Word: layering
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Investigating the tragedy, meteorologists concluded that it had been triggered by a temperature inversion, an atmospheric phenomenon that prevents normal circulation of air. Ordinarily, warm air rises from the earth into the colder regions above, carrying much of man's pollution with it. Occasionally, a layer of warmer air forms above cooler air near the ground; the inversion acts as a lid, preventing the pollutants at lower altitudes from rising and dispersing. Inversions are no novelty, but what happened at Donora shocked public-health officials into an awareness that such layers pose a deadly threat to an increasingly industrialized...
When the Arne River burst over the parapets of Florence on November 4, it submerged the city in unimaginable quantities of mud, a thick layer of oil, and an average of 15 to 24 feet of water. Thirty-three persons were drowned, several are still missing, and the damage to art works, libraries, and architectural monuments -- to say nothing of homes and businesses -- staggers the imagination...
Trapped Poison. An inversion layer of warm air domed over the region the day before Thanksgiving, trapping the dirty air beneath it. Westerly winds, which normally whisk away 'the 17.6 million lbs. of pollutants that New York City alone spews into the air each day, were nowhere to be found. By Thanksgiving, despite the holiday inactivity, New York's pollution reached five times its normal level of noxious carbon monoxide from cars, soot and fly ash from chimneys and potentially deadly sulphur dioxide from soft fuel oil and coal fires...
...reduce most factory fumes and did little to deter motorists from flocking to the city for the traditional post-Thanksgiving buying splurge. The break finally came, not because of the alert measures, but from evening showers that washed the dirty air. By week's end the inversion layer was breaking up as the westerly wind returned to sweep clean the skies...
Computers & Rockets. Scientists have devised countless ways to make use of the controlled output of fluidic circuits. A fluidic guidance system can control the course of a torpedo by shooting out jets of gas or sucking in water. This distorts the surrounding boundary layer of water, changes its frictional effects and causes the torpedo to turn. In a rocket flying through the atmosphere, the control jets of a fluidic stabilization system are attached to vents in the rocket's nose cone. As the attitude of the rocket be gins to change, the nose vents gulp in air at different...