long lines spanning up to 80 miles, dangling scores of thousands of baited hooks; enormous nets, nearly invisible in water. These indiscriminate killers drown everything, including birds and mammals, that takes the bait or blunders into the mesh. The unwanted--a quarter of everything caught--is discarded, left to rot or, sometimes, taken aboard to be ground into meal and fertilizer...
...argument hinges on the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that brings warm surface water north and east and heats Europe. As it travels, some of the water evaporates; what's left is saltier and thus denser. Eventually the dense surface water sinks to the sea bottom, where it flows back southward. And then, near the equator, warm, fresh water from tropical rivers and rain dilutes the salt once again, allowing the water to rise to the surface, warm up and begin flowing north again...
...with global warming, melting ice from Greenland and the Arctic Ocean could pump fresh water into the North Atlantic; so could the increased rainfall predicted for northern latitudes in a warmer world. Result: the Gulf Stream's water wouldn't get saltier after all and wouldn't sink so easily. Without adequate resupply, the southerly underwater current would stop, and the Gulf Stream would in turn be shut...