Word: acidated
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Caves can be pounded into existence by ocean waves, plowed open by ice or formed by lava. But to speleologists, the most interesting are those that have been etched out of limestone by acidic water flowing underground. For a long time, researchers believed that nature could accomplish this feat in only one way: through the action of carbonic acid, which is produced when water reacts with carbon dioxide. The weak acid slowly dissolves bedrock. An underground stream forms, and an elaborate network of chambers like those found at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky takes shape. The unusual limestone terrains where this...
...attack. But the 91-year-old naval base earned a more dubious distinction last month when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) added the site to its list of the nation's most dangerously polluted places. Among the hazards scattered across 12,264 acres: unlined landfills, pesticide-disposal pits, chromic acid- disposal areas, heavy-metal contamination and waste-oil leakage...
...addition, the council discarded a proposed EPA ban on lead-acid automobile battery incineration, even though Health and Human Services Secretary Louis H. Sullivan said that lead is "the number one environmental threat to the health of children in the United States...
...unforeseeable. In the 1890s it was widely predicted that the U.S. would be bare of trees by the 1920s -- they would all have been chopped down to provide wood for heating and cooking. Along came oil burners and the gas stove, saving the trees to be menaced instead by acid rain...
That was only the beginning of disaster: now the real tragedy began. Nitric oxides rained from the air, turning the sea to acid. Clouds of soot from incinerated forests darkened the sky, hiding the sun for months. Worldwide, the temperature dropped precipitously, killing off most of the plants and animals that had survived the initial cataclysm. Though some species would linger on for millenniums, the reign of the great reptiles was finally over...