Word: crustal
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...original crust. The crystalline rock, the first large one of its kind found by astronauts, may well give scientists a new slant on the early history of the 4.6 billion-year-old moon. It may also expand man's knowledge of the primordial earth, where wind, water and crustal movements apparently obliterated all rocks older than about 3.4 billion years. The prized rock, Scott reported later in a televised press conference from space, was found on top of a larger brown rock-"sitting there like it was waiting...
...question the efficiency of the geologic process of crustal assimilation to remove large volumes of waste material. The trenches may fill faster than the garbage can be ingested. New islands and reefs of curiously familiar material could be the result. Volcanoes could become smokestacks belching atmospheric pollutants on a scale never before imagined. On the brighter side, organic carbon under such conditions may be converted into huge quantities of diamond...
...will shift to take account of the new distribution of mass. Slowly, the plastic earth will swell in the proper places to make itself a geoid again. When this process is complete, it will settle down with its North and South Poles in new places. Gold figures that modest crustal changes could make the earth turn 90° in less than 1,000,000 years, relocating its poles on its former equator...
Such regularity in a chart usually means that an overall law is operating. Dr. Benioff studied more records, made more charts, and found evidence that the earth generates earthquake-producing strain at a constant rate. When the strain is not released in earthquakes, it accumulates at crustal weak points until something has to give. Then comes a series of earthquakes, followed by a period of quiet until more strain has accumulated...
...thing they do know: that a belt of crustal uneasiness surrounds the entire Pacific Ocean. The Pacific's shores are nearly all high and rugged, decorated with volcanoes or with young (a mere 100,000,000 years or so), still growing mountain ranges which shake periodically like custard on a plate. Atlantic shores, much calmer, are mostly old and stable...