Nazaré and the World’s Largest Waves Like tornadoes and mountains, ocean waves are a form that seems to have a primal impact on humans. Their shapes, sounds, and monotonies are alluring, but they also feature a fear-inducing monstrosity. The looming tsunami wave is a moving wall from which one cannot escape. Millions of years of …
The Hole Story Seventy-one percent of the Earth’s surface is covered with oceans. Eighty percent of those tempestuous seas is completely unexplored. We like to think of outer space as the final frontier, but that’s a large swath of our home about which we know very little. And with all those murky regions, unmapped and …
Bloop In the late 1940s, the U.S. Navy began to develop the Sound Surveillance System, an array of passive sonar stations designed to track Soviet submarines. By the late 1980s, SOSUS became surplus goods, as the USSR blinked out of existence. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began to utilize the system to study the …
The Bathysphere In our previous exploration on the death spirals of army ants, we met the enigmatic William Beebe, ornithologist, entomologist, ichthyologist, and conservationist. Beebe pioneered a holistic approach to ecology. In order to understand a place in totality, one must study the place in totality. Having practiced this method multiple times in the jungle, …
Point Nemo Way back in Episode #32, we explored Poles of Inaccessibility. These geographic curiosities are the spots on continents or countries that are the farthest from some criterion, usually the ocean. In North America, the point farthest from any major sea lies in South Dakota, 1,030 miles from salty water. We can also measure the …