Word: crusting
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Racing Rupture. Such shallow earthquakes, which are apt to be the most violent and do the most damage, are usually caused by sections of the earth's crust slipping past each other along great cracks called faults. Most of the time, a fault is motionless, its two rock faces pressed tightly together, cemented, perhaps, by chemical action. During these quiet periods, tension builds up along the fault. If the fault finally yields at one point, the rupture races along it at several miles per second. Hundreds of miles of rock relax like a broken spring, releasing the gigantic energy...
Arcs & Ranges. If the continents are moving away from each other across the Atlantic, they must be moving toward each other across the Pacific, because the earth is a sphere and they have nowhere else to go. As they move, their leading edges push against the crust of the ocean bottom, sometimes thrusting it down in deep trenches, sometimes bending it upward to form curving arcs of islands, like Japan. High mountain ranges like the Andes rear up behind the edges of the advancing continents, and where the rocks bend and break, lines of volcanoes spout their fire...
...Wilson believes that this has happened several times and that the cycles of warmth and cold will continue until some movement of the earth's crust shifts the Antarctic continent away from the freezing temperatures of the South Pole. Just how soon the glaciers will spread out again over the Northern Hemisphere, he does...
...rock salt domes that poke to the surface along the Gulf of Mexico shore; the needle reactor should bubble through them as carelessly as a skindiver. Later models can tackle the sterner granite and basalt that form most of the rest of the earth's crust...
Virtue triumphs in the end of course, and Sweeney is strapped into his own chair for its final run. Since no one who rode the contraption in the course of the evening ended up in a pie crust (not even the one Sweeney shot in the head, for good measure), it is fair to conjecture that the demon barber is yet at liberty. Veal pie, anyone...