Oceanology: Underwater Waves Make Underwater Weather

After years of patient probing, oceanographers still have only the sketchiest notions about the shape of the drowned, undersea landscape that makes up 70% of the earth's crust. They know even less about undersea "weather"—the currents, eddies and swift temperature changes that sweep across the ocean bottom like winds and storms on land. Not until Columbia University's Hudson Laboratories announced the first direct measurements of deep waves, could oceanographers be sure that the great, lazy surges actually exist.

The latest contribution to submarine meteorology was made by modified Swallow buoys,* which...

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