Word: sand
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...does he know? Moores is a specialist in ocean crust, which he routinely discovers high and dry in the Sierra Nevada. "The whole vast assemblage of transported deep-ocean rock," writes McPhee, "now rests on California like a ship stuck in sand, listing thirty degrees to the west." Scientist and writer poke through the wreckage. They straddle fault lines and sift through road cuts while impatient drivers speed...
...international banker, prizewinning correspondent -- he and his wife Katie became temporary workers: royalties from Sam's 1986 book, Selling Money, had run out, and they , needed some income while looking for permanent employment. Gwynne worked briefly as a "production assistant" on a TV commercial (his job: raking and reraking sand on a beach to smooth it out after strollers had walked by) and as a secretary at Southern California Gas Co. Sam vividly remembers the unnerving insecurity that helped inspire this week's stories on temporary workers: "No health insurance, no pension plan, no protection against arbitrary termination...
...company on the best of terms, the scene in Somalia turned nasty. On Wednesday demonstrators set up burning roadblocks along the main thoroughfares in Mogadishu and pelted passing U.S. servicemen with chunks of concrete. Banners paraded past the Marine base at the old American embassy read THIS IS SOMALI SAND NOT AMERICAN SAND. Later in the week, fierce fire fights erupted in several parts of the city between UNITAF (Unified Task Force) troops and Somalis thought to be loyal to General Mohammed Farrah Aidid, leaving five American servicemen and two Nigerians injured and an estimated 10 Somalis dead. The unrest...
...easiest examples to understand is sand dunes, which maintain their overall shape despite winds and sandslides. Researchers at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center built an artificial dune, a tiny sandpile sitting on a sensitively balanced plate, to study this behavior in detail. In one experiment, they dropped 35,000 grains of sand onto the pile one by one. As the sides grew too steep -- in some cases, by only a single grain of sand -- avalanches would make the pile collapse. Then it would start growing steeper again, until it was time for the next avalanche...
This phenomenon is known as self-organized criticality -- the grains have organized themselves to slope at a certain angle, yet the arrangement is precarious because a tiny extra bit of sand can knock the whole thing down. The sandpile is not quite stable, not quite chaotic...