Word: dust
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...iridium as normal rocks. The Berkeley team knew of only a few places where such high concentrations of the rare element might occur: in the earth's core, perhaps 2,000 miles belowground; in extraterrestrial objects like asteroids (or their fragments, meteors) and comets; or in the cosmic dust drifting to earth from a nearby supernova (exploding star). The core material seemed too deep to come to the surface, and further analysis ruled out a supernova as the source, so father and son concluded that the iridium had been left by a giant asteroid hitting the earth...
...Alvarezes did not stop there. Basing their calculations on the atmospheric consequences of the explosion of Krakatoa, they roughly estimated how much dust the impact of the asteroid would have thrown into the atmosphere, how long sunlight would have been blocked from the earth's surface, and what kinds of life would have been the most gravely affected by the climatic changes. They decided that plants, totally dependent on the sun for photosynthesis, and a variety of marine organisms would have died first, followed by the land animals highest on the food chain, the dinosaurs. Eventually the iridium-enriched debris...
Sniffing a connection, Rampino and a Goddard colleague, Astrophysicist Richard Stothers, among others, proposed an ingenious way that the oscillating journey might trigger bombardments on earth. Whenever the sun passes through the Milky Way plane, they suggested, the swirls of dust it encounters would gravitationally disrupt the Oort cloud, a vast bubble of comets that scientists believe surrounds the solar system at a distance of up to 10 trillion miles from the sun. Like a lazy fruit picker shaking plums from a tree, the dust would send showers of comets falling toward the sun. Some comets would collide with...
...like a scene out of Woody Allen's Bananas. A ragged band of soldiers played The Yellow Rose of Texas in 110 degrees heat as two helicopters, their blades whipping up dust in the clearing, touched down at the base camp in Honduras, three miles from the Nicaraguan border. Out of one jumped Texas Governor Mark White, in combat boots and freshly pressed camouflage fatigues. Out of the other, a platoon of reporters, who quickly surrounded him. The Governor also brought 400 lbs. of Texas barbecued beef, 7,200 flour tortillas, 100 lbs. of pinto beans, and buckets of barbecue...
...menacing action began last Wednesday, on barren, rock-strewn ground marking a rare flat stretch of the rugged border between Marxist Nicaragua and U.S. ally Honduras. The oppressive quiet of early afternoon was broken by a buzz, quickly swelling into a roar. Out of a cloud of dust lumbered heavy tanks and armored personnel carriers, following an obvious invasion route north toward the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, some 80 miles away...