Word: mi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...home where the buffalo roam would be a darn sight more profitable than a busted ranch. Or so thinks Robert Scott, who has proposed turning the 15,000- sq.-mi. Big Open area of east-central Montana into a game park the size of Maryland with half of New Jersey thrown...
...years the source of that water seemed inexhaustible. Much of it comes + from 165-sq.-mi., dam-created Gatun Lake, through which the ships pass on their route across the isthmus. Most of the remainder is tapped from nearby Madden Lake, formed in 1935 (also by damming) to provide an additional reservoir of water for the dry season. But now a 375-page report by Stanley Heckadon Moreno, an environmentalist at Panama's Ministry of Planning, has raised a startling worry about the canal's future: it may be running short of water...
...problem is that the dense tropical rain forest that blanketed the 1,300-sq.-mi. watershed around the route of the canal has been disappearing at an alarming pace, cut away by farmers. By 1950 some 20% of the forest had been cut. Now more than 70% has vanished, and about 800 acres of the remainder is being cleared every year...
Once the trees are gone, denuded slopes are eroded by rainfall, which has been washing soil into 20-sq.-mi. Madden Lake at the rate of half a million tons a year. A study by Hydrologist Luis Alvarado of the Panama Canal Commission shows that silt accumulating at the bottom of the lake has reduced its storage capacity by 5%. By the year 2000 the loss could be as high as 10%, and by 2020 nearly...
...upper hand, if only psychologically. The Iraqis have been put on the defensive by the recent campaign, for which both sides have amassed at least 200,000 soldiers. Since beginning its offensive in December, the Iranian army has made small gains south of Fish Lake, a 120- sq.-mi. area flooded by the Iraqis as a defensive barrier. Iran has also made incremental progress southeast of Basra in the marshy terrain along the Shatt al Arab, a strategic waterway that affords access to the Persian Gulf. The new toehold has enabled the Iranians to bombard Basra from closer range...