Word: peakes
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...persuaded officials to evacuate 35,000 people two days before it did. Researchers now have at their disposal an arsenal of newly developed volcanology hardware, ranging from satellites to acoustical sensors to highly sensitive gas sniffers. Whether the technology is up to the task of monitoring not just one peak but hundreds worldwide, though, is impossible to say, but the question is becoming pressing. "Someday," says Robert Tilling, chief scientist of the USGS Volcano Hazards Program, "one of these mountains will erupt on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than mankind has ever seen...
...volcanologically untutored, there are worse ways to learn what a volcano looks like than to see Dante's Peak. Though the story line is standard disaster-film fare, the science is generally sound. As the movie reveals, the first debris disgorged by a volcano is often a great gray mass of ash. The opaque cloud, made of pulverized rock and glass, falls like concrete snow on land and buildings miles away and may blot out the sun for days...
...known as a pyroclastic flow, a ground-hugging cloud of superheated gas and rock that forces a cushion of air down the mountainside at up to 100 m.p.h., incinerating anything in its path. Other mountains spew that signature substance of the volcano: lava. (On this point Dante's Peak was wide of the scientific mark, concocting a fictitious mountain that produces both substances.) Lava moves at speeds ranging from less than 1 m.p.h. to 60 m.p.h...
...Like any volcanic mountain, Augustine is swelling slightly as it fills with magma. The degree of this deformation--as calculated by the gps--can help determine the imminence of the eruption. Elsewhere, scientists are leasing time on European or Japanese satellites to take photos of volcanic peaks as they undergo a seismic event like an earthquake. Imaging hardware then measures the precise distance between the satellites and any point on the mountain. If that distance changes as the spacecraft make repeated passes over a peak, scientists can determine how much the ground moved as a result of the event...
...marketing the high-quality, middlebrow "people pictures" that the Academy has always rewarded, from Marty to Annie Hall to Ordinary People to Driving Miss Daisy. The allure for the high-stakes gamblers who run the studios is the $100 million special-effects film, like the Twister-Flood-Dante's Peak epics--"movies that seem programmed off the Weather Channel," as Bob Weinstein drolly says...