Word: subsoil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...kept grounds and smartly-dressed Mrs. Mackenzie might well have been in the southern Ontario town of Oakville, where she used to live. But they were just 92 miles from the Arctic Circle, at Norman Wells, where her husband runs a refinery for Imperial Oil. Permafrost, the permanently frozen subsoil of the North, sometimes makes the ground heave under the installations, but cannot stop the refinery from turning out an annual 320,000 barrels of oil products. In July permafrost is also a foot to three feet below Mrs. Mackenzie's garden, but cannot stop her either. "We scatter...
South of Los Angeles and inland from Manhattan Beach is a flat suburban area that was once semidesert. It had no surface water, but under its tight clay subsoil lay water-saturated gravel. When real-estate boomers discovered this treasure, they drilled well after well, and the well water, used recklessly, made the land salable for home sites and industries. Now the "west basin," as the geologists call it, has oil refineries and factories, as well as 500,000 people. But its underground water is almost gone. The water table is some 50 to 60 ft. below sea level...
...folk music is the good earth from which much great music springs, the U.S. has a rich subsoil. But little has been cultivated outside the jazz patch, and the U.S. opera crop has been especially sparse. Last week a foreign-born U.S. composer proclaimed that the soil was ready to bear, if only U.S. composers would work it. He offered a piece of his own produce to prove his point...
...white marble, imported block by block from Italy. Officially it is the Palace of Fine Arts, but mexicanos call it the elefante blanco and point out, with mingled pride and disdain, that the ponderous thing is slowly sinking, of its own weight, into the city's soft subsoil...
Then one day veteran Railroadman Raoul Dautry, Joliot-Curie's boss on the Atomic Energy Commission, came to Saint-Sylvestre.To the assembled villagers Dautry said: under a law of 1810 all subsoil wealth belongs to the state. Therefore no individual would gain from radioactive hectares. At the maximum the local uranium fields would need less than 50 workers. Therefore even a new hotel or restaurant might not be assured of success...