(/dʌk wiːd/)
Noun
1. Any of several reduced floating aquatic plants in the subfamily Lemnoideae that float on the surface of ponds.
… [Lake Maracaibo is] an enormous shallow estuary, five thousand square miles, in the hot, dry, northwest corner of Venezuela. Forty-three billion barrels of oil have been pumped from the Maracaibo Basin since 1914. Rusting tank farms line the shores of the lake. Petrochemical complexes glitter in the brushlands at night. Oil platforms, many of them abandoned, stud the lake’s surface. Snaking across the lake’s bottom are fifteen thousand miles of pipeline. The water is dense with sulfates, fluoride, nitrogen, detergent, fecal coliform. Huge blooms of noxious duckweed look, from above, like pea-green wigs spread out in the sun.
From the post: How Venezuela went from a wealthy South American country to a failing state
Source: Venezuela, a Failing State (newyorker.com)
