Word: lavas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...November 1959 when Hawaii's Kilauea Iki volcano suddenly erupted and formed a lava pool 300 ft. deep in its own crater, no one in the neighborhood saw any particular reason to cheer. But at the University of California's Livermore Radiation Laboratory, the news brought joy to the hearts of a pair of bright young scientists. To Geologist Donald Rawson, 26, and Physicist Gary Higgins, 33, the new lava pool sounded like an ideal testing site for a key phase of the Atomic Energy Commission's Project Plowshare: a plan for harnessing a steam-powered turbogenerator...
Figuring that the drilling problems encountered in piercing the crust of the lava lake to its molten core would be similar to tapping the heat of molten rocks created by a man-made blast. Rawson and Higgins set up a gasoline-driven rotary drilling rig in the middle of Kilauea Iki's cone on the steaming crust of the lava pool. Using compressed air as a coolant, they drilled a 3½-in. hole into the crust at the tedious rate of 1½ ft. every eight hours. The 1,652° heat damaged the diamond bits and jammed...
...first shudder. The cold, rain and sleet of subequatorial winter chilled the survivors as they dug through the ruins for bodies, or camped in the open, waiting numbly for the next jolt. Six old volcanoes and three new ones came to angry life as channels cracked open to lava beds. Just north of the town of Rupanco, a flood of boiling lava poured into Lake Ranco and swept over the town. Short moments before, an avalanche had thundered down a nearby mountain, burying...
...mountains sank out of sight, a 25-mile stretch of high ground dropped 1,000 feet, and new lakes were formed. Volcanic ash rose 23,000 ft. into the sky. Seismic waves washed away 630 of the 800 citizens of the fishing village of Queilen. In the inferno of lava, smoke, fire, water, avalanche and death, the helpless victims first scurried around in panic, then subsided into resigned silence. They worked feverishly to claw the dead and injured from the rubble...
Inevitably, Paolino receives his own sexual initiation in the embrace of a simmering charmer named Stella L'Afri-cana, whose North African blood gives her skin the green-bronze hue of lava...