Body Of Water

Two weeks ago we asked you to name the last body of water Clara reaches in "The Shore Beyond." Ashley Vance of Armstead Gardens had the correct answer: the purple sea. Thanks! Teachers: Check www.sunspot.net / nie tomorrow for stance questions related to Just for Kids stories.

Joe Bollinger in Glen Burnie listens to his NOAA Weather Radio. He keeps hearing the term "dominant period" and wonders what it means. "What factors cause the time to vary, and why report it at all?" he asks. Sailors and boaters need to know. The term refers to the time, in seconds, between peaks of the highest energy waves on a body of water. Higher waves and shorter dominant periods can mean rougher waters. Longer periods provide smoother sailing, and lower demand for Dramamine.

His CIA controllers have ruled that Aldrich Ames will get no more victims, especially not them.If disaster could happen on as calm a body of water as the Baltic, treat the Chesapeake with respect.Virginians could not stop Grant but, by God, they were not going to be rolled over by Mickey Mouse.Polls show that Bill Brock is as popular in Maryland as in Tennessee.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- Swift boats own a small but tortured part of Navy history. The shallow-water craft crewed by armed sailors patrolled the rivers of Vietnam, one of the most dangerous missions in the Navy. In the 2004 presidential campaign, the boats emerged as part of a bitter debate over whether Navy veteran John F. Kerry, the skipper of one of the 50-foot vessels, was a hero or not. Now, 30 years after Swift boats were mothballed, the Navy has decided they are just what's needed in Iraq and beyond.

The Chesapeake would be a pretty body of water if they ever got the junk out.The deal is that Bill will help Boris' re-election if the latter promises to stay out of his.Bill turns out to be our greatest foreign-policy president sinceGeorge Bush.Hollywood made still another remake of ''Jane Eyre,'' even though it isn't even by Jane Austen.Pub Date: 4/22/96

Joe Bollinger in Glen Burnie listens to his NOAA Weather Radio. He keeps hearing the term "dominant period" and wonders what it means. "What factors cause the time to vary, and why report it at all?" he asks. Sailors and boaters need to know. The term refers to the time, in seconds, between peaks of the highest energy waves on a body of water. Higher waves and shorter dominant periods can mean rougher waters. Longer periods provide smoother sailing, and lower demand for Dramamine.

WASHINGTON -- With an eye on the sale of Russian submarines to Iran, the Pentagon has sent a nuclear submarine into the Persian Gulf to examine the acoustic properties of the waters there, according to senior Pentagon officials.The deployment of the Topeka, which passed through the Strait of Hormuz Sunday, represents the first time that a nuclear-powered American submarine has entered the Persian Gulf.A senior Defense Department official, who insisted on not being identified, said yesterday that Moscow's sale of three diesel submarines to Tehran for a reported $600 million was an important consideration in the Pentagon's decision to send the Topeka into the gulf.

WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency will propose this week that states regulate water pollution by focusing on the quality of bodies of water, instead of the levels of discharges from individual plants.Once a state determines the extent to which pollution must be reduced in a body of water, polluters would receive a quota and could clean up their emissions or buy the right to discharge pollutants into the water from someone whose cleanup had exceeded a quota.The change, announced yesterday by President Clinton in his weekly radio address, is based on a mostly unused provision of the 1972 Clean Water Act that requires regulators to assess water conditions and issue discharge restrictions accordingly.

The other day I got a clear signal that Baltimore is in the midst of a mayoral election campaign.I was heading west on Druid Park Lake Drive in a taxicab and glanced over at Druid Lake, the 55-acre reservoir at the southern edge of the park.Lo and behold, the fountain in the middle of the lake was gushing. A stately plume of water was dancing aloft in the warm summer air. I was refreshed for half a minute but was soon around the corner and out of sight.It's been my experience over the past few years that the fountain only gets turned on when there's a hot race in progress for the big desk and ceremonial office in City Hall.

By nature, largemouth bass are creatures that favor relatively shallow, almost sluggish waters heavy with vegetation or marked by stumps, bushes, fallen trees or root systems.Within the cover of these habitats, the adult bass is the hunter, virtually the top of the food chain -- unless one counts man, which has made the largemouth one of its most preferred targets.George Cochran, who finished third in the 1990 Bassmasters Classic and has qualified for the tournament each of the past 10 years, has some basic advice for making the hunt easier and more rewarding.

