Word: lava
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Since 1790, when the nation's population concentrated statistically at a spot near Baltimore, the American center of gravity has tipped ever westward. Census results show it moving across the map like flowing lava: in 1870 east of Cincinnati, in 1900 near Indianapolis, in 1940 on the Indiana-Illinois line. Today, the computers calculate, the population center lies at lat. 38° 27 min. 47 sec. N., and long. 89° 42 min. 22 sec. W. That puts it in the middle of one of Farmer Lawrence Friederich's fields outside of Mascoutah, Ill., just southeast...
Nearly every resident of the small Sicilian winegrowing village of Sant'Alfio last week joined the procession up the fuming, rumbling mountain. Praying, singing hymns and carrying relics of their patron saints, the villagers advanced to within a few yards of the glowing, smoking wall of lava. As his flock knelt before the threatening stream, Sant'Alfio's parish priest, Don Francesco Parisi, tilted his head skyward and implored God to "send away this menace from us and from our homes...
...volcanoes lie near the meeting place of the massive, slow-moving plates that are believed to make up the earth's outer shell. Their crunching movements apparently cause cracks in the earth's crust that enable hot material known as magma to escape in the form of lava. Many scientists think that Etna was created by the meeting of the African and European plates...
...onto the mold; lights out; into the dining room- and find twelve stoned happy guests dancing and singing in orgy, arms entwined, like a close-knit Borneo family celebrating the end of a promising mango harvest under a full moon. Our cognac flamed ("down the mountain slopes like molten lava") unheeded, the meringue sighed and slipped down a little more, the Truc candles sputtered and flickered, but we were happy. Our guests, after all, were happy...
...been slightly squeezed and become thinner than that on the far side. Indeed, such an uneven distribution of crust was offered by University of Chicago Mineralogist Joseph Smith to explain the paucity of maria on the far side. These great lunar seas are believed to be vast upwellings of lava, perhaps from volcanic eruptions set off by the moon's collision with large asteroids. On the far side, where the crust is thicker, such impacts would have been less likely to penetrate the moon's hard crust and release underlying lava...