Word: meteorically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have 1989FC land in the backyard. A 100-yd.- wide asteroid hitting the earth at a speed of nearly 50,000 m.p.h. could dig a crater a mile or so across and several hundred feet deep -- similar in size to a gaping hole in the Arizona earth, known as Meteor Crater, that was blasted out some 40,000 years ago. Such an impact today would be enough to wipe out a major population center...
...most spectacular example is the dying off of the great dinosaurs during the Cretaceous period (136 million to 65 million years ago). No one knows exactly what killed the dinosaurs, although a radical change in environmental conditions seems a likely answer. One popular theory is that a huge meteor crashed to earth and kicked up such vast clouds of dust that sunlight was obscured and plants destroyed. Result: the dinosaurs starved to death...
...most likely cause of their demise, said Bakker, touching on another dinosaur controversy, was not a meteor or a sudden temperature change, but a disease of epidemic proportions. "I see dinosaurs as not going out with a bang, but going out with diarrhoea," said Bakker...
Sontag doesn't own a TV, though she did rent one last month to please a houseguest. (Regarding it with the look of a bird that has found a meteor plunked in her nest, she shrugs, "I haven't turned it on yet.") She also has no phone-answering machine, no word processor and, in most of her two-bedroom New York City duplex, no air conditioning. The coolest spot in the place is likely to be the sun-room that opens onto a small terrace. That was where she spent much of the past summer, with its Egyptian heat...
...many as 120 are believed to be performing military missions. For hours each day, say intelligence analysts, Soviet Cosmos military satellites drift over the U.S., photographing missile silos and naval deployments. Other Soviet spacecraft lurk with sensitive electronic ears that can pick up telephone conversations in Washington, while Meteor weather satellites monitor conditions over key U.S. targets. Soviet infrared satellites watch for the telltale heat signaling a launch of U.S. ICBMs. At the military launch site in Plesetsk, 500 miles northeast of Moscow, crews stand ready to launch additional intelligence satellites at a moment's notice...