Word: ashli
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...giggles rather than fear. As we leave our traces around the room, Meireles appeals to all of our senses but taste. Yet it is somehow impossible to find an underlying grammar to order our perceptions. Although his materials seem related to combustion (the talc could double as gunpowder or ash), they are somehow irreconcilable. Candles don't smell like gas and neither they nor pure gas fires produce ash. Where is the wood, or the warm smell of gunpowder? In the end, Meireles leaves us not with easy equivalencies, but heightened perception through the uncanny juxtaposition of carefully chosen stimuli...
...there are worse ways to learn what a volcano looks like than to see Dante's Peak. Though the story line is standard disaster-film fare, the science is generally sound. As the movie reveals, the first debris disgorged by a volcano is often a great gray mass of ash. The opaque cloud, made of pulverized rock and glass, falls like concrete snow on land and buildings miles away and may blot out the sun for days...
After the ash, some volcanoes produce what is known as a pyroclastic flow, a ground-hugging cloud of superheated gas and rock that forces a cushion of air down the mountainside at up to 100 m.p.h., incinerating anything in its path. Other mountains spew that signature substance of the volcano: lava. (On this point Dante's Peak was wide of the scientific mark, concocting a fictitious mountain that produces both substances.) Lava moves at speeds ranging from less than 1 m.p.h. to 60 m.p.h...
Even if new gas-sniffing and satellite equipment succeeds in keeping people on the ground safe from volcanoes, people in the skies could still be at risk. For them the danger comes from volcanic ash, which can choke the engines of passenger jets. Since the 1960s there have been 85 such midair encounters, and while none have led to a fatal crash, some have come close...
...combat the problem, the USGS is deploying detectors around volcanoes so that air-traffic controllers can be alerted when an ash cloud belches forth. While this could go a long way toward making the skies safer, the business of setting up the instruments is going slowly. Currently, the faa, which funds the project, is devoting only $2 million a year to it, barely enough to equip two volcanoes. At that rate, it would take 275 years before all the world's active peaks were covered...