Word: retreat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hard to realize that at the source of this exuberant retreat was a bloody massacre. The attack on Kolwezi by the self-styled Katangese "Tigers" had been thoroughly organized. A year earlier, an estimated 2,000 rebels had launched Shaba I, an incursion into the region that was halted short of Kolwezi after 49 days of fighting between the F.N.L.C. forces and the French-supported Moroccan and Zaïrian troops. The rebels promised to return to Shaba and overthrow Mobutu's regime. They carefully planned this infiltration. After the liberation of Kolwezi, French paratroopers found three railroad cars...
...endorses homosexual rights legislation, even while requiring discrimination within the church. Some liberals found this inconsistent, but the rationale is that secular law need not follow the dictates of religious teachings. Significantly, the document declares that all sexual relations ought to occur only within heterosexual marriage. This signals a retreat from the so-called New Morality by the denomination that published Joseph Fletcher's influential Situation Ethics in 1966 and four years later came close to embracing such theories officially...
...drops chunks of ice off its face as it moves forward. This process can speed up dramatically when changing climatic conditions cause a glacier to begin thinning out. This decrease in thickness can destroy a glacier's delicate equilibrium and radically increase calving in a process called "drastic retreat" that may last for decades...
Columbia is the only calving glacier in western North America not to have experienced a drastic retreat in several thousand years. But ominous signs of instability have been reported by a U.S. Geological Survey team. Upstream from its face, the glacier has thinned by more than 30 ft. in one year, and since 1974, there have been periods of accelerated calving every summer. Says U.S.G.S. Glaciology Project Chief Mark Meier: "This suggests that there is not enough ice coming forward to keep up with the iceberg calving...
...strung across a 3.1-mile-wide passage near the glacier to block outbound icebergs. Similar barriers already help keep Greenland harbors free of drifting bergs. A feasibility study directed by Kollmeyer concluded that 20 men could put the cable in place within 40 days after the glacier's retreat is confirmed. Estimated cost: $31.1 million. Declares Don Ryan, a marine safety specialist for the Coast Guard: "So far, no one has suggested that our study is wrong or that the barrier approach won't hold water...