Word: sands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...incongruous sight. Two miles offshore from the hotel-lined beachfront, two giant dredges toil away round the clock, scooping up tons of sand from the ocean bottom. Heavy, 27-in. pipes carry the grayish slurry to the beach. There it is deposited in large, neat mounds, until the fresh sand is spread out by large earth-moving machines. Under way for two years, the controversial $64 million project by the Army Corps of Engineers is aimed at nothing less than saving one of the nation's vacation landmarks: that fabled stretch of the Florida Gold Coast known as Miami...
Perhaps the biggest factor in the resort's decline is man's intervention with nature. One of the many barrier islands off the U.S.'s Atlantic and Gulf coasts, Miami Beach is vulnerable to waves, winds and the natural ebb and flow of its fragile sands. During the first great Florida land boom in the early 1920s and the second boom of the 1950s, the beach's problems were compounded by unrestrained growth. Developers put up mansions, hotels and condominiums almost at the water's edge, atop the dunes that protect the island from...
...groins were also ultimately destructive. Though each protected its own stretch of beach, the barricade hastened erosion on the adjacent section, which was no longer replenished by the wash of fresh sand. The only solution seemed to be to build more groins, but they caused more erosion. By the early 1960s, the waves were lapping almost at the foundations of Miami Beach monuments like the Fontainebleau Hilton...
...smallest island in the harbor, Nix's Mate, as an example of how history-laden the yawning harbor is. Once, it was a few acres of sand and brush. Now it is rocks, and then only at high tide. But from a gallows erected on this small hump of land, nine pirates and mutineers were hung. The last to go was a ship's mate, convicted of mutiny against his captain, Mr. Nix. He reported his innocence to the last, promising those assembled for his execution that were he not guilty, the island would soon sink into...
Western Australia's Nullarbor (meaning no trees) Plain is an arid, limestone plateau that lies east of the old gold-rush towns of Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie, southeast of Comet Vale and northeast of Grass Patch. It is a barren, almost unpopulated land of sand and saltbush. Out of the blackness of the southwestern sky one night last week, the fringe of this isolated region was visited by a fiery symbol of the Western world's most advanced technology: the final, fatal fall of Skylab...