Word: glacial
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...coal during the Industrial Revolution, which pumped unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, might be too much of a good thing. Arrhenius made the startling prediction that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would eventually lead to a 9 degrees F warming of the globe. Conversely, he suggested, glacial periods might be caused by diminished levels of the gas. His contemporaries scoffed. Arrhenius, however, was exactly right. In his time, the CO2 concentration was about 280 to 290 parts per million -- just right for a moderately warm, interglacial period. But today the count stands at some 340 p.p.m...
...Idaho. Once an inland sea, it was formed 20 million years ago by geologic plates thrusting sediment layers upward into mountain ranges. The relatively small national park contains nearly all the Great Basin's ecosystems, from desert to arctic-alpine tundra, encompassing 3,000-year-old bristlecone pines, glacial lakes and one of the continent's southernmost permanent ice fields. As recently as 10,000 years ago, bowl-like cirques in the park's mountains were sculpted by glaciers, which left in their wake gray carpets of rock known as taluses...
...glacial period, and in southern Africa the climate was cooler than it is today. Giraffes, hyenas and baboons abounded, along with now extinct giant horses and hartebeests and buffalo with 13-ft. horn spans. Neanderthal man had not yet emerged, but intelligent beings already roamed the savanna, upright creatures known today as archaic Homo sapiens, who could fashion crude axes, picks and cleavers out of stone. On a clear night 170,000 years ago, one of these ancestors of man may have looked up at a milky band of stars stretching across the sky, his eyes pausing briefly...
Careers have been proving more attractive to women than early marriage. More than half of all women now work, and the median age of a woman at her first marriage has increased by two years in the past decade, a huge jump compared with the typically glacial pace of demographic change. Last week, however, the Census Bureau announced a reversal in that trend. New findings show that the median age of first-time brides registered its first drop in 20 years, falling to 23.1 years from a record...
...rich and near rich have more money to toss around, so the values of the age appear callously self-directed. Yet the plight of the poor is a constant subject of concern and speculation, arising regularly in the platforms of both political parties and in public debate. Below the glacial surface of inactivity, real hearts stir on this issue, but they move nothing. This secret of the age has a secret of its own: we embrace all groups but the poor...