Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...science the impractical can turn practical overnight with a little cash behind it. In Scientific American this week, Geologist Willard Bascom published the first full report of a onetime AMSOC daydream, which is now backed by the National Science Foundation: to drill a hole right down through the earth's crust to its hidden interior...
Imaginative people have mulled the idea for years. Novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, who visualized the earth's shell as a living creature, made his fictional Professor Challenger poke a sharp drill eight miles down, called his story When the World Screamed. AMSOC's goal is to pierce the Mohorovicic discontinuity, which scientists call the Moho for short...
Flexible Finger. The Moho was discovered in 1909 by Seismologist A. Mohorovicic of Yugoslavia, when he noticed that the speed of earthquake waves increases suddenly at a certain level under the earth's surface (the depth varies from place to place). This suggested that the Moho marked a dividing line between different materials. Geologists believe that the Moho is the bottom edge of the granite and basalt that forms the lower layer of the earth's crust; under it is the earth's mantle consisting of a mixture of silicates and nickel-iron, which in turn encloses...
Lowering thermometers and other instruments through the hole to the hot (about 150° C.) mantle should solve many mysteries about the earth's structure and origin. A continuous core sample through the sediments of the ocean floor may provide what AMSOCers call "the most fabulous history book of all time"-an uninterrupted record of the earth's development for 2 billion years. And somewhere below there may still be traces of the face of the earth as it was when it began...
...charted so exactly, that it has been used to plot, with an accuracy never before possible, the exact position of oceanic islands. In the past, islands were mapped by celestial observations whose accuracy depended on the establishment of an exact vertical by gravity. Because of uncertainties about the earth's shape, this can be done precisely only at the poles. So the Army Map Service sets up mobile tracking stations on various islands. When Vanguard I passes overhead, the trackers determine its bearing at an exact time, in microseconds. Stations on the mainland, which have been following the satellite...