Word: plate
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Scientists have known for some time about the 700-mile-long fault off the coast of Washington, Oregon and California, where a wayward slab of the earth's crust known as the Juan de Fuca plate is trying to slide under continental North America. What they didn't appreciate until quite recently was that the juncture where the two plates are locked together can snap violently like a giant spring, unleashing a tsunami as large and terrifying as the one that pummeled South Asia...
...EARTHQUAKE FACTORY The Cascadia Subduction Zone???where the Juan de Fuca Plate meets the North American Plate???is remarkably similar to the subterranean system that triggered the tsunami in the Indian Ocean and is capable of generating equally powerful earthquakes and equally destructive waves Some key differences: a tsunami???warning system, better housing construction and a more rugged and less populous coastline. The death toll from a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest might be in the hundreds but not in the tens of thousands...
Geologists describe the tectonics--the almost imperceptibly slow movement of massive plates--of the southern Indian Ocean as complex because a number of plates converge there. The floor of the Indian Ocean--the Indian plate--is moving north at around 2.5 in. per year, about twice the rate that your fingernails grow. As it moves, it is forced under the Burma plate to its east. Eighteen miles below the surface of the ocean, stresses that had been gradually accumulating forced the Burma plate to snap upward. That was a huge geological event, eventually measured at 9.0 on the Richter scale...
...before the Massachusetts Senator could define himself. "He discovered in 2000 that campaigns are choices and not referendums," says Bush's media adviser, Mark McKinnon. "You have to frame the choice, or your opponent will frame it for you. So unlike 2000, in 2004 he came up to the plate with...
...into blinking lights and plastic wreaths for anyone who can afford them, and lots of waitresses dressed in Santa's red-and-whites that show a bit of leg. (Nativity scenes and other overtly religious displays are still forbidden by government decree.) Some restaurants in Beijing offer $300-a-plate Christmas dinners that newspapers deride as "money-burning meals." All over China, department stores run Christmas sales and cardboard Santas peer from shop windows...