Word: silts
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...Guyana and Suriname have begun to open huge tracts of forests for logging by timber and trading companies from Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia. Conservationists around the world are horrified at the prospect, aware that in southern Asia the loggers have ravaged forests, leaving a legacy of eroded hills, silt-choked rivers and barren fields. If such exploitation cannot be prevented in sparsely populated countries like Guyana and Suriname, the environmentalists ask, can deforestation be stopped anywhere? For thousands of years, deforestation has presaged the fall of civilizations. Now, for the first time, humanity is facing the consequences of forest destruction...
...Shaw Creek. All are listed for cutting. "They want to turn all that into lawn furniture and hot-tub decking," Thron yells over the Cessna's intercom. A much larger area of nearly 40,000 acres is scarred and scraped by bulldozers, its salmon-spawning streams choked with silt. Some of this is healthy second growth (redwoods reach marketable size in 50 to 80 years), but the recently logged areas look as if they had been fought over by an armored division. This is a tree farm, not a forest; viable commercially but useless to creatures who had lived here...
...silty washout. At least two albertosaurs, sharp-toothed scavengers about half T. rex's size, fed on the carcass, leaving a few of their teeth behind. Within months a river overflowed its banks and swept the bones away, eventually covering them with a three-foot $ layer of silt, which preserved them for eternity--and Stan Sacrison...
...three centuries. One layer, which they dated to 2200 B.C., revealed the crumbling walls of a ghost town. It also provided some important clues about the weather. "Ancient soils bear a climatic signature," Weiss explains. "In a dry climate, you see very little earthworm activity and lots of loose silt, for example...
...geologist with the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, painstakingly examined and sorted the soil samples from the roofs of the abandoned buildings under a binocular microscope. She identified a thin veil of volcanic ash, one quarter of an inch thick, underneath 8 to 20 inches of silt. The layers showed no evidence of having been disturbed by earthworms and also showed patterns characteristic of soil that has settled after a dust storm. It looked like a volcano had erupted, perhaps in nearby Turkey, and a long drought had followed...