Word: crusts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...oven; the hot plate on the sink is more than adequate for Michael and him. Beneath the sink all the drawers of the kitchen cabinet have been pulled out, leaving holes. In an aluminum pie plate on the table, cigarette ashes mix with the remains of a crust. The ceiling is water-stained around a circular fluorescent bulb. The walls are yellow, sallow in the darkening room...
...earth's crust gave...
Solid though it appears, the earth's crust is composed of a dozen large plates and several smaller ones, ranging in thickness from 20 to 150 miles. The plates are in constant motion, riding on the molten mantle below and normally traveling at the pace of a millimeter a week, equivalent to the growth rate of a fingernail. Geophysicist Bill Spence of the U.S. Geological Survey in Colorado says, "They're just like a mobile jigsaw puzzle." The plates' travels result in continental drift, the formation of mountains, volcanoes--and earthquakes...
...plates carrying two continental masses collide, for example, the crust buckles, creating craggy mountain ranges like the Himalayas. If they grind past each other, as the Pacific and North American plates do under California's San Andreas fault, friction locks them together. Every so often, abrupt slippages occur and the earth around them shudders in what geologists call strike-slip quakes. Still another kind of tectonic phenomenon, the meeting of an oceanic and a continental plate, is responsible for the Mexican disaster...
under the continental crust, the oceanic mass sticks in certain places, its motion halted by friction. But the force propelling Cocos forward remains unrelenting, building up strain in the rock of both plates. When the frictional forces are overcome, the "stuck" section of the Cocos plate lurches forward (at least 10 ft. last week), generating the shock waves of a "thrust" quake...