Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pieces of the puzzle started falling into place after Marie-Agnes Courty, a 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...
...they afraid of NATO air attacks if they did not withdraw? No, replied a self-confident Serb captain. "We know you can hurt us by air strikes, but you can only defeat us on the ground," he said. "You will not send your boys here to die on my soil...
Otherwise, what might be revealed is a character untainted himself in wrongdoing like the incarcerated Cagliari, or even implicated in mispolitics like Gardini, but who was broken in a few months by the soil of a political landscape few cold ever imagine. Perhaps it it time to re-examine my own perspective...
...Pilas, Arthur Demarest is turning his attention to garbage piles. "Those are the most important finds," he says, "not the tombs, because you find everything they ate, their tools -- a real cross-section of life, in really good preservation." A colleague plans to study the chemical composition of ancient soil and pollen samples and exhumed human bones to learn more about the Maya diet, common diseases, agricultural practices and even what the climate was like...
Nowhere are these effects more dramatic than in the Mississippi Delta, which used to be replenished every year with rich alluvial deposits. Now the soil, laden with nutrients, is carried by the river, bypasses the Delta and falls into the Gulf of Mexico, where it is contributing to algae blooms and threatening the fisheries. The Delta is sinking, with the result that the levees keeping the river at bay have to be periodically raised...