Word: aridity
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...graze. Beyond stretches the desert of northeast Kenya, baked by the African sun. In a wadi, or dried-up stream bed, not far away, a sandy-haired man moves slowly, his loose shorts and shirt flapping in the breeze, his head bare to the sun, his eyes searching the arid soil at his feet. Some 50 ft. away, sandals scuffing dust into the air behind her. his wife keeps pace, her eyes sweeping the ground. An African, remainder of the party...
...group of small California farmers who charged that the Government had never really enforced the Federal Reclamation Act of 1902. That law's original goal: to give a boost to the small family farmer by granting 160-acre parcels of the West's vast quantity of public arid land, and making it fit for agriculture by bringing in federally subsidized water. According to the suit, larger landowners (including such agribusiness giants as Southern Pacific Co., Standard Oil and Tenneco Inc.) gradually cut themselves in for Government water, ignoring the requirement that they sell any land in excess...
...navigation. But the bergs may have a use, after all. For the past few years planners in the parched lands of the Middle East and South America -not to mention more than a few drought-bedeviled Californians-have been toying with ideas for towing icebergs from the Antarctic to arid areas where they could be melted for their pure, fresh water (TIME, March 7). Last week scientists from 18 nations gathered at Iowa State University, in the town of Ames, for an International Conference on Iceberg Utilization to discuss whether such plans could be put to any practical...
...Engineering Laboratory, warned would-be iceberg movers: "Once you get north of the equator, you'll have nothing but a rope at the end of your tow." Other doubts were expressed. Could an iceberg be effectively insulated against melting? Would anchoring a huge block of ice off an arid coast have unexpected environmental effects...
Residents of arid Littlerock, Calif, (pop. 1,500), a farm community northeast of Los Angeles, have a choice of potential disasters. Would they rather risk being drowned, or drying up and blowing away? State officials want to drain the 521 million-gal, reservoir behind the nearby Littlerock Dam, whose water irrigates the peach and pear groves and melon fields that give the town what little prosperity it has. But the 53-year-old dam sits virtually atop the San Andreas Fault. Although the structure has survived severe tremors in the past, seismologists say it is located where the next...