Word: soils
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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University officials claim the landscaping was not done properly and say they are working with the contractor to correct the problem. The disagreement "has to do with the way the soil retains moisture," said Micheal E. Williams, the director of the office of physical operations for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences...
Park officials maintain that they can only contain the fires, not extinguish them. Meanwhile, defenders of the natural-burn policy trumpet its benefits: the flames clear thick stands of timber and prepare the soil for a new generation of flora. For example, many of the seed cones of the lodgepole pine, which covers 60% of the park, only open after being exposed to intense heat. Ecologists expect the fires to help restore the park's depleted stands of aspen trees and increase the wide array of insects, birds and mammals that have found Yellowstone's aging forests increasingly inhospitable...
...break an important ecological chain: they destroy the habitat of small mammals that shelter in forest undergrowth. These creatures eat and distribute mycorrhizal fungi, which grow among the rootlets of saplings and help the trees absorb water and nutrients. There may be enough spores of fungi in the soil after a clear-cut to start a second-growth forest, but a third crop is less likely to be successful, and it now seems possible that sustained-yield forests based on clear-cutting simply may not work...
July has not been kind to Tehran. Only two weeks after the U.S.S. Vincennes downed an Iran Air Airbus, Baghdad began the last stages of a counteroffensive that promised to drive the remaining Iranian soldiers from Iraqi soil. By overrunning Iran's military headquarters on the southern front, Iraq gained control of the vital Shatt al Arab waterway, providing another sign that the eight-year-old gulf war was tilting in Iraq's favor...
...miles from the lander. It will be equipped with TV cameras, scoops and drills to sample materials and a minilab to analyze them. With information gained from this mission, the Soviets hope to launch as early as 1998 a larger Mars lander-rover that could return soil samples to earth...