Word: lava
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What happens when the siren sounds too late is evidenced by six mounds of freshly tilled soil adorned by simple wreaths. The graves contain the charred remains of local residents who perished on June 25, when the Soufriere Hills volcano spewed 150-m.p.h. molten rivers of lava, gas and ash down its flanks onto the villages below. As farmers tended to their carrot and cabbage fields, huge rocks showered on them and the scorching lava raced over the scalded ground. Ash-filled smoke plunged the land into darkness. There was nowhere to run. Nineteen people died, buried under tons...
Klimley also discovered what may be the reason the hammerheads school year after year at an undersea mountain known as Espiritu Santo, 15 miles east of the Baja Peninsula. The metal-rich seamount, he found, has a particularly strong magnetic field. So do bands of ancient congealed lava that radiate from the seamount like spokes from a wheel. The hammerheads, he believes, can detect this magnetism and use it for navigation. The seamount is essentially a depot: the hammerheads gather there before going out to their feeding grounds...
...blame them? Good times are terrific for raising children and arugula, but they lack the pulse-quickening vitality we've come to expect from late-20th century life. Maybe that's why our national cinema these days is populated by mutants, aliens, snakes, velociraptors, lava rivers and doomed ocean liners. It isn't art, but it does get the blood pumping...
...right, nobody cares. You just want to see the volcano that ate L.A. If so, you'll have a hell-lava time...
...gookum-like lava is less smothering than the plot cliches: our hero (Tommy Lee Jones) and his perpetually hysterical child (Gaby Hoffmann), ever blundering into catastrophe; the spiky geologist (Anne Heche) who has to exclaim "Oh, God!" 46 times; silliest of all, the ornery whites and blacks who when covered with gray ash learn that, gee, Armageddon is color-blind. And just once in a disaster film, could a dog please...