North of Mount Washington, a new lake is growing. On a sunny morning a hawk soars overhead, riding thermals. Geese fly into the former crushed marble quarry, settling on crystal green water. Nearby, the buzz of building construction recalls a century of other men and machinery that once mined this property. It is a dramatic transformation. After years of furnishing material for Baltimore's best-known roads and buildings, the old Greenspring Quarry is making money in a very 21st-century way. It is becoming Quarry Lake - the centerpiece and key selling point for a new upscale development of homes, offices and shops.

IF WE WERE unschooled, but attuned to nature, instead of the other way around, we wouldn't need to study and dissect all the ways water dies as you develop its watershed. We would just accept that when you keep wounding any animal - in this case the watershed, the creature containing all other creatures - as you replace its living, breathing skin with dead concrete and asphalt, you are killing it. Eventually, modern ecological science does tend to bring us to the same place as native wisdom.

For thousands of years, the people of ancient Persia and their descendants in modern Iran have called it the Persian Gulf. But the National Geographic Society's mapmakers noticed that some U.S. military agencies and other map gazers use the name Arabian Gulf for the body of water on Iran's southwestern shore. So they altered the eighth edition of the society's influential Atlas of the World to include Arabian Gulf as an alternate name (in parentheses) under the traditional title. That has landed them in hot water with Iranians from Los Angeles to Tehran.

To reach Australia's Kalgoorlie lakes, you fly west from Sydney, across the outback to Perth. From there, you can drive inland for 12 hours, or catch a plane. But after landing in the dusty gold-mining town, you'll have to rent a Jeep before the shops close at 5 p.m., and then strike off into the desert on your own. Kathleen C. Benison and her geology team made the long trip from Central Michigan University in 2001 to study the cluster of highly acidic salt lakes, which she says bear a striking resemblance to waters that once flowed on Mars.

An environmental group sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Baltimore yesterday, seeking a ban on the nation's most widely used herbicide -- a weed killer they say is polluting the Chesapeake Bay and other major waterways. The National Resources Defense Council says that up to 70 million pounds of atrazine -- banned in several European countries -- may be causing untold environmental damage by being applied to lawns, golf courses and farms because much of it ends up flowing into the nation's rivers, streams and other bodies of water.

Normally, bass fishermen don't have handicaps, like golfers, or degrees of difficulty factored into their routines, like gymnasts. Unless your name is Aaron Hastings, in which case you've had both at the same time. You might say that if the second-year pro from Boonsboro didn't have bad luck, he wouldn't have any luck at all. In January, at the first stop on the BASSMASTER Tournament Trail in Harris Chain, Fla., Hastings was too busy battling boat gremlins to catch fish, and he didn't survive the second-day cut. A bad start, but trouble was just getting warmed up. Between Harris Chain and the second event at Lake Okeechobee, some thugs picked Hastings clean, stealing his boat, his truck and all his gear from in front of a friend's house.

LAKE GEORGE, N.Y. -- A year and a half ago, it looked as if Lake George, a blue jewel in the green Adirondacks, had dodged a biological bullet -- the zebra mussel, an invasive European mollusk that is clogging pipes, crowding local aquatic life and turning beaches into toe-slicing shell heaps from Michigan to the Hudson River. Scientists had found microscopic mussel larvae in the water, probably imported in the bilges of boats. But lab tests showed that some quirk of Lake George chemistry -- probably a lack of calcium -- seemed to keep them from maturing and reproducing.

LIKE MOST of us around here, I've gotten used to rising early and getting errands done in the morning, before the day's humidity envelops the city in its death grip. One recent morning, I hadn't had time to squeeze in the usual outing for my 8-month-old Labrador retriever. And now I was paying the price. We sat together in the dining room, I working at the table and he sprawled underneath it. Both of us were using the absolute minimum physical movement necessary. In my case, this meant lifting fingers off the keyboard and placing them back down again, and occasionally reaching for my glass of ice water.

Two weeks ago we asked you to name the last body of water Clara reaches in "The Shore Beyond." Ashley Vance of Armstead Gardens had the correct answer: the purple sea. Thanks! Teachers: Check www.sunspot.net / nie tomorrow for stance questions related to Just for Kids stories.