Word: soils
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Having been directly involved in research on the posteruptive soils of Mount St. Helens ((ENVIRONMENT, June 15)), I was interested in your observation that the burrowing of pocket gophers has helped mix and enrich the soil. The "bulldozer" effect of the pocket gophers and other small mammals should not be emphasized as or assumed to be the primary reason for the rapid soil development in the area. After the soils were buried by thick layers of pyroclastic flows and debris, complex physical and chemical processes began, aided mainly by the naturally produced acid rain resulting from gases emitted...
...source of all political power. Japan's national charter renounces war. Portugal's forbids private ownership of television stations. Peru reprints its charter in the Lima telephone directory, filling ten pages of fine print. Yet beneath such diversity, each document can trace its rights and freedoms to U.S. soil. Says Joseph Magnet, a law professor at Canada's University of Ottawa: "America has been and remains the great constitutional laboratory for the entire world...
...Seoul there will be another thorny consideration: North Korea. The $ Communist government in Pyongyang has insisted that it should be host to fully half the 1988 Olympic events on its soil -- and keep 50% of any profits from the Games. Its failure to get anywhere with such demands has caused Pyongyang to hint frequently that it will boycott the Games, perhaps pulling the Soviet Union and other East bloc countries along in sympathy. The I.O.C. position is that the Olympics are awarded to a city, not a nation, and that the athletic events cannot therefore be shared. When Munich...
...widely regarded as the end of Britain's days as a major world power. She presided over the 1982 victory against Argentina in the Falklands war, and despite domestic opposition, pressed ahead with the modernization of Britain's aging Polaris nuclear submarine fleet, accepted U.S. cruise missiles on British soil and last year allowed U.S. F-111s to strike Libya from British air bases. Her visit to Moscow in April, during which she spent 13 hours in private with Mikhail Gorbachev, cemented her position as a world figure. British cartoonists have even taken to portraying her with a Churchillian cigar...
...flora and fauna. Inside the boundaries of the monument, where by law people are not allowed to assist regeneration, a mammalian equivalent of the bulldozer has been the pocket gopher. Colonies of these tiny industrious burrowers have helped mix the nutrient-poor ash and pumice with rich, pre-eruptive soil, creating a more hospitable turf for windblown seeds. Deer mice, ants and beetles have also assisted in the regeneration of the soil. Flowering lupine, with root nodules that convert nitrogen into compounds necessary for plant growth, has seized a foothold on the pumice plain, along with the ubiquitous fireweed...