With the colossal HMS Ocean docking at Devonport to prepare for a quick turnaround to head off to the Nato mission Trident Juncture, there's much to be done in terms of filling its cargo hold with everything from heavy artillery to combat helicopters.
The old saying has it that oil and water don't mix, but every day the world's oceans absorb colossal amounts of oil.
Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater.
It looks like the spine of some colossal Kraken risen from the ocean depths, especially for the slender right-angled promontory tacked on at the end; there's an uncanny perforation in it, like the eye of a monster.
Colossal engineering projects could link oceans and seas in ways we hardly thought possible – but at what cost, asks Fred Pearce.
Ahead, colossal rocks loom out of the ocean, eroded by the sandstorms into natural arches large enough to sail a ship through.
There are 300 different types in the oceans, ranging from the colossal squid, who has the biggest eyes of any creature on the planet, to the vampire squid, whose eight arms flow like a black cape.
"The rainpower is colossal, comparable in magnitude to the ocean-derived power that fuels the hurricane," says Pinaki Chakraborty, a fluid mechanician at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan.
Rain - in effect, evaporated ocean - fell in such colossal quantities during the Australian floods in 2010 and 2011 that the world's sea levels actually dropped by as much as 7mm.
At Yale, he maintained his blog and published his most startling leak to date — a dossier relating to the construction of Transneft's East Siberia Pacific Ocean pipeline, alleging graft on a colossal scale.
