Word: arid
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...Just over an hour's drive from Mildura's sprinkler-fed lawns and orange groves, the Willandra is starkly arid. But it wasn't always so forbidding. For thousands of years during the last Ice Age, when it was possible to walk from Tasmania to Papua New Guinea, water was everywhere, with a series of five large, interconnected lakes and 14 smaller ones offering a rich larder - mussels, golden perch and cod, as well as marsupials and water birds - for communities camped on their shores. As the lakes receded and were refilled, prevailing winds layered sand and clay on their...
...Gorgon. A visit to the town of Ouarzazate, on the mountains' edge and 400 km outside Marrakech, might lead to you to believe that Atlas survived and that the giant is now amassing a collection of supersized toys. Roman amphitheaters, Tibetan temples and Egyptian sphinxes tower over the arid terrain, left behind at the appropriately named Atlas Studios by crews working on films including Kingdom of Heaven, Kundun and Gladiator. (Producer Dino De Laurentiis is on the set of Slave of Dreams in 1994.) Moroccan entrepreneur Mohamed Belghmi had a hunch that the ethereal light quality in Ouarzazate would appeal...
...Gorgon. A visit to the town of Ouarzazate, on the mountains' edge and 400 km outside Marrakech, might lead to you to believe that Atlas survived and that the giant is now amassing a collection of supersized toys. Roman amphitheaters, Tibetan temples and Egyptian sphinxes tower over the arid terrain, left behind at the appropriately named Atlas Studios by crews working on films including Kingdom of Heaven, Kundun and Gladiator. Loh and Behold Avant-garde murals and imaginative furnishings characterise a new Singapore hotel Identity Parade An iconic style magazine marks its quarter century Summits of Style Esoteric treatments...
...many as a quarter of a million people. In The Fate of Africa, an excellent new history of the continent since independence, writer Martin Meredith explains that drought "was only one aspect of the problem." Rapid population growth had forced peasants northward into pastoral areas that were too arid for permanent farms. "The overall result was overgrazing, overcultivation and deforestation on a catastrophic scale." A massive Western relief effort poured some $7.5 billion of aid into the region. "But all the efforts had little lasting impact," writes Meredith. Much of the aid went to civil servants, soldiers and the police...
...space-shuttle contingency has been declared," the voice of Mission Control intoned in the arid argot of the space agency. It was an echo of the understated announcement 17 years ago, when the shuttle Challenger consumed itself in an awful fireball, and the stunned NASA narrator was left to declare, "Obviously a major malfunction...