Word: silting
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...tourist strip, cheap motels and nightclubs where groups like Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts play, and part fishing villages and marsh and swamp. The swamps give way to Lake Pont-chartrain presently, and the Louisiana Superdome starts to loom on the horizon. Beyond the Mississipi and the alluvial silt of the Coast, Houston beckons...
Shrinking Underpinning. As water, oil and gas are pumped in increasing quantities from deeply drilled wells, the upper layers of clay, shale or silt often dry out and contract. The surface of the earth then subsides on its shrinking underpinning. California's San Joaquin Valley, pocked with irrigation wells, has sunk up to 29 ft. since intensive farming began there in the 1940s. Only recently have engineers finally managed to halt the subsidence by piping in water from elsewhere in the state...
Critics of the dam point out that it has obstructed the natural flow of silt that enriched the soil of farms along the Nile. Thus it has been necessary to increase the use of imported chemical fertilizers on farms downstream from the dam. Environmentalists also contend that elimination of the silt flow has increased the rate of erosion along the Mediterranean coast adjoining the Nile Delta. In addition, they claim that the absence of the organic matter in the silt in the waters at the river's mouth has deprived sardines and shrimp of an adequate food supply...
...miles behind the dam. Fishermen are now taking river bass, Nile catfish and carp from the lake, and government experts estimate that annual catches will eventually rise to as high as 60,000 tons. Coastal erosion, Aswan defenders say, is not so much a product of the loss of silt as it is a result of changing wave patterns in the Mediterranean...
...fate of weighty books in summer to be lugged to shores and mountains, to gather sand and silt and rings where vodka-and-tonic glasses treated them like coasters, and to go unopened. War and Peace, Gravity's Rainbow, Remembrance of Things Past, The Gulag Archipelago: they will all be home soon, reminders of Mark Twain's melancholy observation that a classic is "a book which people praise and don't read...