Word: crust
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...energy company executives are organizing new drillings for oil and gas all along the Overthrust Belt, a wide twist of rocky ground that stretches 2,300 miles from northwestern Montana through southern Arizona. The Overthrust Belt was formed eons ago, when two tectonic plates of the earth's crust heaved and crunched together, crinkling one plate over the other. Geologists have known for decades that the region hid pools of oil and gas some 12,000 to 20,000 feet below the earth's surface, but exploration and drilling had proved too expensive...
Examining camel remains recovered from local abattoirs, the scientists found the answer. Camel noses are filled with many tiny winding passageways, moistened with glandular secretions. As the camel loses water, the secretions dry and form an absorbent crust. This crust soaks up moisture coming from the lungs. During inhalation, the stored moisture is carried back into the lungs. In short, the camel saves water not in its hump but in the folds of its prodigious shnoz, which cover an area of roughly 1,100 sq. cm, vs. only 12 sq. cm for the average human...
...couldn't the President be more like his brother, a real, no-nonsense redneck? "The first Cracker President should have been a mixture of Jimmy and Billy," Blount reckons, "a cobbler of Billy's basic blackberries oozing up into and through Jimmy's cut-to-specifications crust . . . forming a nice-and-awful compound like life in Georgia...
...midst of its growth spurt, Cambridge officially became a city. Over the protests of many upper-crust Cantabrigians, all the communities were officially joined. But, to borrow a phrase from Sutton, "the joining was strictly contractual, rather like a pre-arranged marriage of convenience in which the partners shared little love and continued to sleep in separate bedrooms." Actually, there was comparatively little for government to do--this was a boom era, and local government simply did not enact zoning regulations. It also refrained from planning, and even building codes were rudimentary. The look-the-other-way policy permitted fast...
...face before the May explosion. Scientists were not sure if it was caused by a swelling on the rim or the settling of material on the floor of the crater. Inside the crater a lava dome has been forming. It glows red as molten rock roils underneath its hardened crust. The questions: Will it be able to cap the volcano? Or will pent-up gases blast through again...