Word: peninsulas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Shevket Osmanov moved to his family homeland in 1987 after spending all his life in Uzbekistan, the welcome he received was less than effusive. "People were terrified of us," says Osmanov, who was part of the first wave of Crimean Tatars to return to the Crimean peninsula on Ukraine's Black Sea coast during perestroika in the late 1980s. "Ten days before Eid al-Adha [the Muslim Festival of the Sacrifice], they closed all the schools because there were stories that we were going to sacrifice children...
...Descendents of the Mongol armies that swept through what is now southern Russia and Ukraine in the 13th century, the Muslim Tatar khans ruled the Crimean peninsula until it was annexed by Russia in 1783. A summer holiday destination during the Soviet period and still home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, many Russians see Crimea as part of their country, a fact that rankles the Tatars...
...Blanchon examined fossil coral reefs about 40 miles south of Cancún on the east coast of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. (The fossils had been exposed during the construction of a new seaside resort.) Working with his co-authors at Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science, Blanchon calculated the age of the samples by measuring isotopes of thorium in the fossils, a process similar to carbon-dating. The patterns of the fossils indicated points where the coral died when the seas rose too fast for the organisms to adapt; each time the seas stabilized, the corals grew back...
...higher. And other scientists caution that Blanchon's work should still be viewed as preliminary and in need of independent confirmation at other, similar sites where old coral fossils have been deposited. (One obstacle is that only a few places on the earth - the Yucatan peninsula among them - have been seismically calm enough over the past several hundred thousand years to allow for such measurements.) But in the wake of the surprise breakaway of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica, which won't raise sea levels but will speed the melting of the remaining Antarctic ice, the Nature study...
...crucifix. But several caskets stood out for another reason: always with the smaller white one perched atop the larger, they held a parent and young child set to be buried together. From Turin in the northwest to Taranto in the southeast, the entire length of Italy's boot-shaped peninsula spent Friday absorbing the broadcast images of the state funeral for the victims of the L'Aquila earthquake: a toy motorcycle placed on top of one such mini-casket; a purple jumper attached to another; surviving relatives collapsing in tears; others bearing the empty gaze of shock...