Word: mountainize
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Despite that rapid and spontaneous outpouring, rescue work at Armero proceeded at a slow and frustrating pace. The torrential mudslides washed away roads and bridges, limiting efforts to deliver both rescuers and relief supplies. Foul weather and the continuing down pour of volcanic ash from the smoking mountain kept Colombian helicopters away from Armero until Thursday afternoon. Only on Friday could the U.S. fly in any of the big CH-47 Chinook helicopters, capable of evacuating dozens of people at a time. In the interim, only nine small helicopters, able to carry just a handful of victims each, had flown...
...nothing, however, are calamities like Nevado del Ruiz known as acts of God. For the people who lived and worked in the farmlands around the simmering mountain, the early signs of eruption were accepted as part of the environment. Nor could anyone have predicted that the disaster would finally take place at night, the time of maximum vulnerability. Said Father Augusto Aosorio, one of Armero's parish priests: "We knew the danger was there. But we just cheerfully got accustomed to it." Aosorio was extraordinarily lucky: only hours before the eruption, he had left town to meet with his bishop...
...miles to 150 miles. These sections float on a gooey layer of partly molten rock known as the asthenosphere. As they move in different directions at an average speed of several inches a year, the plates collide, dive under and buckle against one another, crinkling up into a mountain range here, yanking apart to form a rift valley or oceanic ridge there. Such tectonic clashing was responsible for the violent earthquake that shook Mexico City two months ago, when the Cocos plate of the Pacific, temporarily stuck in its slow but inexorable plunge under the North American plate, suddenly jarred...
...active, most of them lying in the so-called Ring of Fire, a broad circle that more or less coincides with the boundaries of the Pacific, where oceanic plates are diving under continental plates. Of particular concern to scientists are some of the peaks in the Cascades, the mountain range that includes Mount St. Helens. The Mammoth Lakes ski-resort area in California is another area of potential volcanic activity...
...nearly ten years ago about Soufrière, a volcano on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe that began to spout a heavy plume of ash. Goaded by the geologists' alarms, authorities evacuated more than 70,000 people from the area and kept them away for 3½ months. The result: the mountain continued to sputter smoke and cough volumes of ash for a while, but it never blew. --By Natalie Angier. Reported by Christine Gorman/New York and Charles Pelton/San Francisco