Word: crusts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...read with gusto your [March 29] story, where I learned that following Louis Vaudable, his business-minded wife, Maggie, has learned to fleece the wealthy American upper-crust families...
...water near the Turkish coast, off Cape Gelidonya. With the same finicky techniques that archaeologists use on land, the water-borne scientists photographed the ancient vessel from above by swimming over it with underwater cameras-a preliminary process already reported in the National Geographic. They marked the crust of lime that covered the remains and carefully chiseled it into chunks that were lifted 3 to the surface by inflated plastic balloons. Bit by bit the wreck was moved ashore and reassembled...
Back in the days when Grandpa went to grade school, geography teachers had no trouble explaining how the earth's mountains are formed. The earth is cooling and shrinking, they told the kids; its crust has wrinkled into mountain ranges like the skin of a drying apple. Modern geophysicists, who believe that the earth was cold when it started its career, have abandoned this charmingly simple theory. Trouble is, they have had little luck developing a satisfactory substitute...
Most of the earth's material is plastic enough to contract evenly, but the thin surface crust is rigid. Instead of contracting smoothly when the core shrank, it cracked and wrinkled, just as in the old theory. Sometimes parts of the earth's crust slid over other parts like sheets of ice in a fast-flowing river. These surface irregularities, much changed by erosion, are the earth's mountains...
Lyttleton figures that the earth's compressible liquid core, which can be studied by means of earthquake waves, has caused the earth to shrink about 400 miles in diameter. Some 20 million square miles of crust have been tucked away in mountainous folds and wrinkles. How long this process will continue, Lyttleton does not know. But mountains are still rising, and Lyttleton estimates that if the entire earth were to liquefy, it would lose another 50 miles of diameter...