Word: sands
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Most of the time, that lack of elevation makes no difference. But occasionally it makes a big one--as it did that Sunday morning late last year when waves triggered by the great tsunami of 2004 spilled over sea walls to flood the city with sand-clouded water and then swept out just as suddenly, leaving behind a visceral feeling of foreboding. For what has the more thoughtful of Malé's 80,000 or so residents worried is that such intrusions will become more frequent, not because of the sudden onslaught of tsunamis but as a result of the slow...
...islands of the Maldives--little circles and half-moons of platinum sand--seem as fragile as they are exquisite. To see them is to marvel--as Charles Darwin did--that they did not long ago succumb to "the all-powerful and never-tiring waves." But as Darwin went on to explain, these islands are more substantial than they seem. They are in fact the visible crests of massive limestone reefs that extend from the sea floor to the surface. The limestone is made of the consolidated skeletons of tiny marine organisms, including untold generations of coral polyps that millions...
...surface as sheer-sided limestone pinnacles. Then, as the earth warmed and the ice melted, the rising ocean overtopped these pinnacles, providing new surfaces for the corals to colonize. Around 5,000 years ago, after the corals brought the reefs close enough to the sea's surface, coral sand and gravel began to accumulate in shallow depressions, and the present-day islands formed...
These islands are extremely dynamic, continuously changing shape in response to shifts in the monsoon winds. Each year, in fact, sand swirls around with the waves; beaches grow in one season and shrink in the next; and this process has been going on for a very long time. Geographer Paul Kench of New Zealand's University of Auckland has collected evidence suggesting that the islands of the Maldives emerged from the sea when their reefs were quite a bit lower than today, meaning that larger, more energetic waves would have slammed into them during a critical formative period. In their...
Every weekday for more than eight months now, through winter freeze and summer swelter, scores of Americans, black and white, have been assembling in front of the large, sand-colored South African embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington to demonstrate their revulsion from apartheid. Every weekday for those eight months, some of the protesters have been arrested. Through last week, Washington police had detained nearly 3,000 antiapartheid demonstrators; in virtually all the cases, they were quickly freed after posting $50 bail, and none were prosecuted. Among those arrested since last November are 22 Congressmen, former First Daughter Amy Carter...