Word: crusts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
While Physicist William Mansfield Adams was working at the atomic Energy Commission's Livermore laboratory in California, he heard a lot about Project Mohole, and he did not believe what he heard. Mohole's goal is to drill through the earth's crust to see what the earth below is made of, and Adams questioned whether conventional drilling methods could reach much deeper than five miles, one-quarter of the desired distance. The doubting physicist worked out a radically different scheme for doing...
Adams' crust piercer, which he patented and assigned to the AEC, is a high-temperature nuclear reactor designed to melt its way into rock. The reactor is 2 ft. to 3 ft. in diameter, and its active material (uranium oxide) is enclosed in a cylinder of beryllium oxide, which serves as a heat insulator. The lower point, mostly tungsten, is heavy, while the upper point, mostly beryllium, is light...
...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...