Word: basalt
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...early Olmecs were apparently inventive and cultivated people. They produced carved stone sarcophagi, colonnades of prismatic basalt, colossal basalt heads weighing up to 15 tons. Later Indians made no attempt to emulate these massive achievements. But Olmec stone bas-reliefs, ceramics and carved jades remained an influence, and the Olmec pantheon of jaguar gods appears to have lived on in different forms...
...speed of earthquake waves increases suddenly at a certain level under the earth's surface (the depth varies from place to place). This suggested that the Moho marked a dividing line between different materials. Geologists believe that the Moho is the bottom edge of the granite and basalt that forms the lower layer of the earth's crust; under it is the earth's mantle consisting of a mixture of silicates and nickel-iron, which in turn encloses the nickel-iron core...
...impossible depth. The best place to drill is the floor of the great ocean basins. The floor may be three miles beneath the ocean's surface, but the Moho lies only three or four miles deeper, under a thin skin of sedimentary deposits and a layer of basalt...
...nature of things, are an odd lot. His personal Maquis, or tusk force, consists of a refugee girl, victim of multiple rape in the liberation of Berlin, a Danish naturalist, a U.S. magazine photographer, and a nuclear scientist who has just refused to go on helping to make the basalt bomb. Each in his own way understands something of Morel's strange passion...
...save one of the most interesting relics of America's distant past. Water, backed up by the great new dam at The Dalles, will soon cover the strange rock carvings in Petroglyph Canyon. No one knows who carved the animals, sunbursts and strange, maplike designs in the hard basalt, or when or why they did it. But the fascinating mystery will never be solved if deep water is permitted to cover the evidence...