Seven-Tenths Read Online Free PDF

noise in the Bering Sea, especially at 10 kilohertz. There was indeed enough energy to break through the correlator return, but it was continuous ‘active’ noise, not a genuine return signal, and it was also associated with biological activity in the water column. It could well have been caused by numbers of animals all fleeing the GLORIA sound at the same moment. Nor should we forget that porpoises can produce all sorts of noise and interference merely by breaking the surface of the water as they swim. Air bubbles are one of the richest sources of noise – look at the swim bladders of hatchet fish – and sudden frothing and foaming plays havoc with signals and can produce the oddest effects. …
    This is not dissension, of course. The man merely drifts amiably away, leaving behind a feeling of official cold water having been poured, as well as a suspicion that perhaps not everything has been neatly explained after all.
    The next day it is discovered that existing charts of this area, which like most maps (other than those of pirate treasure) look completely authoritative, are quite wrong. Whole features are either absent or misplaced. We examine the printouts. Entire mountains flicker in and out of existence somewhere down there in the cold darkness. The bathymetry is all haywire. GLORIA knows best. There remains the experience of being present when a portion of theEarth’s surface is discovered. This is a rare sensation for the layman in the late twentieth century, and the diminishing opportunities for experiencing it must belong almost exclusively to potholers and cavers, apart from oceanographers themselves. At this moment, except for the handful of people present in the Farnella ’s laboratory, I know more of the range of hills we are traversing than anyone else in the world, be they professors, explorers, Nobel laureates, fellows of distinguished societies or captains of industry. In fact, I know more of this piece of America than the President himself, and I am not even a US citizen.
    This schoolboy superiority is too brief and dubious to be at all satisfying. Moreover, it is imbued with a certain sadness. One more thing has fallen under Homo ’s rapacious gaze, and as always the knowledge is not neutral. By its very nature this project makes one constantly aware of the question of ownership. Effectively, anything we find down there belongs to the United States which, by annexing its tranche of the seabed, is actually adding a prodigious 2.9 billion acres to the 2.3 billion acres of dry land it already commands: rather more than the same again. Quite apart from any military consequences, the economic aspects are plain. This makes the fixing of all EEZ boundaries a matter of great importance, both scientifically and bureaucratically. As soon as one starts to consider it in any detail, obvious difficulties present themselves. On this cruise we are supposed to be mapping the EEZ around Johnston Atoll. Are the 200 nautical miles to be measured from the island’s coastline or from its centre? There again, if they are measured from the coastline does the boundary have to describe a neat circle or should it faithfully follow every little promontory and indentation so that on a chart Johnston Island will eventually appear as a small blob in the middle of a dotted outline of its own hugely magnified ghost?
    According to Roger everything depends on the size of the island. International law stipulates how big an island has to be before the EEZ may follow its coastline. There again, a mass of guidelines define a coastline and how to treat it. If the mouth of a bay is less than a certain width it must be considered as if a straight line ran across it. Such niceties are far from being purely academic. According to ColonelGaddafi the Gulf of Sirte is entirely within Libya’s territorial waters whereas the US Navy, which is constantly on patrol there, claims the Gulf is international.
    ‘It usen’t to be like this,’ Roger