Word: layering
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...from tankers flushing their storage compartments at sea. That, along with other everyday mishaps, adds up to 284 million gallons of spilled oil every year-about ten times the amount that oozed from the Torrey Canyon, and enough to coat a beach 20 ft. wide with a half-inch layer of oil for 8,633 miles. Scientists are increasingly worried that this oil could be poisonous to ocean plankton, a key source of photosynthesis that produces most of the earth's oxygen...
Here and there the floods left a boon. On the Kairouan plain, 80 miles south of Tunis, a three-foot layer of soil was washed away, uncovering a sizable Roman village. Inland lakes eight miles wide were created by rainfalls of 16 inches in 24 hours. The lakes are now draining down to raise the water table, and farmers are assured of at least four years of well-watered soil. Most important, the rains that battered 80% of Tunisia bypassed coastal resort areas whose hotels account for $40 million in tourist revenues annually. Even so, cancellations already total...
Although these bell-like reverberations were unlike any seismic event on earth, Columbia University Geophysicist Gary Latham offered a plausible explanation. The effect may have been caused, he said, by a layer of rubble or fractured rock sandwiched between bedrock in the floor of the Ocean of Storms and a solid cover of fine material deposits above. Lacking dampening fluids or gases, the layer of rubble may have acted as an echo chamber in which the seismic waves reverberated. If so, the next big seismic event on the moon should be a scientific spectacular; the third-stage rocket of Apollo...
...around, too, because this stretch of the creek was the spawning area. I watched one perch for two weeks while it faithfully guarded its nest against the other fish. It was there every morning and every evening; then one day it was gone. All that was left was a layer of silt from a construction project that the university had just started a little further up the creek...
...dating each ice layer like growth rings on a tree, the scientists have been able to use the oxygen-isotope ratio to chart yearly variations in weather to depths of 300 ft. Beyond that level, the annual record becomes blurred. But it is still clear enough to let scientists distinguish broad climatological trends. Analysis of the layers showed, for example, that the earth's last ice age began some 70,000 years ago and did not end until about 10,000 years ago. The investigators also made some long-range forecasts. Projecting the established weather pattern, they predicted that...