Word: geochemist
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Before the Pyramids. Working with hundreds of ancient wood samples, Geochemist Hans Suess of the University of California at San Diego recalibrated archaeological ages derived by carbon 14 dating in all parts of the world. His corrections did not affect the commonly accepted dates of Near East events and artifacts, which have been largely deduced from ancient calendars. But they did show that carbon-14-based European dates before 1500 B.C. must be adjusted by the addition of as many as 700 years...
...overambition. More recently, specialists from other disciplines have taken their turn at scrutinizing Rome's downfall. A few years ago, a sociologist suggested that the empire had withered away after its upper classes died off from lead poisoning caused by lead-lined drinking and cooking vessels. Now a geochemist has concluded that Rome's troubles derived largely from the loss of its supply of silver, which fatally disrupted the Roman monetary system...
...silver production stops, a nation's entire supply can disappear in about a century. Production in the silver mines of Rome began to decline about A.D. 200. By then, they were so deep that Roman engineers had no way of clearing them of water. After that, says the geochemist, "it was like being bled to death without knowing that one was bleeding." The result was the gradual disappearance of Roman coins and the return to an unwieldy barter system too crude to sustain the empire...
Elusive Fragment. Suddenly, Scott exclaimed: "Guess what we just found!" His prize was a rock made up of large crystals; to scientists his description indicated that it had once been molten and had cooled slowly, probably far below the surface. "The Holy Grail," proclaimed NASA Geochemist Robin Brett, who, like Scott, immediately concluded that the specimen could well be an elusive fragment of the moon's original crust. The crystalline rock, the first large one of its kind found by astronauts, may well give scientists a new slant on the early history of the 4.6 billion-year-old moon...
...scientists, in any case, agreed that the maria are probably quite alike, a view supported by the first Russian scientist to attend a NASA moon conference. Reporting on the 3 oz. of dust gathered last September from the Sea of Fertility by the automated Soviet moon probe, Luna 16, Geochemist Aleksandr Vinogradov indicated that the dark gray samples were very similar to the American lunar specimens from the Ocean of Storms and the Sea of Tranquility, Apollo 11 's landing site. He elicited even greater interest with his revelation that the Russians are planning still more sophisticated unmanned retrievers...