Word: floodplains
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tall and 2 ft. long, the boxy, six-wheeled, 22-lb. car is nobody's idea of a roadster. But while Cooper will be at the controls at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the car will be 119 million miles away, touring the arid Ares Vallis floodplain on Mars...
...blow. Both a parachute and a retrorocket will slow its plunge, and an array of airbags will inflate to cushion the shock of landing. And finally, the spacecraft will simply drop to the surface, striking the ground like a beach ball and rolling to a stop in the ancient floodplain...
...another problem with developing, said other residents such as Peter V. Cignetti III, is that the site is in the middle of a floodplain. Disturbing the plain, Cignetti said, may cause flooding problems in residential homes near the site...
...dinosaur burial ground, now a dry, undulating pasture of sage and buffalo grass just below the North Dakota border, was once a subtropical floodplain, where dinosaurs roamed amid palm trees and ferns on the edge of a dying inland sea. One day a mature male T. rex, weighing up to five tons and measuring nearly 40 feet in length, died in a silty washout. At least two albertosaurs, sharp-toothed scavengers about half T. rex's size, fed on the carcass, leaving a few of their teeth behind. Within months a river overflowed its banks and swept the bones away...
...Hannibal, Missouri, can only be thankful that it has just completed construction of a new $8 million floodwall, without which the Mark Twain home and museum would now be underwater. But absolutely critical to stemming future flood losses, a federal task force concluded last year, is protection of riverine floodplains from further development. In some cases it may even prove cost effective to relocate entire flood-prone communities. "We need to start giving land back to the river," says Larry Larson, head of Wisconsin's floodplain program. "If we don't, sooner or later the river will take it back...