Word: sediments
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Then, about four miles offshore, Goddio's magnetometers pinpointed large structures covered by sediment 30 ft. below the surface. Nearby, they also discovered what was once the mouth of the now submerged Canopic branch of the Nile, where ancient writings had indeed placed Herakleion, a prosperous, commercial gateway to Egypt...
...past month, divers have been clearing away 3 ft. of sediment from on top of the 40-ft.-long sub and dredging an excavation trench around it. Although tilted on its starboard side, the Hunley appears largely intact except for a 3-ft. hole in its riveted iron hull. Because both hatches were sealed, it probably still holds the skeletons of its captain and eight-man crew. Once recovered, the sub will be barged upriver to a conservation facility, there to be reimmersed in cold water, chemically stabilized, excavated and restored--which could take up to 10 years...
...irrigated civilizations were appearing in contemporary Iraq and Pakistan about 5,000 years ago, the Gulf of Mexico was roughly where New Orleans now sits. The Gulf, like all the other seas, had been rising since the last Ice Age, but the Mississippi River dumped 18 billion truckloads of sediment at the Gulf's door in the time it took the seas to rise a foot. It was (and still is) one of the planet's most dynamic contests between land and water...
...Congress made levee construction Washington's responsibility. Billions of tax dollars from elsewhere--probably tens of billions, in modern money--were spent constricting the Mississippi's channel, so its silt began washing straight out to sea and off the continental shelf. By the 1970s, more than half the historic sediment load was coming to a dead stop behind dozens of upriver dams--especially seven monstrous structures erected on the Missouri...