Word: gold
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kunze believes that the statue was made largely of sheet-gold supported on a wooden framework. Phidias probably fashioned a model out of clay. From it he took clay negatives of the parts that were to be made of gold. When these were baked and reinforced with iron, goldsmiths could hammer their metal into them, reproducing faithfully the shape of the model. Along with the molds were found chisels and hammers of the type used by goldsmiths of the period...
...earth seems to rotate with trustworthy steadiness. Astronomers know better. Observed with their sharp-eyed instruments, the earth's rotation is a wobbly business. In Nature, Astronomer T. Gold of Britain's Royal Greenwich Observatory tells how he took the wobble apart and used it to show, among other things, how Antarctica may have got its deposits of coal...
...Gold uses this motion to show that any departure of the earth from its normal axis makes the earth's material flow plastically. The flowing "damps" the motion and keeps it from continuing for more than a small fraction of 1°. Having proved this to his satisfaction. Gold constructed a high, wide and handsome theory...
...what if the shape changes because of the rise of mountains or the accumulation of glacial ice? In this case, says Gold, the axis will shift to take account of the new distribution of mass. Slowly, the plastic earth will swell in the proper places to make itself a geoid again. When this process is complete, it will settle down with its North and South Poles in new places. Gold figures that modest crustal changes could make the earth turn 90° in less than 1,000,000 years, relocating its poles on its former equator...
...Gold finds it somewhat harder to explain why the earth's axis is not migrating appreciably at present. He suspects that it may have been caught in a "trap." The axis tends to shift, he thinks, toward the region where glacial ice is melting fastest, moving one of the poles toward that same region. The climate there gets colder. The glaciers grow thicker. Then the axis and the pole move slowly back again...