Reefs

With a spray of water, Guy Gleichmann surfaces from a 40-foot dive during which he helped set his mother's remains in their final resting place: a sunken city where brightly hued fish shimmy among fantastical architecture. "I didn't want to leave," Gleichmann says, doffing mask and mouthpiece. "It's so beautiful down there. It's so serene." The 48-year-old investment manager and diver from Pompano Beach, Fla.

Surfers just can't catch a break at Dockweiler State Beach. An ambitious effort to use an artificial offshore reef there to create ridable ocean waves is a washout, its organizers concede. Disappointed long-boarders watching workers remove the sandbag-sided Pratte's Reef say the last big wave action was 26 years ago, when a spectacular wintertime El Nino storm system pounded the El Segundo shoreline.

What was intended as a noble science experiment in the 1970s has turned into a modern-day plague for the delicate coral reefs surrounding the University of Hawaii's research station here. A professor scoured the seas for the heartiest, fastest-growing algae to help Third World nations develop a seaweed crop for carrageenan -- the gelatinous thickener and emulsifier used in such items as toothpaste, shoe polish and nonfat ice cream. The late Maxwell Doty succeeded, in one regard.

After more than half a century of wartime valor, maritime tragedy and cinematic triumph, the aircraft carrier Oriskany is preparing for its final mission: sinking into an afterlife as an artificial reef. But being transformed into an attraction for anglers and divers in the Gulf of Mexico is proving one of the more challenging assignments for the storied and long-retired ship.

Just a thousand feet offshore from this beachside town lies what should be a wondrous underwater world of color and activity, a realm of angelfish, gobies and other aquatic beauties darting among sun-dappled reefs. But instead of a diver's delight, the area is an ecologist's lament.

The most important rule for any criminal investigator: Preserve the crime scene. Strict records must be kept of who goes in, who comes out, what they touch and what they collect as evidence, from carpet fiber or bullet casings to human remains. This is old news to "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" viewers or anyone who followed the O.J. Simpson case. Evidence that is not collected properly can be excluded at trial. But what do you do if the crime scene is a coral reef?

A proposal to install an electrified artificial reef on the ocean floor off Lauderdale-by-the-Sea has won approval from a key federal agency, making it more likely that the high-tech conservation project will get built.

THANKS for the delightful and well-written article "Wild and Wooly Imaginations" [May 6]. Although I don't know these ladies, Diane Haithman certainly seems to have captured their uniqueness and the enthusiasm they have for crocheting. The term they use to describe their Institute for Figuring, "the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics, and the technical arts," is an intriguing and all-encompassing description. This would make a great TV show -- turning these ladies loose in these areas of thought and form.

Marine scientists have discovered hundreds of new animal species on reefs in Australian waters, including brilliant soft corals and tiny crustaceans, according to findings released Thursday. The creatures were found during expeditions run by the Australian chapter of CReefs, a global census of coral reefs that is one of several projects of the Census of Marine Life, an international effort to catalog all life in the oceans. Among the creatures researchers found were about 130 soft corals -- also known as octocorals, for the eight tentacles that fringe each polyp -- that have never been described in scientific literature, and scores of similarly undocumented crustaceans, including tiny shrimplike animals with claws longer than their bodies.

Two decades ago, scientists didn't know coral reefs existed in the cold, deep seas off Alaska. Those reefs may now be among the first victims of global warming in a marine environment that's home to half of the U.S.'s commercial fishing, researchers said Tuesday. The loss of Alaska's cold-water reefs may be a precursor to the extinction of reefs worldwide that's expected to occur by the end of the 21st century because of acidification, which occurs when oceans absorb carbon dioxide, according to Oceana, a Washington-based conservation group.