Word: crusts
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...after 2000, NASA is hoping to launch a Europa probe that will orbit the Jovian moon at an altitude of 60 miles--about the same distance at which Apollo spacecraft used to orbit Earth's moon--photographing its surface and taking radar soundings to look for water beneath its crust. If the radar picks up the telltale echoes of liquid, another spacecraft would be sent to land on Europa. Once there it would release a small cylindrical probe with a heated tip that would melt through the ice layer and propel itself through the frigid ocean, looking for signs...
Still another spacecraft might be launched to fly by Europa and drop a 20-lb. sphere onto its surface. Striking the frozen crust with the force of a suitcase full of TNT, the cosmic cannonball would release a mushroom cloud of ice particles into space; the mother ship would then fly through the crystalline mist, collect a bit of it and carry it back to Earth for analysis...
...Basin is a paranoid Holy Land, and no place is better suited for the job. Topography is destiny out here. It is the only region in North America where falling water has no outlet to the ocean (it lies trapped, then evaporates back into the atmosphere). The thin, spreading crust of the valley floors is notoriously unstable, agitated. Hot springs steam up through faults and fissures. Whirling dust devils dance across the flats. The mountain ranges are new, still rising, alive; perched on top of this tectonic tumult, the structures of civilization seem to teeter. The schools and supermarkets...
...theory of plate tectonics radically transformed the field of geology by offering new explanations for earthquakes and volcanoes, the development of similar species on different continents and the dynamic nature of the earth's crust...
...remember seeing pictures of these women in the halls and thinking, 'They would die if they saw me here because here were these white, upper-crust women from New England society, and here I was a young black female,'" she adds...