Word: plumingly
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...opening days. Chemical-weapons alarms sounded in U.S., British and French units at the same time. Tuite's correlation of the detections and of satellite weather photographs taken at the time suggests that the tons of nerve agent atomized in the allied strikes rose in a huge thermal plume that became stuck behind a stationary weather front. He argues that this invisible cloud drifted south over the entire theater, gently sprinkling the soldiers with a poisonous rain. The Pentagon has disputed his theory, arguing any fallout was too low to harm U.S. troops. But some outsiders ask how the Pentagon...
Unhappily for reefs, humans upset the balance between corals and their competitors in many ways. Consider the erosion that accompanies deforestation and agriculture. No longer restrained by tree roots, tons of soil laden with nitrogen and phosphate washes into rivers and then sweeps into the sea, forming a muddy plume that may be hundreds of miles long. As this nutrient-rich water flows over a reef, it stimulates the growth of all kinds of algae--including the microscopic diatoms and dinoflagellates that nourish such reef animals as the crown-of-thorns starfish. In recent years hordes of these coral-devouring...
...market. In another bit of publishing gimmickry, both novels--which share the same cast of characters in skewed, slightly different roles--will be published the same day, Sept. 24. One is Desperation (Viking; 688 pages; $27.95). The other is The Regulators, written under King's occasional nom de plume, Richard Bachman (Dutton; 475 pages; $24.95). Along with The Green Mile's 592 pages, this means King will have graced his fans with a total of 1,755 pages of fiction in less than 12 months. By way of comparison, you can get a standard-size, paperback King James Version...
...SOON AS THEY SAW THE PLUME OF gas, the Mexican truck drivers leaped out of their cabs and ran for the American side of the border. Acrylic acid, a toxic chemical, had leaked from a tanker waiting in line for U.S. Customs inspection, and the liquid was vaporizing as it gathered in a noxious pool. It was "chewing holes in the pavement," says Lee Thompson, who saw it all happen in early November at the border station outside Laredo, Texas. His hazardous-materials response team, fortuitously on the scene for a training exercise, rushed to prevent the highly flammable acid...
...half a dozen different ways. An atmospheric mist of sulfur dioxide, for example, could have stoked lethal storms of acid rain. Carbon dioxide, injected into the atmosphere by erupting volcanoes, could have trapped solar heat, disrupting climate through global warming. Even the physical force exerted by the rising plume of molten magma could have contributed to the extinction by uplifting a substantial section of the earth's crust. Since temperatures fall with elevation, says Renne, snow and ice would have quickly accumulated, wrecking ecosystems at higher elevations and contributing to the drop in sea level...