Word: damming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last year, when a group of journalists and historians offered a list of the 100 biggest news stories of the 20th century, the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was ranked 58th. Completion of Hoover Dam didn't make the cut. You sort of expect this from celebrity-infatuated mass culture: when it comes to fundamental achievements that make contemporary civilization work, a stifled yawn. Water, dams, aqueducts, irrigation, hydroelectricity--how borrrrrrring! Really? Los Angeles, world headquarters of celebrity culture, has measured as little as 5 in. (13 cm) of rainfall in a year. And despite occasional monsoons, Southern...
...would think the creation of modern Los Angeles, which is what Hoover Dam allowed, would make that structure newsworthy. Actually, its historic significance is of more cosmic proportions. The first of the world's great dams, Hoover inaugurated an Age of Dams, which has spanned the past three-quarters of a century. The dam-building mentality has pretty much expired in the U.S.--one reason is, we've run out of dam sites--but it's still prevalent throughout much of the world. In China, which is erecting the Three Gorges Dam, the biggest (and, at $25 billion, the most...
...happens, scientists have stumbled on several ways to do just that. When the lake behind the Hoover Dam was first filled, it triggered quakes in a region that had been seismically inactive. Nuclear-weapons designers found that they were also generating quakes at the Nevada Test Site when they detonated underground blasts. But the real breakthrough came when the U.S. Army began pumping liquid wastes into the ground near Denver at their Rocky Mountain Arsenal and discovered that the pumping was setting off tiny artificial quakes. Scientists studying the phenomenon found that the fluids were lubricating the fault boundaries, allowing...
Releasing crude from the SPR--the oil is stored in underground caves in Texas and Louisiana--could be a dam breaker. Says Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Resources, a leading consultant: "Any effort to tap the strategic reserve now will add to pressure on oil producers to put more crude on the market, which will start to bring prices down." The last time the government announced it was unloading oil from the SPR, in April 1996, petroleum-futures prices plummeted nearly 8% almost immediately and the cost of gasoline soon dropped 10[cents...