Word: ironed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What they "see" is astounding. Far from being just a featureless sphere of molten iron, the core has a surface that is apparently studded with mountains and riddled with depressions that may be filled with lower-density fluid that forms the equivalent of oceans. There may even be a bizarre kind of rain: showers of iron particles that sprinkle down on the core. And all of this takes place in a region whose temperature is perhaps as hot as the surface...
...Harvard group found, for example, that pressure waves travel more quickly when moving parallel to the earth's axis than when they are perpendicular. That could be explained if the solid inner core were a crystal, in which waves would travel at different speeds along different axes, but molten iron is hardly crystalline. Instead, Don Anderson and his colleagues at Caltech's seismological lab postulated the existence of iron rain. Their theory: the polar regions of the core are slightly flattened and tend to be cooler than the equatorial regions. The heat exchange between the two areas may then result...
...exchange places. Scientists do not understand whether this phenomenon comes about gradually, say, over thousands of years, or all at once. One idea, advanced in recent years, is that turbulent eddies within the core-mantle boundary somehow give rise to electromagnetic disturbances that trigger the reversals. A rain of iron particles, say some scientists, might supply the energy to keep the eddies churning...
...running through her list of unsatisfactory or irritating or boorish suitors when she saw a church made from glass towed into her field of vision by two men in wide straw hats." This is no hallucination. The crystalline minicathedral that floats into view, with a framework of iron, measures 50 ft. in length and 22 ft. 6 in. across. It weighs twelve tons...
Carey's next trick is to bring these two similarly addicted but far-flung young people together. Lucinda journeys to London, where she consults with the designer of the Crystal Palace, the glass-and-iron housing for the famed Exhibition of 1851, about new directions her factory should take. Oscar, meanwhile, successfully out of Oxford and teaching school, has begun to feel that his method of raising money, while not in itself sinful, has inspired unholy passions in his soul. He longs, in short, to bet on everything. So, on the toss of a coin, he decides that...