Word: crater
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...cabinet minister and a private retinue of physicians. Irazú has rated such attentions since March 13, 1963, when it started spouting enormous clouds of hot ash and became the country's top menace and tourist attraction (TIME, Jan. 17). Sightseers can park near the lip of the crater and actually stare down into the billowing pit. Usually the prevailing wind blows the ash away from the spectators, but last week Irazú took antitourist action. With a sudden, violent explosion it lashed out at its admirers with a hail of ash and a shower of red-hot rocks...
Painfully Solemn. Some of them insist that it was caused by a comet; others prefer to believe that a huge, extraterrestrial spaceship crashed in Siberia, or perhaps jettisoned nuclear fuel that exploded and dug the crater. In 1959, an expedition of students from Tomsk University claimed to have found that the area is still radioactive, and so many Russians accepted their observations that the Soviet Academy of Sciences sent its own expedition-which found no abnormal radioactivity...
...puddles, joy though they may be to the Cambridge psyche, and no more splinters in the community feet. New measurements indicate that when the last brick is removed from Dudley House, the whole damn Health Center topples. University officials are undecided whether to go ahead and turn the resulting crater into a parking lot or squash court or whether to halt construction and let the clear air be. We for one favor un-Sertified clear...
Clean Clouds. When a crater-making shot is fired, a mushroom of earth grows out of the ground above the explosion. A jet of hot gas raises a dust cloud high in the air. Most of the dust and debris settle immediately, and hardly any dust falls more than 21 miles from the crater. This dust is not very radioactive. Nearly all of the shot's radioactivity is buried deep under the rubble that falls back into the hole. Ploughshare men are sure that if modern, "clean" explosives are used, the radioactivity that escapes will be of little significance...
...canal-like ditches with long lines of nuclear explosions, but it has experimented elaborately with chemical shots and believes it knows the basic laws that govern both kinds of blasts. If nuclear explosives are placed in "strings" with the distance between them equal to half the diameter of the crater that a single shot would dig, and if they are exploded simultaneously, they will excavate a smooth-bottomed ditch, throwing the rock to the sides. One hundred shots, for instance, of 100 kilotons each, will dig a ditch 1,600 ft. wide, 350 ft. deep and 16 miles long...