Word: compassing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When silt sinks slowly to the bottom of an ocean or lake, the magnetic particles in it line up with the earth's magnetic field like tiny compass needles. When the silt hardens into rock, the magnetic particles are "frozen" so that they cannot move. The Carnegie scientists found that even when the rock layer is folded by geological forces, the magnetic particles keep their alignment, pointing accurately around the curves of the folds. Even in layers known to be 200 million years old, the rock keeps its magnetism...
...John Graham and a team of Carnegie geologists went to work. A series of rock samples 10 million to 100 million years old which they took from flat-lying strata in the western U.S. proved to have a magnetism pointing in about the same direction as present-day compass needles. The conclusion was that when the rocks were laid down as silt, the earth's magnetic field was about as it is today...
...from California to Great Britain was having trouble with its radio compass. The pilot asked for a radio bearing, got it. It was three hours later when Kindley Air Force Base in Bermuda heard from it again. This time the message was terse, urgent: the B-29 was running out of gas and preparing to ditch. A few minutes later the Coast Guard cutter Bibb heard a faint SOS. After that, there was nothing...
...there any significance in having Mr. Dubinsky [TIME, Aug. 29] looking smilingly southward from your cover's clothes compass? Perhaps that region of the country could use some of his admirable talents for doing such a mammoth job in so streamlined and painless a fashion...
...Luftwaffe. The Nazis had destroyed his father's practice and he wanted to see them destroyed. After special training by U.S. instructors, he got a new name. For his tools of trade he also got forged identification papers, a supply of Reichsmarks, ration stamps, sandwiches, a revolver, compass and a cyanide tablet. His assignment: to travel 400 kilometers in a broad, jagged semicircle behind the enemy's lines, find where two "missing" German divisions were stationed and make his way back to the Americans...