Word: aridity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rural community of Sage, 80 miles from San Diego, with unseasonal intensity late last month, blackening more than 3,500 acres. Fire fighters this time were able to contain the flames, but next time they may not be so lucky. A five-year drought has left this always arid region even dryer than usual, and when the hot Santa Ana winds start to blow off the desert in September, it could take only a spark to set off fires that will be much more difficult to control...
...Still, there isn't enough," says widow Dorjon Nongrun. Once called the "Scotland of the East" by the British, Cherrapunji lost its trees and topsoil after decades of slash-and-burn agriculture. Today, fruit and vegetables are trucked in from hours away. It's a scene repeated across many arid parts of India and would be unremarkable but for one fact: with an average 12 m of rain a year, Cherrapunji is the wettest inhabited place on earth...
...years before the first humans set eyes on the crater. During that time, sand blown on the desert winds filled most of the crater's depth, although its bottom still lies 25 m below the level of the surrounding plain. For thousands of years the local Aborigines in this arid stretch of the southeastern Kimberley region, members of the Jaru and Walmajarri tribes, have known the crater as Kandimalal. Here on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, Dreaming tracks meet and cross, and while traditional ownership is shared between the tribes, their myths, told and retold over the generations...
...movie is also daring in its extravagant (though seemingly not expensive) sets by Rudolph Sternad, who designed 23 films for Kramer, from "Champion" in 1949 to "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" in 1963. Sternad worked from Seuss sketches to devise rolling, arid science fiction landscapes, ladders that stretch to the sky, gilded bedrooms and grotty dungeons and, for the 500 boys to play at the climax, a gigantic two-tiered piano with 44,000 keys. Seuss peopled these vast, forbidding vistas with characters from his own teeming imagination (and his old notebooks): hulking sentries, their skin painted...
...Chair Raquel E. Arid ’04 submitted her first chapter to her thesis adviser last week, hoping to get some thoughtful feedback and instead just got some artful feedback—a landscape doodled across the first page. A visibly upset Arid calmed down after friends assured her that she was still a good, decent person and that her thesis adviser also respects her as a person—just not as a thesis writer...