Word: layered
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...excavating the ancient Akkadian city of Shekhna in what is now Syria, Weiss and his colleagues determined that the urban center, once a thriving home for 10,000 people, was deserted for three centuries. One layer, which they dated to 2200 B.C., revealed the crumbling walls of a ghost town. It also provided some important clues about the weather. "Ancient soils bear a climatic signature," Weiss explains. "In a dry climate, you see very little earthworm activity and lots of loose silt, for example...
While most insiders consider insiderdom so distasteful that they try to bury it under a thick layer of gloss, I almost envy the access to information that members of what Newsweek's Meg Greenfield calls the "politico-journalistic elite" enjoy. I'll admit the possibility that I'm not asking the right questions of my interviews or understanding the full meaning of their replies. But seasoned reporters tell me that wading through ten minutes of "squishy" chaff to get a few sentences of pith isn't an unusual experience here...
SSAWS is also much better kept. The 1,607-ft. slopes are routinely groomed to take out moguls and ice spots that might send skiers crashing into the wall. Every night workers lay down a fine layer of fresh powder. "The quality of the snow is incredibly good here," says Mihoko Ehara, 24, a waitress. "But because it is so good, I think that if you skied here too often you might lose touch." Still, unlike Seagaia, SSAWS really has little to offer apart from snow. The skiing is fine for the first few runs -- and is especially surreal...
...which showed every sign of being this week's weather as well -- the standard reply starts to wear a little thin. Why are so many records being set in so many places right now? Could it have anything to do with the holes we've drilled in the ozone layer? The forests we've leveled? The greenhouse gases we've pumped into the atmosphere...
What is new about today's weather is that, for the first time, some of the factors that help shape it may be man-made. Experts say it may be decades before we are certain what effect the buildup of greenhouse gases or the depletion of the ozone layer has had on the global climate. Last week's flooding and heat wave served as a warning that if we wait for the weathermen to tell us what's wrong with the weather, it may be too late to do anything about...