Word: magma
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...performance can’t really cathartically take away your pain. But I do feel like the best concerts have been ones in which I’ve witnessed an artist either screaming or whispering his or her way through the Earth’s crust, drilling into the magma that flows in the subconscious. I remember seeing Beck do a solo acoustic show, playing Big Star’s classic “Kanga-Roo,” and his eyes glazed over. He saw all his lovers, past and future. He was exorcising demons. Similarly, I remember seeing...
...Rodin was quick to recognize not just Claudel's pensive beauty but also her talent and to promote her to collectors and critics. She was just as quick to absorb the lessons of his work, in which figures could seem as though they were modeled from magma, erupting from the earth in anguished or compelling postures. Her early portrait bust of Rodin, with the fiercely modeled turmoil at its base, might almost have come from his hand. In a sense, of course, it did. But in time his example would prove too formidable. Rodin had rethought the human body more...
...descends beneath, the lighter mass of the South American plate, which is moving westward. As the oceanic plate dives deeper into a region of high temperature and pressure some 60 miles to 125 miles below the earth's surface, rock in the area begins to soften and form magma, molten rock. Says Robert Christiansen, a volcano specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, Calif.: "This is one area in which our knowledge is the least advanced...
Christiansen and others suspect that magma is produced in the subduction zone, the border between the diving plate and the lower mantle. In that complicated layer, a variety of phenomena, including high temperatures, changes in pressure and the influx of water, may act to melt the already softened rock. Minerals and water then coalesce with the molten material into viscous, tear-shaped packets known as diapirs. Because they are more buoyant than surrounding rock, the diapirs percolate upward, like bubbles rising through honey, melting more rock as they go. Eventually they accumulate in pockets called magma chambers, located two miles...
...seismic activity in the area, rumblings or the emission of ash and gases are all harbingers of greater things to come. Changes in the snowcaps that cover tall volcanoes may also indicate trouble. In Iceland, for example, the sight of a sagging, snow-covered mountaintop, which indicates that hot magma is pushing upward and melting the ice cap, warns knowledgeable residents to head for safety. More sophisticated techniques include tiltmeters or laser ranging devices to detect deformations in the volcano cone, also caused by magma oozing upward. Seismometers are used to measure harmonic tremor around the volcano, a series...