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Bora Bora
Bora Bora is a volcanic island and French commune in the Leeward group of the Society Islands of French Polynesia in the South Pacific. Known for its turquoise lagoon encircling dramatic basalt peaks, it forms a commune that also includes the uninhabited atoll of Tupai. Tourism is the dominant economic activity, complemented historically by copra, vanilla, and mother-of-pearl.
Coral reef
Coral reefs are biogenic marine structures built primarily by reef‑building stony corals that secrete calcium carbonate skeletons in warm, shallow seas, where they create highly diverse habitats supporting thousands of species. Although they cover less than 1% of the ocean floor (about 0.2% of the seafloor), they underpin fisheries, coastal protection, and tourism for hundreds of millions of people across more than 100 countries and territories. Reefs are increasingly threatened by ocean warming, mass bleaching, ocean acidification, disease, pollution, and overfishing, prompting global monitoring, conservation, and restoration efforts.
Glacial period
A glacial period is a prolonged interval within an ice age when global temperatures cool and continental ice sheets and mountain glaciers advance. The most recent glacial period spanned roughly 115,000 to 11,700 years ago and culminated in the Last Glacial Maximum, when ice sheets covered large parts of North America and Eurasia and global sea level was about 120–125 meters lower than today.
Volcanic eruption
A volcanic eruption is the release of molten rock, gases, and fragmented material from a volcano onto Earth’s surface, driven by buoyant magma and the expansion of dissolved gases. Eruptions range from gentle effusions of lava to highly explosive events that inject ash and aerosols into the atmosphere, with impacts that can extend from local communities to global climate. The style and magnitude of eruptions depend chiefly on magma composition, viscosity, and gas content, as well as interaction with external water.
Hydrothermal vent
A hydrothermal vent is a seafloor hot spring where seawater circulates through the oceanic crust, becomes heated and chemically altered by underlying magma, and reemerges carrying dissolved minerals that precipitate to form chimney-like structures. These sites, common along mid-ocean ridges and back-arc basins, host dense deep-sea ecosystems based on chemosynthesis rather than sunlight, and are central to studies of geochemistry, mineral deposition, and the origins of life.
Serendipity
Serendipity is the faculty or phenomenon of making valuable discoveries not actively sought. Coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, the term links chance events with sagacious recognition and action, and it has become central to discussions of scientific discovery, innovation, and information seeking.
Ephemerality
Ephemerality is the quality of being short-lived or transitory, a property observed across language, religion, aesthetics, ecology, and digital technology. Rooted in the Greek ephēmeros, meaning “lasting one day,” the concept frames cultural attitudes toward change, loss, and documentation and informs practices from Buddhist ritual to performance art, from desert botany to ephemeral social media.
Xanthic
Xanthic is an adjective meaning yellow or tending toward yellow and, in chemistry, denotes compounds related to xanthic acids and their salts and esters, the xanthates. The term derives from the Ancient Greek xanthos, “yellow,” and has wide usage across color terminology, organic chemistry, mineral processing, and textile manufacturing.
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