Word: silt
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Residents of Anchorage, Alaska, saw a dramatic demonstration of that strange phenomenon during the disastrous 1964 earthquake, says Columbia University Geologist Paul Kerr, whose investigation is described in the current issue of Scientific American. While probing beneath the battered sand, gravel and silt surface of Anchorage during the past two summers, Kerr studied an underlying layer of quick clay from 10 to 30 ft. thick. During the three minutes of the quake's violent up-and-down jolting, he concluded, some of the quick clay under Anchorage turned into liquid, triggering the damaging landslides that literally floated large sections...
...energetic cleanup campaign, the streets are clean, but the Seine is murky and grey, except for the occasional white fluff of detergent suds. Once England's M.P.s fished for salmon in the Thames at Westminster. No more. In Poland, the Vistula's filtration system is clogged with silt and scum, and Warsaw must tap other water sources. Sickest of all the Great Lakes, Erie is so close to dying that the states along its shore face the prospect of paying a billion dollars apiece for pollution control...
...living in our own filth," says John W. Gardner, the new Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. U.S. rivers and streams, like the muddy Missouri, used to be contaminated with nothing worse than silt, some salt, and the acids from mines. Now they are garbage dumps. Raw sewage, scrap paper, ammonia compounds, toxic chemicals, pesticides, oil and grease balls as big as a human fist-these are the unsavory contents of thousands of miles of U.S. waterways...
...ashes of Jawaharlal Nehru have long since disappeared into the silt of the Ganges, carrying with them the faint shadow of the rose he always wore in his lapel. Gone with the Pandit is the image of India as a moral bulwark of the "nonaligned" world, a pious mediator between the great powers. Gone with the jaunty jodhpurs and preachy pronouncements is the hope that India might soon be an economic success. Gone, too, are the pride and the confidence that inspired India in its formative years. India without Nehru stands dispirited and disillusioned, a land without elan where...
...once-sleepy resort of Aswan, where thin-blooded Edwardians and the Aga Khan wintered, has become a boom town; its population has effectively tripled in the past four years to 140,000. Steel mills, nucleonics plants, and vast chemical complexes that will provide fertilizer to replace the lost Nile silt, are rising in what the Cairo press calls "the Pittsburgh of Egypt." Four resort hotels, plus the Aswan Hilton currently abuilding, loom glassy and air-conditioned ("TV in every room") above the Old Cataract Hotel, where oldtimers still sip icy martinis on the veranda and watch the river ride...