Word: crusts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...strangeness in her behavior to the inconsolable loss of three sons and the assassinated Abe. Just as the artless conviction of her account is taking hold, a spasm of madness shatters her face in fragments as if an earthquake had jaggedly ripped open the mind's thin crust. As Lincoln, Fritz Weaver brings timely eloquence to a pithy debate on civil rights...
...true realist's explanation: "Everybody figures they ought to go out and get a Benton now because the old codger is going to be out of production before long." But a warm and happy birthday party, thrown by his admirers, finally produced an infinitesimal crack in the crust. Said the painter: "This is the kind of thing that comes to you when you've outlived your critics...
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...
Alaska is a churning focus of just such action. A rock current under the crust is pushing North America into the Pacific, where another current is moving toward the northwest. The two currents are at right angles to each other, and their force makes the crust yield sideways, forming the great Fairweather Fault running up the Alaskan coast. The fault is a prolific spawning ground for earthquakes, and at its northern end is another source of seismic trouble: the great Aleutian Arc, which was formed by Siberia pressing southeastward into the Pacific and is dotted with active volcanoes. The Fairweather...