Word: basalt
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...rock structure convinced them that the site would make an ideal superbunker. An April 1953 bureau study concluded that "the rock in the area . . . is exceptionally hard and tight." There were few faults or fissures; most of the rock was epidosite and greenstone, a local name for a Precambrian basalt that had metamorphosed into an extremely dense formation...
...Mexico's President Carlos Salinas de Gortari made sure all the stops were pulled out for this exhibit. The country's biggest media mogul, Emilio Azcarraga, put up the money. An unprecedented tonnage of basalt, clay, obsidian, jade, gilt, inlaid wood and painted canvas has been moved out of Mexican churches, museums and private collections -- sometimes over protests by local communities that resent having their saints or gods borrowed by the government. On view are 365 objects, starting in l000 B.C. with a five-ton stone Olmec head and finishing in 1949 with Frida Kahlo's The Love-Embrace...
...Catalan opening is, of course, a chess gambit. Corbero's exhibition is a set of 16 black chess pieces -- king and queen, hulking monoliths more than 9 1/2 ft. high, and a whimsical army of knights, bishops, rooks and pawns, all carved and constructed from basalt. This brittle volcanic rock is too hard to chisel cleanly; it can only be sawed or broken like a flint. Corbero revels in the risks of breaking it. Each piece of basalt becomes a found object -- altered, but bearing a memory of the raw look it had in the quarry...
...heraldic encounter, the dungeons and dragons that lie within the shapes of chessmen. Loving the double image, Corbero is part heir to Catalan surrealism. The son and grandson of metalsmiths, he sometimes gets a bit overrefined for American taste, but his delight in odd tropes -- like making forms in basalt that conventionally would be done in metal -- has its ! own authentic motives. He remains a very considerable sculptor...
Their risky efforts paid off. The cliffs, part of a stratum of sedimentary shale and sandstone interleaved with volcanic basalt, date from between 225 million and 175 million years ago. The entire rock formation was long thought to be virtually devoid of fossils and thus of little interest to paleontologists. In fact, says Neil Shubin, 25, a graduate student in biology at Harvard, the site they discovered "looks like Rocky Road ice cream. It's dark rock absolutely splattered with bone." Says his partner, Geologist Paul Olsen, 32, of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory: "We were shocked...