Word: geologist
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Some 400 miles to the southeast, atop snow-covered Mount Palomar, Eugene Shoemaker, a geologist on leave from the U.S. Geological Survey, and his wife Carolyn, an asteroid astronomer, scurry around the unheated dome of the 18- in. Schmidt telescope. They photograph the sky in four-minute exposures, hunting for fast-moving objects against the background of the fixed stars. So far their Palomar study has identified 25 asteroids that cross the earth's orbit, bringing the known total to 60. Asteroids like this, they think, have occasionally crashed into the earth with catastrophic consequences, and they strive to calculate...
...revolution began with an unassuming element known as 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...
...Boone Pickens, Senior Correspondent Frederick Ungeheuer did some preliminary interviews. "Everyone I talked to," he says, "told me, 'One thing about covering Boone--you'll enjoy yourself.' And they were absolutely right." Ungeheuer retraced Pickens' life from its beginnings in Holdenville, Okla., to his early days as a geologist and wildcatter in the Southwest's Anadarko Basin, to Denver, Houston, Wall Street and Amarillo, Texas, his present home and headquarters...
...liquid core. Some scientists speculate, however, that the magnetic field may be generated by an electrically charged ocean covering the planet. Some of the larger moons apparently have, or at one time had, crustal movements that created the fault zones and valleys evident in the Voyager photographs. Geologist Laurence Soderblom, for one, was surprised at what he called "the degree of geological activity on the Uranian satellites." Along some of the faults on Titania, he said, "some sort of material is leaking out of fractures and perhaps freezing on the surface...
After cooking up their theory, the two scientists turned to proving it, primarily by examining craters on the earth that can be geologically dated, Sure enough, after analyzing data compiled by geologist Richard Grieve of brown university, they found that the ages of craters formed over the past 250 million years were clustered in 26 million-year intervals...