Word: geologist
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When dinosaurs vanished abruptly 65 million years ago, they left an enduring mystery-and created a scientific parlor game. Hypotheses abound to explain the extinction. Brains too small in bodies too large? Emerging mammals feasting on dinosaur eggs? Now comes evidence for another possibility. Geologist Walter Alvarez, probing an ocean canyon near Gubbio, Italy, discovered an abrupt increase in iridium in a limestone layer dating back to the dinosaurs' demise. Probable cause: some mysterious, still unfathomable extraterrestrial event...
...happier news. Venice is still sinking ever so slightly from natural causes. But according to a team of scientists who have been watching water levels since 1969 in response to the worldwide hue and cry over the plight of Venice, subsidence from man-made effects has ceased. That, said Geologist Paolo Gatto, is "definitive and final...
...problem; one-quarter of the nation's shores are suffering serious erosion, and a number of resort areas, such as Miami Beach, have been ravaged. Padre is no exception. "The shoreline of South Padre Island has been retreating at least since the late 1800s," wrote University of Texas Geologist Robert Morton in a 1975 report. "At many points, rates of erosion increased between 1960 and 1969, with parts of the island experiencing extreme erosion." Separate studies last year by the state's general land office and researchers at Texas A & M University confirmed the problem...
...resources avail able, a way will be found to conquer the sea's appetite. The town is about to hire an engineering firm to study solutions, such as extending the existing jetty or building groins off the shore to reduce the impact of the waves. But Geologist Morton is skeptical. "Any attempt to trap sediment on the island only works when you have a good sediment supply," he warns...
...last week, in a posthumous statement published in the journal Nature, the late British Geologist James Archibald Douglas offered his solution to the Piltdown hoax. The culprit, said Douglas in a tape recording made only a few months before his death last February at age 93, was his predecessor as professor of geology and paleontology at Oxford University, William Johnson Sollas. The motive: Sollas wanted to destroy the reputation of a hated rival by tricking him into publicly accepting as authentic what would later be unmasked as an elaborate joke...