Word: crater
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mount Baker first began to stir from its long sleep last March, when unusual amounts of steam or smoke began rising from the Sherman Crater, a 1,600-ft.-wide depression left just below the summit by an earlier eruption. Fearful that the steam could melt snow and trigger giant mudslides, the Forest Service closed the shoreline of Baker Lake, shut down several nearby campgrounds, and put much of the mountain off limits...
...August, geologists studying the crater rim found that steam escaping from widening fumaroles. or vents, had caused considerable melting of snow and weakened several large rock outcroppings; they warned that as much as 40 million cu. yds. of rock, a mass three times greater than that of Grand Coulee Dam, could break loose, slide into the lake and trigger flooding. In September, researchers from Eastern Washington State College, wearing oxygen masks to protect them from the sulfurous fumes, made their way through cave passages in a 140-ft.-thick layer of ice and snow to reach the center...
...there are immediate and plaguing flaws in adaptation. A Boy And His Dog is set in 2024, in an America ravaged and torn by the nuclear warheads of the Third World War. The survivors, either alone (solos) or in marauding groups (roverpaks), eke out a savage existence on the crater-ridden surface, foraging for canned food and gang-raping the remaining females. Aiding them in their search for food and sex are telepathic dogs, equal in intelligence to humans. Below the surface, in cavernous air-raid shelters, are the remains of Middle America, existing in ante-bellum middle class splendor...
...March, and the smoking has not stopped since. One of a dozen major volcanoes in the western U.S., the 10,778-ft. Mount Baker is now venting several thousand pounds of sulfurous gases and debris every hour. Right below the mountain's summit, the 1,600-ft.-wide crater is so thick with fumes that geologists can enter only with gas masks. Does this spectacular activity foreshadow the first major eruption in the lower U.S. in a half-century? U.S. Geological Survey scientists refuse to speculate. "Some volcanoes erupt with hardly any warning," explains Geologist Mark F. Meier. "Others...
Closed to Hikers. In either case, scientists are not taking any chance with Mount Baker. They are regularly monitoring the volcano's activities from planes and helicopters and by remote instruments at the crater. The devices automatically signal any local tremors or changes in the character of the outpouring gases, both possible signs of imminent flows of lava from deep within the earth. Meanwhile, to protect the curious who have already descended on the area, the U.S. Forest Service has closed off the crater area to hikers and campers...