Word: silts
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Roaring into a hell-hot 3.443 m.p.h.. it peaked into a graceful arc. seemed to hover uncertainly for a brief moment, then hurtled downward. Minutes later, its tail skids carved a high rooster tail of dust in the wind-slicked silt of Rogers Dry Lake in California. The plane stopped. "Well." said Test Pilot Joe Walker as he threw off the switches in the cockpit, "there's that one for today." In his X-15, Walker had just streaked to a new altitude record for manned planes: 246.700 ft.-46.7 miles above the earth...
...sheltering hangar on the ship's stern. Oceanographers will study the tossing sea water by measuring its temperature, salinity, and oxygen content at all depths ranging up from the bottom. They will chart ocean currents and plunge long tubular probes into the ocean floor. The cores of silt they bring up will give glimpses of Antarctic geologic history over millions of years...
Phantoms in the Depths. Most of the earth's fresh-water lakes were deposited by glaciers 10,000 years ago. In their youth they were clear, silt-free and oxygen-rich. But with the passing of centuries came the infirmities of age. Land erosion, the death of billions upon billions of microscopic organisms inexorably added silt to the lake beds at a measurable (though varying) rate of some 18 in. a century. Summer heat warmed the upper layers of water, upsetting the normal turbulence that sends life-giving oxygen to the deepwater fish and other life...
Although the University reportedly filled in these fields with compressible slag after a flood in 1956, the fill has sunk so far into the former tidal area that drainage pipes, 30 feet apart, are almost literally supporting the entire area. Instead of allowing rainwater to drain off, the silt serves as a reservoir where seagulls have been known to nest...
...climb trees and launch itself into gliding flight when it wanted to move to another tree or when danger threatened. On one of these glides it must have landed in the lake where its flesh was eaten by fish and its sunken skeleton was covered slowly with silt...