Word: silting
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Spina, the half-mythical Etruscan "Venice" on the swampy Po delta, was one of the world's great cities in the 5th century B.C. Ancient writings tell tales of its wealth and luxury, but over the centuries the silt of the Po has been pushing the shore line into the Adriatic. Cut off from the sea, Spina declined in late Roman times to a village; then it disappeared. Cemeteries believed to be connected with it were found and recently excavated by both thieves and archaeologists (TIME, Nov. 8, 1954), but the remains of the city itself lay obstinately hidden...
...north of Baghdad, while dams, channels and dikes gouged by German, French, British and American contractors will catch next spring's floodwaters for the first time and lead them into new $30 million lakes at Wadi Tharthar and Habbaniya. Downstream, other contractors are digging drainage ditches and scooping silt from the ancient Babylonian water-distribution canals, now scheduled to be used again as in Hammurabi's time. In upper Iraq, a French firm is building a $28 million concrete dam at Dokan...
...have dammed the Nile in many places, but still it drifts sluggishly for half the year leaving much good land parched, and then spews its silt-laden floodwaters, wasted, into the Mediterranean. Dams upstream in Ethiopia, Uganda and the Sudan are out of Egypt's control and too far to bring electric power...
This book qualifies as the German Naked and the Dead on the literary principle of silt by association. Author Böll, 37, known to U.S. readers for Acquainted with the Night (TIME, Oct. 4, 1954), lacks the power Norman Mailer showed in his first novel, but he wallows in the same mud-and-tears and reaches the same inevitable conclusion, i.e., war is a dirty, futile business. Adam has no heroes, only victims. The time is 1944; the place, principally occupied Hungary, as the mighty Wehrmacht comes apart at the tank sprockets. A panoramic miniaturist, Author...
...operation was a pilot program to see if the method would work. This summer the Authority engineers will dose the river more liberally to trace the travels of its silt. Meanwhile, the Hydraulic Research Establishment is trying radioactive scandium-glass on Britain's beaches to find out how they get eroded away...