Word: glaciality
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...cheers of hundreds of workers, the redesigned 85-ton orbiter Discovery was rolled into the 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building to be attached to the two solid-fuel rocket boosters and the external fuel tank. This week plans call for the entire structure to be moved, at a glacial pace, more than four miles to launching pad 39B and poised for launch in late August or September. "The test results look good. The hardware looks great," said Deputy Operations Director Robert Crippen. "We're in the countdown to launch...
Tommy Griscom, Reagan's communications director, and Baker, who was once a candidate himself, were watching Bush on TV shivering down the glacial campaign trail. Griscom ribbed Baker: "Just think, if you were a candidate you'd be there." Baker smiled and looked lovingly at the burning logs in his White House fireplace...
...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...