Word: sedimentality
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Keeping Track. The bulk wine arrives from southern France in barges or 40-tank-car trains, rests eight days in 1,000,000-liter tanks to let the sediment settle, then streams through stainless-steel mains to sterilized, electronically inspected bottles. They are automatically topped (with plastic and metal, not cork), stamped with labels, dropped twelve at a time into cases and conveyed to a mechanical loading dock. There a monitor at a control board punches out orders that fill up waiting trucks at the rate of a truck a minute-fast enough so that some drivers do not bother...
Working with 32-to 65-ft.-long sedimentary cores taken from the bottom of the North Pacific, Geologist Bruce Heezen and his associates at Columbia's Lamont Geological Observatory carefully examined each one, slice by slice, for traces of residual magnetism and remnants of primitive life. Because sediment has settled continuously on the ocean bottom for millions of years, each core represented both a magnetic and evolutionary calendar; each slice was a thin but significant record of a brief period in the earth's history...
...They are proposed for hydro-electric power to pay for the rest of the irrigation project, but their great size would make them more expensive even in the long run than conventional generating plants. In any case, priceless, spectacular canyon scenery and ecology will be forever lost under lake sediment if the dams are built...
...Herbert Summers turned from his career in mechanical and civil engineering to learn scuba diving, earn a master's in oceanographic geology at Southern Cal, land a job to study sediment movements on the ocean floor. Mrs. Sylvia P. Pauley earned $30,000 a year as an interior decorator in Manhattan for such clients as Charles of the Ritz, decided she wanted to be interested in "something more vital than chair legs." At 46, she enrolled at Columbia, got a B.S. in sociology, then an M.A. in educational administration. Today she makes $10,000 helping Job Corps graduates find...
...Palo Alto specimen probably died nonviolently, then its body sank to the ocean floor. A few shark teeth were found among the bones, suggesting that sharks may have had a few bites of paradoxia's plentiful flesh before a storm or flood covered the body with sand. Then sediment from the sierras covered it deeply, and a mountain range pushed upward between its grave and the ocean. At last big-brained primates, which had not evolved during its lifetime, brought it into the sunlight while searching for the secrets of infinitesimal matter...