Word: bitumen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, though with benefit of modern geological research. "A pall of thin, grey haze hovered ominously over the valley and the smell of sulphur filled the air. There were places . . . where naphtha oozed from the ground, slimy and flammable. There was also asphalt (bitumen) for the gathering . . . Petroleum gases and light fumes of sulphur often hung on the air above the plain . . ." Through Canaan ran an enormous geological fault, and a shift in this, it is thought, touched off an internal explosion of petroleum gas which in turn sent tons of flaming asphalt, marl...
Some of Nuri's advisers foresee the need for a widespread system of fundamental education. Now that the government has built a new printery and a $3,200,000 bitumen plant, the board has to rush construction of the first schools so men can be trained to staff them...
...great wave of romanticism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, some painters became so absorbed in expression that they lost sight of the limitations of their materials. Ralph Albert Blakelock, the American romantic landscapist (1847-1919), delighted in the rich gloss of bitumen, a poor-drying, brown pigment, which he used so excessively that the paint ultimately slipped on the canvas (e.g., in one of his landscapes owned by the Brooklyn Museum, paint ran down and over the frame). Edgar Degas, the French impressionist, striving for certain effects, sometimes reduced his paint to what he called essence by thinning...
Iraq's oil is a big IF. The oil is there, all right, and has been since recorded history. Noah caulked his Ark "within and without with pitch" taken from bitumen springs in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley. Just a few hundred yards from where Nebuchadnezzar, "full of fury," cast Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into the fiery, oil-fed furnace, Iraq Petroleum (then called Turkish Petroleum) in 1927 blew in its first well with a gush that could not be controlled for three days. Iraq's proven reserve (7.5 billion barrels in the Kirkuk field alone) is within...