Word: driftings
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...iridium, a rare and hard silvery-white metal related to platinum and gold. In the spring of 1977, Geologist Walter Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley, was carefully chiseling through the rocks outside Gubbio, a medieval Italian town halfway between Florence and Rome, seeking clues to continental drift. Gubbio has long been an appealing site to geologists and paleontologists because its rocks provide a complete geological record of the critical boundary line between the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs disappeared, and the Tertiary period, which followed...
...impact theory, Luis and Walter Alvarez. Neither conferred his benediction on the hypothetical star, but Walter recommended one way that its existence might be tested. He knew that if comets cyclically pelted the planet, they must have left behind craters in chronologically distinct batches. Water, wind and continental drift have eroded most of the earth's impact craters, but 100 of the largest survive in some form and have been roughly dated. Muller and Walter Alvarez examined the data on 13 of the best- dated craters spanning a period of 250 million years and, sure enough, the gutting seemed...
...more often, the author evinces a tragic yearning for days that never were. Her obviously neglectful and self-indulgent mother is made into an art nouveau madonna, complete with aura: "I would drift into . . . the sunlight yellow that surrounded her." Reality is hard to hold; at 17, Gloria finds herself staring hard at visitors, "because if I didn't keep my eyes on them they might all disappear in a puff of the . . . cigarette." She imagines a sofa as "a nest on the topmost branch of a tree where I'm safe and nothing can harm...
...This demonstration takes on a whole complex of issues," said DSA member Damon A. Silvers '86. "It represents our opposition to the drift this country is taking toward a foreign policy of aggression and adventurism and a domestic policy of a sort of crass materialism...
...audience has had a hard day. For example: "The problem with elites, which in our topsy-turvy times has got people all churned up is this: who defines the elite? And then, who decides that you or I do or don't meet those superior requirements? Such queries can drift us into minefields like racism and genocide, which this easygoing amusement will bypass, thank...