Word: sedimenting
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...irrigated civilizations were appearing in contemporary Iraq and Pakistan about 5,000 years ago, the Gulf of Mexico was roughly where New Orleans now sits. The Gulf, like all the other seas, had been rising since the last Ice Age, but the Mississippi River dumped 18 billion truckloads of sediment at the Gulf's door in the time it took the seas to rise a foot. It was (and still is) one of the planet's most dynamic contests between land and water...
...Congress made levee construction Washington's responsibility. Billions of tax dollars from elsewhere--probably tens of billions, in modern money--were spent constricting the Mississippi's channel, so its silt began washing straight out to sea and off the continental shelf. By the 1970s, more than half the historic sediment load was coming to a dead stop behind dozens of upriver dams--especially seven monstrous structures erected on the Missouri...
...this leaves Null's believers with a decidedly mixed message. For those willing to go panning through his books looking for the gold mixed in with the sediment, there's a lot to be had. For many consumers, particularly seriously ill ones, that may simply be too much to ask. Null himself acknowledges that staying healthy can be a difficult business, requiring people to rip out the very foundation of their beliefs about health care. The problem is, some of what he's replacing it with feels a little wobbly...
UCLA geochemist Frank Kyte thinks he may have found not just the answer but also a piece of the thing itself: a tiny meteorite fragment, a tenth of an inch across, that was extracted from a 65-million-year-old geological layer under more than 50 yds. of sediment at the bottom of the Northern Pacific. In a report in the current issue of Nature, Kyte notes that the little chunk contains concentrations of metals (such as iridium and nickel) and mineral textures that clearly show that it is extraterrestrial and that it probably was once part of a much...
...down (it really is--you can track it across the sky), causing colors to punch out and deepen. I'm fly-fishing in peerless blue water--yellow sunlight bounces off the surface--and fat lunkers lurk below. When one at last strikes at the red-feathered lure, lake-floor sediment swirls like a dust cloud...